Word: physicists
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...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's visionary godfather. Because of their academic specialties, the founding trio are irreverently known as "Stinker, Tinker and Thinker...
...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...
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...
...Police Chief Lavrenti Beria, who was then also head of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Finally released after Stalin's death, he resumed the direction of his own Moscow Institute for Physical Problems, helped promote the idea of an entire city, Akademgorodok, devoted to science and, along with Physicist Andrei Sakharov, became an outspoken champion of intellectual freedom...
...create what in effect is an electron freeway without these obstructing potholes, Bell Physicist Raymond Dingle and his colleagues built a semiconductor made of extremely thin, alternate layers of aluminum gallium arsenide (which they doped) and gallium arsenide (which they left pure). They reasoned that any electrons donated by the impurity would tend to migrate to the adjoining undoped gallium arsenide layer because of their tendency to seek what physicists call a lower energy state. Explains the Australian-born Dingle: "It's rather like the inclination of water to flow downhill." The new design worked. Isolated from the obstructing...