The Purists

(See Cover)

At 7130 one morning, two men who had just met for the first time sat eating breakfast in Pasadena's Huntington-Sheraton Hotel. One of the men was a U.S. Senator who had come to town to see the jet-propulsion laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. But the Senator seemed to have only the foggiest notion of who the other man was. "What department are you in at Caltech?" asked the Senator. Replied his companion: "Physics."

For modest, stocky Lee Alvin DuBridge, it was a typical answer. He would be the last man in the world to volunteer the information that he is actually president of Caltech, that he heads one of the nation's most powerful advisory boards, and that he was wartime director of the fabulous Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T. He looks like a pleasant, slightly rumpled Mr. Anybody--a man who starts the day with a bowl of shredded wheat and is willing to drop the dry cleaning off on his way to work. Yet, both in his own right and as head of Caltech, Lee DuBridge plays a crucial role in the U.S. He is one of the new breed of men who have become an integral part of the national destiny. At 53, Lee DuBridge can justly claim the title, Senior Statesman of Science.

Old as Archimedes. The kind of science that DuBridge and Caltech stand for is as old as Archimedes, but for the U.S., it has come into its own only within the last generation. It was not until 1907 that an American scientist (Physicist Albert A. Michelson) won the Nobel Prize. It was not until 16 years later that DuBridge's great predecessor, Robert A. Millikan, became the second American to win one in physics. Since then, U.S. science has accumulated 36.

Americans take a certain patriotic pride in that record, but they can take little credit themselves for having achieved it. The tradition of "pure" science is a foreign one that had to be transplanted from Europe and virtually forced on American soil. Even today the nation spends, through the Government, $2 billion a year on science, but only about one dollar in 20 goes to pure science; the U.S. has more than 850,000 scientists and engineers, but only about 3% are engaged in fundamental research. The reason for the imbalance is that 1) such research seems dreamy and impractical, and 2) there are tremendous demands for scientists to work in technological fields, both military and commercial. Pure science, explains Lee DuBridge, is "not the development of new devices or techniques. It is not the discovery of new cures for diseases. It is not the development of new weapons of war." Pure science is "simply knowledge."

"TheDickens of It." To DuBridge and the men of Caltech, knowledge is its own reward. The great principles discovered may one day lead to a cure for cancer or a trip to the moon. But Caltech is the home of purists--purists in a technological Babylon that sometimes appears to tolerate them only because they inevitably turn out to be the men behind the men behind some new physical blessing. For no tangible reason at all, the men of Caltech have peered into the dawn of time, measured the invisible, eavesdropped on thunder over Jupiter. Their goal is not to produce, only to understand. "Really," says Astronomer Ira S. Bowen, who directs the jointly operated observatories, Caltech's Palomar and the Carnegie Institution's Mount Wilson, "astronomy is the most useless of all sciences. Why are we astronomers? For the dickens of it."

Fortunately for the nation, Caltech has never compromised with the dickens-of-it approach, nor has it ever ceased to make fundamental principles the entire content and purpose of its education. As a result, it occupies a special place in the esteem of scientists and engineers. Though it may have rivals, it has no superior anywhere in the world. "Other places," says Nobel Laureate Isidor Rabi of Columbia University, "have good people. But at Caltech, they are all good."

Not as a Stranger. Just how Caltech achieved its extraordinary stature is one of the phenomena of U.S. education. Since it took its present form only 35 years ago, it is not only the youngest of its peers among U.S. universities, it is also one of the smallest (600 undergraduates, 450 graduate students). On its 30-acre campus of stucco, Mediterranean-style buildings and olive-shaded walks, no one is a stranger, and with its faculty of 350, it has the luxuriously high teacher-student ratio of about one to three. While other campuses glut themselves with courses, Caltech will happily drop a few (most recent examples: meteorology and industrial design) on the refreshing theory that "if Caltech can't do a job within its sphere better than anyone else, then there's no sense in doing it at all." Over the years, it has either trained or hired for permanent positions five Nobel Prizewinners. It has 42 names in American Men of Science and the highest percentage (9%) of facultymen in the National Academy of Sciences.

