Word: caltech
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Institutional Prestige. So far, the pressures have been greatest at the top graduate schools-Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, California at Berkeley, M.I.T. and Caltech. "Students too often seem to seek out institutional prestige instead of departmental prestige," comments Vanderbilt Chancellor Alexander Heard, who contends that there are "pockets of inadequately used graduate capacity" at many good schools. Out of 5,246 applicants last fall, Harvard took only 1,853. Yale's Law School got 2,000 applications for 165 openings. Michigan's graduate office mailed out 20,000 applications, got 12,000 back, accepted half, enrolled...
Inspired by wild discrepancies in reports of earlier UFO sightings, Science Students Terry Warren, James Gould and Douglas Eardley decided to perform a complex "gullibility experiment." Working secretly in a steam tunnel under the Caltech campus, they rigged balloons out of polyethylene sheeting and filled them with an inert gas-probably helium. From the bottom of the balloons they suspended metal rods, each with fins and a railroad flare fastened to its lower...
...Though a Caltech employee saw the final launching and informed the sheriff, it was too late to prevent the headline-making results. "We succeeded beyond our wildest hopes," said Gould. "We suckered everybody. We could have made the balloons do fantastic things-like zip across the sky-but we preferred to keep the experiment simple...
...educating his daughters in Holland. But the lure of Southern California was too great. "Those big telescopes are a little like drugs," he explains. "Once you've worked with them, it's hard not to return." In 1959 he accepted the offer of an assistant professorship at Caltech and came back to Pasadena. The following year, after immersing himself in the specialties of his American colleagues-spectroscopy, cosmic radiation and extragalactic phenomena-he took over the job of retiring Astronomer Rudolph Minkowski, who had been working on spectrograms of radio galaxies. Almost immediately, he found himself "struggling quietly...
Relaxing Habit. Today he devotes part of his time to work on basic theory "trying to figure out what it all means," part to preparation for classwork. He usually teaches radio astronomy or galactic dynamics for three hours a week to Caltech's bright undergraduate and graduate students. This semester, however, normal staff rotation has left him without any classes, enabling him to devote full time to the pursuit of his quasars. Despite the challenges of his job, though, he takes pains never to miss dinner at home. "It is," says Corrie Schmidt, "the only time he really...