Word: caltech
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Specialty. But Gourdine is a persistent man. After earning his doctorate in engineering science at Caltech in 1960, he worked as a physicist in private industry for four years, vainly attempting to interest his employers in developing a practical EGD generator. In 1964, after failing to sell his idea, he rounded up a handful of fellow scientists, raised $200,000 and founded his own company-Gourdine Systems, Inc. He is already producing laboratory EGD generators for use in college and high school demonstrations, and has licensed Foster Wheeler Corp.-an industrial boiler manufacturer-to build EGD generators for industry...
...some surprises in the full list of departmental ratings. Arizona's little-known anthropology faculty ranks high (twelfth), ahead of Minnesota and Washington; Pittsburgh's philosophy faculty ranks eighth, ahead of Chicago and Stanford; Delaware's chemical-engineering program ranks fifth, ahead of M.I.T. and Caltech. Yet no university in the South or Rocky Mountain states has even one "distinguished" department; the Southwest and Plains states have only two: Texas in German and Minnesota in chemical engineering...
...Most chemical reactions," says Caltech Chemical Physicist Aron Kuppermann, "are unholy messes." The neat formulas and precise equations of the textbooks may be all right as far as they go, but they present an incomplete picture of what is really "a large number of processes, some of which are not fully understood...
...they improve their techniques, the Caltech researchers hope to determine with assurance whether chemical reactions can be described by the laws of Newtonian physics-or by quantum mechanics, in which atoms and subatomic particles behave both like bits of matter and like light waves. Once the answer is known, scientists should be able to calculate precise chemical reaction rates and the amount of energy needed to cause ,them, taking most of the guesswork out of laboratory and industrial chemistry...
...general improvement of teaching, however, cannot be accomplished simply by copying these qualities. For one thing, no one knows enough about how students learn. "We know more about teaching rats, and we are more effective with psychotics and neurotics than we are with freshmen," says Caltech Psychologist John Weir. One of the leaders in cognition psychology, Harvard's Jerome Bruner, has long insisted that "any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest way to any child at any stage of development" (yet a recent Harvard Crimson course guide terms Bruner's own classes "incoherent...