Word: caltech
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...most unusual communication was with the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time (almost 9 million copies sold), whose battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) did not keep him from visiting Caltech in March. Charles e-mailed Hawking's assistant, and after making two small editing changes requested by Hawking, received a FedEx package from California the next day. Inside was a piece of paper bearing Hawking's freshly made right thumbprint...
Back behind the wheel several days later, while MacCready was glancing upward watching birds circle, he drew on his physics and aeronautical education from Yale and Caltech, casually estimating the birds' bank angle. By timing their circles, he calculated their speed. His mind drifted to hang gliders and sailplanes, comparing their flying characteristics with those of birds. Then came the second--and more creative--eureka moment. The Kremer Prize was as good...
George Djorgovski is using the Keck as well, but where Marcy's quarries are no more than 200 light-years way, Djorgovski's are closer to 10 billion. A professor at Caltech, Djorgovski has lately been concentrating on gamma-ray bursts--mysterious flashes of high-energy radiation that have baffled astronomers for nearly 40 years. If these blips of electromagnetic energy can be seen from far across the universe, as some astronomers believe, then they must briefly shine as bright as the rest of the stars in the universe put together--a seemingly preposterous assertion...
Armed with a new generation of adaptive-optics systems now under development, these futuristic scopes will once again revolutionize astronomy. "When we were planning for the Keck in the early days," recalls Caltech's Djorgovski, "we laid out some of the science we expected to do with it. And we were much too conservative: we missed most of the really important stuff we've actually found. I predict the same thing will happen with these enormous telescopes. We'll almost certainly find things we never could have imagined...
Everhart, who is also a professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Caltech, was elected to the Board of Overseers last June, making him a relative newcomer...