But what it looks like, just a bit, is the cone of silence, the hilariously ineffective hunk of technology from the 1960s TV comedy “Get Smart.’’
The wormhole has one advantage over the sitcom version. It works, or at least it should be working by next week, when students start arriving.
Dorian Gangloff, a PhD student in atomic physics, said he thought the wormhole looked like a 1960s version of somebody’s idea of the future. The idea of a modern-age link with Stanford seemed fun and original, he said. And he might try it, he said, to catch up with a friend at Stanford or to meet someone new.
The idea behind the wormhole was spurred by the identical names of the cafes where both sides of the device sit. Bert and Candace Forbes, who founded and sold a successful circuit board company to Intel in 2000, donated money for cafes on both campuses - each called the Forbes Family Cafe - and for the two devices at either end of the wormhole.
Bert was from the MIT Class of 1966 and went to Stanford for graduate school; Candace also attended Stanford, as did their son. Theirs was a small family-run company. (They are not related to “the very, very rich’’ magazine-owning Forbes clan, Candace said.) That’s why they wanted “family cafes’’ at each school, and why they love the idea of people connecting with each other from different campuses.
“It’s kind of like a foreign-exchange program for each end of the country,’’ Bert said, adding that talking face-to-face beats the texting that he sees young people doing too often.
“Just sparking conversation is pretty cool,’’ Candace added.
But the original idea, to set up a microphone and a video screen, would not have worked in two of the most technologically innovative places on earth.
