Quotes About Caltech

The U.S. can still maintain research institutions, such as Caltech, that are the envy of the world, yet it would be hubristic and naive to think that this position is sustainable without investing in science education and basic research.

Caltech is a wonderful place. Named the top university in the world by the Times of London in each of the last three years, it is small enough—just 300 professors, 1000 undergrads, and 1200 graduate students—that I know Caltech experts in all branches of science. It was

Einstein, who was then a professor in Berlin, was by chance visiting Caltech in the United States the day Hitler was appointed.

In the late 1970s, when I was a professor at Caltech, I pioneered four instruments for analyzing genes and proteins that revolutionized modern biology - and one of these, the automated DNA sequencer, enabled the Human Genome Project.

On Sunday August 5, 2012, I was among a group of people who witnessed the Rover landing on Mars in real time at NASA's Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Enzymes catalyze all the reactions of life. They're what allow you to extract materials and energy from your environment and turn that into muscle and tissue and fat. That's all done by enzymes. They're pretty remarkable chemists - they're even better than Caltech chemists.

Following Rice, I went to Caltech for a Ph.D in physics, without any strong idea of what I wanted to do for a thesis topic.

Caltech honored me -- they named an asteroid after me. There's only two of them up there with names. One of them is Walter Cronkite. The other is Tommy Lasorda.

I think Caltech fills a unique role, and it's not a cheap one. Their small size allows them to do interdisciplinary work a lot more effectively than anyplace else I know. The bigger universities get cast into silos.

I left Egypt in 1969 for graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. I have been on the faculty at Caltech for 37 years and carried dual citizenship for 31. But my commitment to the country of my birth never wavered.

Quite obviously, a theoretical determination of the numerical value of ? would signify great progress in our understanding of fundamental interactions. Many physicists have tried to find it, but without significant success to this day. Richard Feynman, the theory wizard of Caltech in Pasadena, once suggested that every one of his theory colleagues should write on the blackboard in his office: 137 -- how shamefully little we understand!

If you are uncertain, or lack evidence, about whether a particular outcome was caused by a preceding event, you are more likely to quickly associate them together," says Sang Wan Lee, a postdoctoral scholar in neuroscience at Caltech

I was teaching introductory geology at Caltech for the first time. I'm not a geologist. I've never taken a single class in geology. If you gave me a handful of different types of rocks, chances are I could identify only a small number of them. I still get confused by the meanings of strike and dip. Luckily, most of my students didn't realize this.