Word: physicists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Caltech have their little eccentricities. Astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky takes peculiar pride in the fact that he has never given a student a grade of 100 (except once, and then the student turned out to be a fiction created by a band of Zwicky's colleagues). Brilliant young Theoretical Physicist Richard Feynman is a master at breaking lock and safe combinations (during World War II, he made the rounds of Los Alamos safes, depositing "Guess who?" notes in them). In his spare time, Nobel Chemist Linus Pauling likes to blast away at the souped-up claims of advertisers (he once...
...Caltech's Seismological Laboratory, such researchers as Hugo Benioff and Beno Gutenberg have explored the crust and core of the earth, and found out as much as any men alive about the nature of seismic waves, earthquakes, aftershock. Physicist C.C. Lauritsen produced the first 1,000,000-volt X-ray tube, and Carl Anderson won a Nobel Prize for discovering the positron. Meanwhile, Caltech biologists have been probing their own areas of the invisible. Geneticist Alfred H. Sturtevant described the linear order of genes; Calvin B. Bridges provided proof for the chromosome theory of heredity. In determining that genes...
...first hand. "It must be studied by indirect evidence, and the technical difficulty involved has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark." But for all the exacting labor, adds Physicist Feynman, "there is a great thrill - a real emotional thrill - when you discover something interesting." The mission of Caltech: to pass on that sense of adventure to the scientists and engineers of the future...
...kept on with his arduous experiments ("I learned to hate liquid air," says Mrs. DuBridge), and at his post as assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, he started collaborating on a book ("It took the evenings of four years," says Mrs. DuBridge). The book, written with Physicist Arthur L. Hughes, turned out to be, at the time, the definitive work on photoelectricity. Lee DuBridge had made a dent on science at last...
Home by Christmas. When DuBridge and his tiny band of scientists first arrived in Cambridge, Mass, in November, they felt certain they would all be home by Christmas. At an early budget conference in Washington, someone suggested the sum of $25,000, and Physicist Ernest O. Lawrence thought he was being hopelessly daring when he suggested that it be doubled. The next month, the sum was doubled again, and the next, again. Finally, Washington received a strange message from Cambridge: "Mary Baker Eddy with one eye." Translation: the scientists had picked up the dome of the Christian...