Like most educators, the men of 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 completely deflated a popular chlorophyll deodorant by proving that instead of killing a smell, the stuff merely paralyzed the nose). But on matters affecting the institute, individualism melts into unity. On one occasion, a visiting professor from a Midwest university asked Physicist Robert Bacher how long it takes the faculty to reach a major policy decision. "Oh," replied Bacher, "anywhere from ten minutes to two hours." Replied the astounded visitor: "Why, it takes us months."

Balloon & Rocket. The gates of Caltech do not swing open for everyone who knocks. In a recent survey, the average student IQ was placed at 142, the lowest scorer (122) being a young foreigner who was still having trouble with his English. This brain power, when combined with mechanics, sometimes finds surprising outlets. Some of the japes at Caltech make ordinary college-boy pranks look like arrangements of kindergarten blocks. On one occasion a senior opened his door to find a completely assembled and working Ford in his room. Another senior found an assembled cement mixer, and still another bumped into a meteorological balloon that stretched from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall--completely filled with water. Even dance decorations may inspire the young scientific mind. Once Dr. George Mayhew, general panjandrum of student affairs, picked up the phone and heard a voice ask: "Dr. Mayhew, did you give permission for a 57-foot rocket to be built by Ricketts House?"

No matter what is going on at Caltech, competition is the order of the day--everywhere, that is, except possibly on the gridiron. There, Coach Bert LaBrucherie, who once led U.C.L.A. to the Rose Bowl and later got thrown out because he failed to make it a habit, rules one of the oddest squads in the history of U.S. football. Though the boys play hard, they have cheerfully lost 25 games in a row. At one time, when they piled up a losing score of 12-18 against their archrival Occidental, a local paper headlined the news: CALTECH THROWS SCARE INTO OXY. "For us," says Coach LaBrucherie. "this was a moral victory. We usually don't scare anyone." After his own experience with the big time, however, the coach is content. He can get along without the hoots of disgruntled alumni, the pressures of professional boosters, the shenanigans over athletic scholarships. The closest he has come to complaining: "Some of our budding geniuses can't see well enough without their glasses. Though a Caltech player has yet to tackle his own man, boys have been known to line up with the wrong team."

Vocabulary Builder. Since Caltech is dedicated to science and engineering, it is only natural that its laboratories should outnumber classrooms about five to one. And out of these laboratories have come some major revolutions in knowledge. The terms that Caltech has made important --cosmic ray, Badger's rule, alpha helix, Neurospora, positron, meson and mumeson--may not be exactly household words, but they have become standard parts of science's vocabulary.

It was Millikan, the first boss of modern Caltech, who discovered the cosmic ray and first measured the charge of the electron. Nobel Laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan unlocked the mysteries of the chromosome, and Richard Tolman helped prepare the way for the modern theory of chemical-reaction rates. Richard Badger's rule described the relationship between the vibration and size of two-atom molecules. Through his work on the red and yellow pigments of such plants as carrots and tomatoes, Laszlo Zechmeister has determined some of the molecular configurations that are effective precursors of vitamin A.

In 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 control the synthesis of vitamins and amino acids, George Beadle discovered the bread mold, Neurospora, as an effective research tool. This has sped the progress of genetics a hundredfold, was partly responsible for the successful increased production of penicillin.

The relentless search for knowledge has not only outstripped the senses, it has transgressed both time and space. Geochemist Claire Patterson has pushed back the origin of the earth to 4.5 billion years, and A.E.J. Engel. Heinz Lowenstam and Samuel Epstein described what the earth's temperatures and atmosphere were millennia ago. At the same time, the astronomers have probed millions of light-years farther out in space. Seth B. Nicholson discovered three more satellites to Jupiter; Walter Baade discovered a whole new family of stars.

Smog & Surge. Occasionally Caltech scientists and engineers come down to earth long enough to worry about such purely practical matters as smog, the effect of wave and surge on harbor installations, the first large-scale testing of hydraulic pumps, and, through their study of the laws of aerodynamics, the design of better airplanes. But the work of Nobel Chemist Linus Pauling is of a more rarefied order. The foremost pioneer in applying the quantum theory to the study of chemical bonds, he found that the "resonance" of the atom is the source of the forces that hold molecules together. He discovered the alpha helix as the fundamental feature of many proteins, went on to explore the architecture of protein, the fundamental substance of living organisms. On the surface, such work often seems remote from practicality, but it has helped chemists find the necessary techniques to create hundreds of new drugs, plastics, synthetic fibers. By unveiling the structure of the hemoglobin molecule, Pauling also revealed the nature of hitherto unrecognized ills, e.g., sickle-cell anemia, and may have laid the foundation for a whole new medical strategy against disease.

