Word: caltech
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...unfamiliar with mesons and V-particles and bevatrons and cosmotrons, he would also be nonplussed by [such phrases as] security risk, Q-clear-ance, confidential, secret, top secret." More important, he would find that the old compartments of knowledge no longer have their old rigid meanings. At Caltech it is possible to find a top geologist, e.g., Harrison Brown, who has never taken a formal course in geology. It is not only possible, but standard operating procedure for the scholars of Caltech to invade each other's fields as if no walls had ever existed between them...
...TheDickens of It." To DuBridge and the men of Caltech, knowledge is its own reward. The great principles discovered may one day lead to a cure for cancer or a trip to the moon. But Caltech is the home of purists-purists in a technological Babylon that sometimes appears to tolerate them only because they inevitably turn out to be the men behind the men behind some new physical blessing. For no tangible reason at all, the men of Caltech have peered into the dawn of time, measured the invisible, eavesdropped on thunder over Jupiter. Their goal...
Fortunately for the nation, Caltech has never compromised with the dickens-of-it approach, nor has it ever ceased to make fundamental principles the entire content and purpose of its education. As a result, it occupies a special place in the esteem of scientists and engineers. Though it may have rivals, it has no superior anywhere in the world. "Other places," says Nobel Laureate Isidor Rabi of Columbia University, "have good people. But at Caltech, they are all good...
...Stranger. Just how Caltech achieved its extraordinary stature is one of the phenomena of U.S. education. Since it took its present form only 35 years ago, it is not only the youngest of its peers among U.S. universities, it is also one of the smallest (600 undergraduates, 450 graduate students). On its 30-acre campus of stucco, Mediterranean-style buildings and olive-shaded walks, no one is a stranger, and with its faculty of 350, it has the luxuriously high teacher-student ratio of about one to three. While other campuses glut themselves with courses, Caltech will happily drop...
Like most educators, the men of Caltech have their little eccentricities. Astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky takes peculiar pride in the fact that he has never given a student a grade of 100 (except once, and then the student turned out to be a fiction created by a band of Zwicky's colleagues). Brilliant young Theoretical Physicist Richard Feynman is a master at breaking lock and safe combinations (during World War II, he made the rounds of Los Alamos safes, depositing "Guess who?" notes in them). In his spare time, Nobel Chemist Linus Pauling likes to blast away at the souped...