What Flyby Wants to See in a Renovated Cabot Library

This Thursday, we learned that the Cabot Science Library and the Science Center Atrium is set to undergo “renovations designed to foster technologically driven teaching and learning” sometime in the vaguely near future. This will be nothing short of a badly-needed facelift for a study space best characterized as Lamont’s ugly stepsister. While the reimagined library will surely include all the expensive touch-screen novelties that “technologically driven teaching” can justify, here are a few of our suggestions for how Harvard could go even further to make the space a happy home for p-setting students.

Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream Bar

We’ve all passed by the Churn2 ice cream stand in the Science Center plaza on our way to Annenberg, where the ice cream is free. Yet even though our wallets advise against it, there is something alluring about ice cream made with not just milk and sugar, but Science. Solution? Harvard acquires proprietorship of Churn2 and sets up a stand permanently in the new Cabot Science Library.

Book Checking Scanner

This is a science library. Surely there is some sort of machine we could invent that detects those pesky students trying to steal discrete mathematics journals without making the rest of us unzip three backpack pockets and expose the embarrassing collection of maxi-pads and old granola bar wrappers inhabiting the bottom of our bags.

Futuristic Chairs

Like this. Or these. Or even this. Those grody old chairs need to go immediately, and what better to replace them than chairs that look like something 3D-printed from Math 21a course head Oliver Knill’s Mathematica animations? Bonus: statue of John Harvard sitting on one of these chairs, levitated by the Casimir force.

Light Sabers

Apparently, Harvard physics professor Mikhail Lukin and MIT physics professor Vladan Vuletić are getting “closer to making…[Star Wars’] iconic lightsaber a reality.” C’mon guys, we know you got them. Hand them over... for science!