As the men of Caltech well know, nature does not give up her secrets easily. There is, says Carl Anderson, no way to see the atom or examine it at 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.

The Big Change. In the last four years. Rodney Supple and John Philip Andelin Jr. of Los Angeles, now seniors, have both caught the spirit of that mission. But they have done so only after going through as tough an ordeal as any under graduate anywhere in the country. In 1951 they were "A" students in their respective high schools, and they had both earned those As with very little effort. Then came the decision to go to Caltech. After that, life was never quite the same.

They did not know it at the time, but they were only two of hundreds of boys (1,200 a year) who also had the necessary credits in mathematics, physics and chemistry to apply for the institute. As it does each year, Caltech picked those with the top academic records, then sent out a team of professors to interview them. The professor who talked to Supple kept asking him why he wanted to be an engineer. He also spoke to Supple's teachers, tried to find out whether the boy was really curious, or merely out for marks. Caltech has good reason for such probing: unless a student wants to be an engineer or a scientist with all his heart, he will simply not get through.

Still cocky from their high-school triumphs, Supple. Andelin and 178 fellow freshmen arrived in Pasadena a week before the term began, were immediately whisked off to Caltech's camp in the San Bernardino Mountains. There, for three days, Nobelmen, freshmen and a few upperclassmen played games, made speeches and put on skits. But each skit or speech turned out to be a veiled warning that tough days lay ahead. Supple and Andelin soon caught on. Says Supple: "I had suddenly run into a bunch of people who were a lot brighter than I was." Adds Andelin: "I was terribly intimidated.

Here were my classmates, and they were already running around talking to the profs about the fourth dimension."

Mud & Noses. During the first term, there were plenty of diversions: the rushing by the four houses, the subsequent indignities after getting in (coolie hats, false noses, etc.), adjustment to the fact that class attendance is optional and that exams are run by the honor system. But there were also other matters--e.g., calculus, molecular physics, basic graphics, inorganic chemistry, as well as a big dose of English literature and European history. Though careful not to appear to be "snakes" (grinds). Supple and Andelin found themselves working a straight 80-hour week. Says Supple: "That first term you don't know where you are. You've got a few physics problems to work out, about 50 pages of history to answer quizzes on each day, and you've got math problems and chemistry experiments. One conclusion you've come to is that high school was never like this." Caltech does its best to cushion the blow when the first blue slips (academic warnings) go out. For a student who has always been accustomed to getting As, the almost inevitable Cs can seem a crushing failure. They are also pretty hard on the proud parents, and it is one of Dean of Freshmen Foster Strong's most ticklish tasks to reassure the older generation that a C at Caltech is the equivalent of an A or a B almost anywhere else. In spite of all the cushioning, however, some students fall by the wayside; by graduation only about two out of three have survived.

Analytical v. Descriptive. After the first year, Supple began to take more engineering, and Andelin more physics and chemistry. But they were both getting the same kind of education--one that does not tell a future engineer how to make a better thermostat, but gives him, instead, all the principles he will need to know in thermodynamics. No matter what their courses, Supple and Andelin learned by solving problems, and the steps they took in their solutions were far more important than their answers. Theoretically, a Caltech student may ar rive at all the wrong answers on exams, and still get passing marks if his professor believes that his thinking is sound. The whole idea, says Biologist George Beadle, is to avoid "the descriptive tech nique, which is just learning things by rote. In the analytical approach, you learn the why of things, the premise being that if you understand the principles, you can apply them to any problem."

In sophomore physics, Andelin was asked to prove "that a central force field is conservative." "Show," asked junior physics, "that curl grad V = 0." In senior physics: "Expand the wave function

Q(r,th,f) = u(r,th) sin mf

in a series of eigenfunctions corresponding to the z-component of angular momentum."

