A Community of Scientists

AS the head of Princeton's physics department, Atomic Scientist Marvin ("Murph") Goldberger, 56, was so happy in his work that he turned away presidential-search committees from a number of universities. That was before he was asked to run the California Institute of Technology. Says Goldberger, who was formally inaugurated last week as the fourth president of 87-year-old Caltech: "As a scientist, I felt I had no choice but to take it. This is an incredible place."

Goldberger is the most recent, but by no means the only scientist to succumb to the lure of the brainy powerhouse in Pasadena. In fact, Caltech was fashioned from a vocational 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."

Housed in a sleek campus of cantilevered concrete labs and trim glass high-rises, Caltech has achieved international influence far disproportionate to its size. The school has only 251 faculty members, 812 undergraduates and 851 graduate stu dents, making it roughly one-fifth the size of friendly rival M.I.T. Two-thirds of the incoming freshmen in an average Caltech class have scored a perfect 800 on advanced-mathematics college-entrance exams. Seventeen of its faculty and alumni have received Nobel prizes; two weeks ago, Alumnus Robert Wilson, now a researcher at Bell Labs, joined this elite roster by sharing the Nobel for physics.

It was at 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.

Caltech alumni give much credit for their school's achievements to its small size, which allows scientists in different disciplines to know each other well. Frequently, interdisciplinary research projects are first sketched over lunch at the Athenaeum, an elegant faculty club with a high-beamed Spanish-style ceiling at the campus' east end. Academically, the school deliberately remains narrower than, say, M.I.T., which is noted for such nonscientific departments as linguistics and economics. At Caltech the focus is on engineering and basic research in the "hard" sciences, especially physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry and seismology. Nuts-and-bolts technology gets little attention. "We really ought to call ourselves the California Institute of Science," argues Chemistry Professor Harry Gray.

The heady atmosphere of fundamental deep-think is unpolluted by the likes of intercollegiate football games and homecoming queens. Until 1970, there were no women undergraduates at all; now there are 88, or some 10% of the student body. Observes retired President Lee A. Du-Bridge: "Our football game is a full-time day of seminars for students and alumni. And they flood the campus for them. It is equal to homecomings in each of the disciplines." Adds President Goldberger: "Our unique position is our mystique. Our small size enables us to form a community of scientists, a scholarly intimacy that cannot be found any place else."

Faculty members at Caltech are fiercely proud of that unique mystique. "We are isolated, and we ought to be," asserts Chemist Gray, 40, who is consistently ranked by students as one of the school's best teachers. Adds he: "I did the Columbia University thing for five years. At those big places, everybody gets up early to read the New York Times in case somebody zings you at lunch by mentioning a book review. You have to be facile. But at the end of the week, there isn't much original work. Here our greatest contribution is what we are really doing in science."

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 to the campus. So too did Los Angeles Businessman Norman Church. Wrongly accused of drugging a horse that won a local race, he appealed to Caltech's chemistry department for help. The professors exonerated Church, and the businessman gratefully gave the school $ 1 million for construction of a new biology lab.

Caltech's high standards and its required menu of advanced science courses put undergraduates under fierce pressure. "When I came here, I felt everybody in the class was smarter than I was," recalls Senior Peter DeWees, who graduated second in his Riverside, Calif., high school class. "In the physics course, you could earn a possible 30 points on one test. I got one point." Top scorers though they are, 30% of the entering class do not graduate from Caltech. Observes Dean of Students Ray Owen: "At midyear, half the freshmen are failing math and one-third are failing physics. They are afraid, and they couple that with their uncertainty in social terms; half have never dated. Still, many students confide to me that they love it here. They'll say, 'It is the first place I have been where I am not considered a monster.' "

To relieve the academic pressure, Caltech undergraduates frequently engage in pranks with a scientific slant. Traditionally, student pranks reach their zenith on "ditch day" in the spring, when seniors barricade their rooms and leave the campus, inviting underclassmen to try to gain entry. One senior returned to find a Model T Ford in his room. Another foiled invaders by rigging an ingenious fruit-fly lock, which opened only when a tiny fruit fly was put into a hole in the door, interrupting a photocell light beam. "We don't applaud pranks around here," chuckles one professor, "but their style is admirable."

One of the few places off tree-lined Olive Walk that is not caught up in recondite science is the Donald E. Baxter, M.D., Hall, which houses the social sciences and humanities. The nonscientific fields have been treated as a poor relation at Caltech, barely tolerated by some of the elite scientists, seen as an outright menace by others. The school has had a hard time filling the chairmanship of its humanities and social-sciences division: Wisconsin Historian Allen Bogue turned down the job, as did Yale Philosopher Ruth Marcus. Still, President Goldberger insists that "the humanities are of central importance to education," and predicts, "We are going to do something significant in the way of humanities appointments."

Goldberger himself nearly chose a field other than physics. The son of a Youngstown, Ohio, real estate broker, he notes that he might have become a physician; what set him on his future course was a chance Army assignment to the atomic bomb-building Manhattan Project, where he worked under Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner. Married and the father of two sons, Goldberger is a trim running buff (he does four miles a day in 32 minutes) who cooks for a hobby. "Murph" Goldberger--he got the nickname from youthful playmates who heard his mother call him "Moish" but could not pronounce it--has already been baptized by whimsical Caltech undergraduates. During a weekend orientation retreat on Catalina Island this fall, students greeted their new president by throwing him into the Pacific Ocean.

Although the institution that Goldberger will lead has a hefty $190 million endowment, 58% of the research grants come from the Federal Government, and funds for basic research have been shrinking since the heyday of the Apollo project in the 1960s. Goldberger, like many other scientists, believes public mistrust of science is increasing, a trend that could lead to further fund cutbacks. He plans to use his prestigious new platform to drum up more support for science. "We are small, and we can't do it all alone here at Caltech," says he. "But the survival of our country and the world may depend on the successful marriage of science and technology."

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