Word: caltech
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...memorable epithet of former Federal Communications Commissioner Newton Minow, but as a vast resource waiting to be tapped. One TV watcher who agrees is Minow himself, who now sits on the PTST board. Says he: "The most important educational institution in the country is not Harvard or Yale or Caltech-it's television." For better or for worse, it is difficult not to agree with...
...Voyager curved around the sun's largest planet at speeds up to 104,600 km (65,000 miles) per hour, the craft performed nearly flawlessly, its probing eyes and instruments shifting between Jupiter and its moons. As one startling picture after another flashed onto the screens at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, even Cornell's irrepressible Carl Sagan was left nearly speechless. Said he: "This is almost beyond interpretation. There's different chemistry, different physics, different forces at work out there...
Last week, after a journey of 18 months, a tiny visitor from earth streaked precariously close to the giant of the solar system, penetrating deep into Jupiter's powerful magnetic field and coming within 278,000 km (172,400 miles) of the Jovian cloud tops. Back at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab, controllers waited breathlessly to see whether the plucky robot would survive that dangerous encounter. But even before Voyager 1 made its closest approach on Monday, the 826 kg (1,820 lb.) unmanned spacecraft sent home a trove of new findings about Jupiter, including evidence that...
Notwithstanding Caltech's emphasis on theory?epitomized by Nobel-Prize-winning Physicist Richard Feynman's abstruse calculations involving quantum electrodynamics?faculty members are eagerly sought out for advice by business and government. Faculty members are permitted up to 52 days annually of outside consulting work, which supplements salaries averaging $28,100. Caltech's past president, Harold Brown, was so well known as a top nuclear-weapons specialist that Jimmy Carter whisked him from Pasadena to become Secretary of Defense. Large high-technology companies, such as Beckman Instruments and TRW, both founded by Caltech alumni, value their close ties...
...Caltech's high standards and its required menu of advanced science courses put undergraduates under fierce pressure. "When I came here, I felt everybody in the class was smarter than I was," recalls Senior Peter DeWees, who graduated second in his Riverside, Calif., high school class. "In the physics course, you could earn a possible 30 points on one test. I got one point." Top scorers though they are, 30% of the entering class do not graduate from Caltech. Observes Dean of Students Ray Owen: "At midyear, half the freshmen are failing math and one-third are failing physics. They...