Best Spot To Feel Smart, Even If You’re Not
Infinite Corridor At MIT
Photo by Joe Harrington
Leave it to the geeks at MIT to transcend spatiotemporal laws and invent a hallway that goes on for eternity. Well, not exactly. But the so-called INFINITE CORRIDOR, the 825-foot passageway that snakes angularly through the campus's original buildings (numbers 7, 3, 10, 4, and 8), is long enough. And meandering past its myriad labs and classrooms imparts the feeling of being a tourist in some sort of genius museum. Whether you're on the heavily trafficked first floor — stay to the right! — the upper floors, with their hidden nooks and balcony views of the capacious marble lobbies below, or, especially, in the buildings' dank and labyrinthine basement, you can almost feel your brain getting smarter by osmosis (whatever that is). Even, that is, if you have no earthly idea what goes on in the Respirable Particle Analysis Laboratory or the Computational Materials Engine Room — or behind doorways with top-secret sounding labels like "Project Athena" or "A Zone." Just be sure to be on the third floor on November 11, 2009, at 4:19:09 pm, in order to witness the "MIThenge" phenomenon, in which the low-hanging sun aligns directly with the corridor.
INFINITE CORRIDOR AT MIT | "begins" in Building 7, 77 Mass Ave, Kendall Square, Cambridge
