Word: caltech
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Goldberger is the most recent, but by no means the only scientist to succumb to the lure of the brainy powerhouse in Pasadena. In fact, Caltech was fashioned from a vocational school into an exclusive West Coast scientific preserve during the early 1900s by deep-thinking migrants from back East. Most notable among them: Chemist Arthur Noyes, a former acting president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who became the first academic vice president of Caltech; University of Chicago Experimental Physicist Robert Millikan, whose prestige attracted many to the young school; and Astronomer and Cosmologist George Ellery Hale, the school...
Housed in a sleek campus of cantilevered concrete labs and trim glass high-rises, Caltech has achieved international influence far disproportionate to its size. The school has only 251 faculty members, 812 undergraduates and 851 graduate stu dents, making it roughly one-fifth the size of friendly rival M.I.T. Two-thirds of the incoming freshmen in an average Caltech class have scored a perfect 800 on advanced-mathematics college-entrance exams. Seventeen of its faculty and alumni have received Nobel prizes; two weeks ago, Alumnus Robert Wilson, now a researcher at Bell Labs, joined this elite roster by sharing...
...Caltech that Astronomer Maarten Schmidt discovered the nature of quasars, perhaps the most distant objects in the universe, that Theoretical Physicist Murray Gell-Mann described the way in which more than 100 subatomic particles are related, and that Physicist Carl D. Anderson discovered the positron, a fundamental particle with an electron's mass but a positive charge. The first successful U.S. orbiting satellite, Explorer I, was launched by the school's acclaimed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which developed the principles that make jet flight possible...
...Caltech alumni give much credit for their school's achievements to its small size, which allows scientists in different disciplines to know each other well. Frequently, interdisciplinary research projects are first sketched over lunch at the Athenaeum, an elegant faculty club with a high-beamed Spanish-style ceiling at the campus' east end. Academically, the school deliberately remains narrower than, say, M.I.T., which is noted for such nonscientific departments as linguistics and economics. At Caltech the focus is on engineering and basic research in the "hard" sciences, especially physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry and seismology. Nuts-and-bolts technology gets little...
Faculty members at Caltech are fiercely proud of that unique mystique. "We are isolated, and we ought to be," asserts Chemist Gray, 40, who is consistently ranked by students as one of the school's best teachers. Adds he: "I did the Columbia University thing for five years. At those big places, everybody gets up early to read the New York Times in case somebody zings you at lunch by mentioning a book review. You have to be facile. But at the end of the week, there isn't much original work. Here our greatest contribution is what...