On the final exam in Astronomy 1, Andelin explained how he would "determine the internal motions and the variation of ionization in a planetary nebula." In Physical Chemistry 21c, he was asked to "describe carefully the resultant change in state which occurs when at the temperature T one faraday passes reversibly through the cell, Cu, CuSO4 (0.01 f), CuSO4 (0.0001f), Cu." In Mathematics 114a he had to prove Lagrange's identity "or complex numbers:

Meanwhile, he took his share of history, literature, economics, French and German, for right from the start Caltech insisted that students spend 25% of their time in the humanities, not only as undergraduates, but also through their fifth year. Characteristically, it refuses to dilute the humanities courses by turning history into --The Effect of Science on the 18th Century" or literature into "The Industrial Revolution and the Novel." Like every other division, the humanities under Elizabethan Scholar Hallett Smith is a place for purists.

Working on the Railroad. It is strange in a sense that Caltech should have become the place it has, for it emerged from an unlikely background. The nation's first technical education was an eminently practical affair in which science played an almost invisible part. It has been said that the first American engineering university was really the Erie Canal; the first school of railroad engineering, the B. & O. Railroad. Outside of West Point and Annapolis, even the regular technical schools were largely subservice stations for industry.

In 1910 the future Caltech was still little more than a progressive vocational training institute founded by Pasadena Philanthropist Amos Throop. It was not until the public schools took over that function themselves, that the institute's trustees began asking various scientists just what they should do with the place. What the country needed, replied Astronomer George Hale, was a first-rate scientific school in the West that would "choose a few things and do them well." Though enrollments plummeted from 600 to 30, the trustees took the advice. They invited Robert Millikan out full-time from the University of Chicago in 1921 ("Millikan," protested President Harry Pratt Judson of Chicago, "if you go way out to California ... it is the end of your scientific career"), accumulated a galaxy of names from Chemist Arthur A. Noyes and Nobel Biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan to Political Scientist William B. Munro. For 24 years, Millikan ruled as the genial autocrat and expert collector of talent. By the time young Lee Du-Bridge arrived on a National Research Council Fellowship in 1926. the spirit of modern Caltech had already been set.

Ice & Ironing Boards. Like Caltech. DuBridge also emerged out of an unlikely background. Born in Terre Haute. Ind., the son of a Y.M.C.A. physical-education instructor, he grew up in a succession of cities from Mount Vernon. Iowa to San Jose, Calif, to Sault Sainte Marie, Mich. Though Lee fished in Lake Superior and watched the ships pass through the locks, he was better known as that studious young fellow in knickers who was so often with a book. At one time, he tried to be a reporter ("but I was too scared to go up and ask the right people the right questions"), later set his hand to selling ironing-board covers and potholders ("but I hated to go out each morning. Some days I made no sales at all. Some days I wouldn't get inside a house"). As a matter of fact, young Lee really scarcely knew what he wanted to be.

But then in his sophomore year at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa he took Professor Orrin H. Smith's physics course. Under Smith, particles became a whirl of whizzing elephants and bouncing basketballs, and science a series of problems involving such exotic matters as Joshua's stopping the earth's rotation to make the sun stand still. ("Given the coefficient of friction between the green grass and the soldiers' britches, how long would it take Joshua to slow down the earth without sliding the soldiers off the battlefield?") DuBridge found himself "enthralled by physics. And I even learned what I had never known before--that it was possible to take graduate work in physics and actually earn money by being a scientist. From that time on, college became an exciting adventure."

Not so adventurous was his romance with the future Mrs. DuBridge, amiable Doris May Koht of Reinbeck, Iowa. The first time she saw him, he was waiting on table. "He wore nose glasses," she recalls, "and looked more like a professor than he does now." After a series of unromantic dates (they spent one hunting frogs) and a number of awkward starts, Lee finally proposed. But it was another four years before the marriage actually took place.

No Great Shakes. Lee graduated third in his class, out of 120. He went on to graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, eventually turned out a doctoral thesis called Variations in the Photoelectric Sensitivity of Platinum ("I'm afraid it didn't shake science at all"). Later at Caltech, he 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.

