Word: physicists
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...Archimedes. The kind of science that DuBridge and Caltech stand for is as old as Archimedes, but for the U.S., it has come into its own only within the last generation. It was not until 1907 that an American scientist (Physicist Albert A. Michelson) won the Nobel Prize. It was not until 16 years later that DuBridge's great predecessor, Robert A. Millikan, became the second American to win one in physics. Since then, U.S. science has accumulated...
...rapidly changing nature and role of science, that education carries an increasingly heavy burden. The physicist of 20 years ago, says DuBridge, would be lost in a modern laboratory. "Not only would he be 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...
...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-up claims of advertisers (he once...
...Caltech's Seismological Laboratory, such researchers as Hugo Benioff and Beno Gutenberg have explored the crust and core of the earth, and found out as much as any men alive about the nature of seismic waves, earthquakes, aftershock. Physicist C.C. Lauritsen produced the first 1,000,000-volt X-ray tube, and Carl Anderson won a Nobel Prize for discovering the positron. Meanwhile, Caltech biologists have been probing their own areas of the invisible. Geneticist Alfred H. Sturtevant described the linear order of genes; Calvin B. Bridges provided proof for the chromosome theory of heredity. In determining that genes...
...first hand. "It must be studied by indirect evidence, and the technical difficulty involved has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark." But for all the exacting labor, adds Physicist Feynman, "there is a great thrill - a real emotional thrill - when you discover something interesting." The mission of Caltech: to pass on that sense of adventure to the scientists and engineers of the future...