Word: caltech
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...until the 1930s that Caltech Astronomer Fritz Zwicky recognized supernovas (he coined the name) as a class of exploding star fundamentally different from ordinary novas. With Colleague Walter Baade, he began formulating the modern theory about how supernovas explode and launched the first systematic search for them. While the average galaxy has only an occasional supernova, Zwicky reasoned, there are so many distant galaxies visible through large telescopes, astronomers should have no trouble finding the great explosions popping out all over the universe. At first Zwicky's colleagues thought the idea ridiculous, but over the four decades that followed...
Closest to home -- in the Milky Way itself -- Cornell and Caltech astronomers have found what may be the early stages in the formation of a new solar system, showing for the first time that a dust disk surrounding a sun- size star orbits the star in an orderly fashion. Such disks, initially found in the early 1980s, have been touted as the precursors of planetary systems. This discovery makes the claim a notch less speculative and suggests that stars with planets may be quite common...
Such single-minded devotion to problem solving has led to criticism that Caltech turns out scientists who have little understanding of life outside their fields and works its students so hard, despite the high jinks, that they have little time for politics or social problems...
...denies Caltech's enviable record or doubts that it will achieve even more. This week Caltech scientists will announce the completion of a DNA sequenator, an instrument that uses a laser beam and colored dyes to analyze rapidly the structure of DNA molecules. And even while major astronomical discoveries are still being made with Caltech's 200-in. Hale Telescope, the school has joined with the University of California in building on Hawaii's Mauna Kea a 394-in. optical scope, the world's biggest, which will enable astronomers to see 12 billion light-years into space...
...could this happen? Richard Feynman, the Caltech physicist who turned out to be one of the commission's most insightful members, probably explained it best. The joint hazard was often discussed before a flight, Feynman pointed out. "It flies and nothing happens," he theorized at a commission hearing. "Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flight--we can lower our standards a bit because we got away with it last time. It's a kind of Russian roulette." In fact, with each pull of the launch trigger, the odds...