In 1934 he moved his family (one son, one daughter) to the University of Rochester, took over the university's physics department, swiftly rose to be dean of the faculty. He produced the world's fourth cyclotron, led in the discovery of the p-n reactions. When World War II broke out in Europe, Lee DuBridge was one of the foremost scientists in the country. Then, one day in 1940, he received a mysterious summons to take over a special wartime job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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 "Now, don't be so modest, Professor. I'm sure you've got something up your sleeve that will blow us all to bits." Science Mother Church in Boston on their experimental radar.

As the months turned into years, the staff grew to 4,000, the final budget to $50 million, and the military men who came around to inspect rose from majors to colonels to generals. Among other devices, the lab produced the microwave early warning radar, the H2X that helped carry Dday, the SCR-584 for guiding fire against the buzz-bombs, and the ground control approach (G.C.A.) for landing aircraft. It revolutionized the relationship between government and science, set the pattern for the Manhattan Project.

Leadership v. Authority. Through those five years, DuBridge ruled with an easy mixture of tact and firmness. He not only kept his freewheeling scientists happy, he also managed the military. Says H. Rowan Gaither Jr., now president of the Ford Foundation, "He exerted not authority, but leadership." Adds Physicist Rabi: "He believed in his people and what they could do. He made the people there become great men because he believed them great." Most important, he would back up his scientists against the most stubborn military conservatism. When Physicist Luis Alvarez invented G.C.A., he had little to support him but the faith of DuBridge. Then, one night in Britain, G.C.A. brought in a flock of lost 6-175. There was no opposition from Washington after that.

At the end of the war, when Robert Millikan retired from Caltech, the trustees knew exactly the man they wanted to replace him. Physicist DuBridge had proved himself a master administrator.

Sewing Machines & Flying Trips. Today, after eight years as president of prosperous (endowment $30 million) Caltech, Lee DuBridge is still a man who will happily spend an afternoon fixing an ailing sewing machine, and then fly off to Washington for a top-secret meeting of the Science Advisory Committee. He runs his campus much as he did the radiation lab, and nowhere is the open-door policy more faithfully followed. Though his days are filled to capacity, he seems always to have time for the unannounced visitor, the troubled student, or for a session of weighty talk punctuated by friendly jokes. But beyond Caltech and Washington, Lee DuBridge plays another role: that of the dedicated spokesman for scientific and engineering education at its best.

In the rapidly changing nature and role of science, that education carries an increasingly heavy burden. The physicist of 20 years ago, says DuBridge, would be lost in a modern laboratory. "Not only would he be unfamiliar with mesons and V-particles and bevatrons and cosmotrons, he would also be nonplussed by [such phrases as] security risk, Q-clear-ance, confidential, secret, top secret." More important, he would find that the old compartments of knowledge no longer have their old rigid meanings. At Caltech it is possible to find a top geologist, e.g., Harrison Brown, who has never taken a formal course in geology. It is not only possible, but standard operating procedure for the scholars of Caltech to invade each other's fields as if no walls had ever existed between them at all. "Nature," says Physicist Bacher, "is not physics or chemistry or biology. It is all three--and much more besides." As one alumnus put it to Scholar Hallett Smith: "When I was an undergraduate, I majored in biology. But, of course, Caltech's biology is really biochemistry. Now everybody knows that chemistry is only a branch of physics, but it took me until my senior year to realize that physics is a branch of philosophy."

That being the case, says DuBridge, it is all the more tragic that the goals of science are so little understood, that science is regarded as either in a mysterious category of its own or merely as a producer of bombs and security risks (having testified for his old friend J. Robert Oppenheimer, DuBridge is all too familiar with the trying ways of security). Apparently, says DuBridge, "it has become fashionable in some circles to say we have had 'too much science'; that 'science is the cause of most of the world's troubles' . . . You would think that the fate of the world rested on the outcome of some sort of race between scientists, on the one hand, and all the historians, philosophers, writers, economists, poets, preachers, and political and social scientists on the other, with the implication that if science wins, the human race will be blasted to oblivion."

Actually, says DuBridge, science is merely one path to greater understanding. "Men climb Mt. Everest, explore the bottom of the sea, sail to the far corners of the earth, explore the atom, the crystal and the stars--all because they are born explorers . . . Are science and engineering just the tools for man's amusement and for his ultimate destruction? Let us say, rather--and more truthfully--that they are his ... tools in his eternal struggle to achieve his highest ... spiritual ends."

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