ENDNOTES
WE ASKED CALTECH ALUMS TO TELL US THEIR FAVORITE CLASSROOM OR LABORATORY MEMORY. HERE'S WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY:
ABOUT RICHARD FEYNMAN:
Richard Feynman’s EE/Phys/CS/Bio 20—he was very entertaining with great stories.
Feynman physics (second year of it) taught me an approach to how to analyze problems that seemed not to have a solution.
ABOUT LINUS PAULING:
Quantitative Analysis with Linus Pauling.
Linus Pauling giving a guest lecture to Chem 1 on polymers. . . . Came with a sports bag filled with a long chain of pop-beads to illustrate linear polymerization.
ABOUT ROBERT SHARP:
Dr. Sharp’s geology lectures. The slide shows. Wow! We went on several of his travel/study trips after graduation.
Bob Sharp teaching Ge1 in 155 Arms—the best course I ever took.
Summer Field Geology in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico. Taught by Lloyd Pray [MS ’43, PhD ’52], Bob Sharp, and Carel Otte [MS ’50, PhD ’54]. This is where you really learn how to do field mapping and write a geologic report.
I took geology my sophomore year. Robert Sharp gave the weekly lectures, which always included a slide show. One week there was some activity around the projector, before the class, as students inserted a slide of a naked lady into the projector. When it finally appeared on the screen, everyone cheered, and Sharp said calmly, “Another one for my collection.”
ABOUT OTHER FACULTY:
Professor Bellan’s many analogies in his Plasma Physics class, for example slow and fast particles in a plasma wave became little old ladies and Tour de France racers bicycling up and down hills.
Tom Lauritsen [BS ’36, PhD ’39] was willing to spend extra time with World War II veterans.
Meeting H.S. Tsien [PhD ’39] and becoming his first grad student.
The enthusiastic and creative teaching in John Preskill’s Quantum Computing course.
[Nobel laureate and discoverer of the positron] Carl D. Anderson [BS ’27, PhD ’30] teaching math physics to us ordinary mortals.
Richard Gomez in a Ph2 lecture—he finished deriving a very gnarly wave equation and said, “So now that we have that, what do we do? We relax, think about it, . . . smoke a cigarette, . . . ” —which he then proceeded to do.
Harry Gray demo-ing timing reactions at Halloween while in costume (along with a woman staff member in a feline costume).
Being invited to leave Math 1 by Tom Apostol because we couldn’t stop laughing.
ETC:
My freshman chemistry (1943) section instructor was a grad student named Jerry Donohue [PhD ’47]. Asked what he did for research, he said, “I measure X-ray diffraction patterns to try to compute the inter-atomic distances.” So every couple of weeks it was, “Well, Mr. Donohue, any more inter-atomic distances?” He presently became Dr. Donohue, then Professor Donohue, and finally chairman of the chemistry department at USC. He died in the 1980s. If you go to the chemical literature and look up the classic paper by Crick and Watson that revealed the wonders of DNA, you will find that it is a very brief paper—just one page—and there are three names on that page: Crick and Watson (the authors, of course) and a footnote in which the authors express their appreciation to Mr. Jerry Donohue for the inter-atomic distances that made the work possible.
Work-study student at the GALCIT Wind Tunnel in 1942.
My favorite lab and classroom is Guggenheim Laboratory. I spent many years in that building. In my last few years when my office was located right next to the walkway toward the Old Dorm [where Winnett Center now stands], I saw many famous professors passing my window almost every day.
Monday assemblies.
Freshman physics lab where we observed falling bodies, shot a rifle into a wooden pendulum to measure the bullet speed. It was an intro to the Caltech approach.
All the connections necessary to access the Univac mainframe at JPL for thesis work.
Ph1a – Air Troughs.
Taking an English test in Dabney while the Coleman Trials were being held; the honor system along with fine music.
Student waiter working in the Athenaeum. Fed me well. Thanks.
Building and testing hot-carrier diodes in the lab of Carver Mead [BS ’56, MS ’57, PhD ’60].
Discovering that I actually liked history, English lit, and other humanities.
Freshman physics and chem labs!
Excellent grad student who conducted chem classroom and labs. We knew him as Mr. Moore. He could communicate even with those of us who were engineering students. Later found that he was Gordon Moore [PhD ’54]. With our weekly lecture by Linus Pauling, Mr. M. brought chemistry to life.
