Word: caltech
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...research is old stuff at CalTech, which has always gone in for rough and noisy engineering. But until World War II, Princeton's academic calm was almost unbroken. Toward war's end it went jet with a bang. The screaming roar of rockets and ramjets in the laboratory behind Palmer Stadium outshouted the football enthusiasts. Already the staff of the psychology department laboratory, next door, has decided to move to a quieter spot...
...himself (at the University of Toronto), who also likes to raise delphiniums. The son of an Ontario minister, he taught history and coached football at Saskatchewan's Regina College, then moved to the U.S. in 1932. While earning a Ph.D. at Stanford, he became a history instructor at CalTech. Most Californians know him best as a weekly radio news commentator (for Day & Night water heaters). Last spring he became director of the famed Huntington Library and Art Gallery at San Marino, Calif...
...good fortune that in 1928 a center of the world's ablest and most vigorous physicists was also in the west - at the California Institute of Technology, to which they had been pulled by such powerful magnets as Robert Millikan and Richard Tolman. Oppenheimer recognized that CalTech had a great deal to offer. At that time, by contrast, the University of California seemed to have "a hick school of science." Both wanted him ; he arranged to oscillate between...
Answers Before Questions. Oppenheimer was tolerated only because his brilliance was as evident as his impatience. (Says CalTech's Professor Charles Lauritsen: "The man was unbelievable! He always gave you the right answer before you formulated the question.") Gradually and painfully, coached by colleagues and profiting by errors, Oppenheimer learned to put a checkrein on his galloping mind, to raise his voice, and to save, his sarcasms for showoffs and frauds.* In time, Cal and CalTech realized that Oppenheimer (like Whitehead and Bridgman) was "a man to whom you could be an apprentice." By 1939, "Oppie" (as his apprentices...
Oppie's apprentices also acquired something of his intolerance for shoddy and fuzzy thinking, his intuitive grasp of difficulties, his mathematical precision of speech. Eventually, Oppenheimer products made their debuts on lecture platforms and in seminars all over the U.S.: Harvard's Schwinger, California's Serber, CalTech's Christy, Stanford's Schiff, Columbia's Lamb, Iowa State's Carlson, Illinois' Nordsieck, Washington's Uehling. (Brother Frank, the original Oppie apprentice, is now a physicist at the University of Minnesota.) Says Nobel Prizewinner Robert Millikan: "Oppenheimer developed at Berkeley an outstanding school...