California Institute of Technology

Thanks for passing me in my candidacy defense or my defense 35 years ago.

So it was 35 years ago this week that I left actually Stanford for Caltech.

Many of you didn't have the great opportunity that I did to get advice from Bernie Roth during your PhD.

So I will pass on one that he told me right before I went out for my first job talk.

It's the same diameter as a baseball, because this is a baseball pitching machine that launches it.

And the sort of simple theory in this first version, talking about dynamic tasks and stability, is actually if you design this thing so that at every instant the center of gravity is above the center of pressure during the arm unfolding process, it will be sort of passively stable.

So this is actually out in the desert about two hours north of Caltech.

We actually were shooting these things off a truck at 50 miles an hour.

But the memory of that violent encounter remains written in their orbital characteristics and their tidal locking.

In 2005, an astronomer named Mike Brown from Caltech announced the discovery of an object that would change everything.

This object, which he had found using data from the Palomar Observatory, appeared to be even larger than Pluto.

It was named Eris, after the Greek goddess of discord, and the name proved prophetic indeed.

It's just another title that he wants to add to this long list of accomplishments, which is not his anyway.

So talking about why this episode was slightly triggering for me in some ways, the opening scene when they're in the Caltech cafeteria and Howard is on the phone to his mom trying to tell her how to check her email.

It's like, and he's just getting more and more frustrated.

I've been there.

But, yeah, so he's probably looking at somewhere around one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and twenty thousand, which is not bad.

In California, that's not always that's not great money.

Well, that's the thing is I interviewed back in around 2012 for 2011-2012 jobs out at CalArt, which is just down the road from Caltech.

And to rent...

Way to go, bro.

also worth mentioning cole thomas allen yet again with the three names might mean something might mean nothing but the three names pops right back up in 2017 there's actually this abc 7 los angeles news broadcast where they're showing caltech students and their different inventions i guess and he actually invented this emergency brake out of pvc pipes for wheelchairs

College student Cole Allen developed a prototype for a wheelchair emergency brake.

The wheelchair brakes tend to lock the wheels but don't actually lock the chair to the ground.

And I'm not so sure that that could be the solution to the problem of dark matter.

You speak with, however, you speak with Catherine Zurek at Caltech, and she's wonderful about this, that physicists like...

Beauty, the beauty of calculations and formulas.

But that nature is not about beauty.

And it's not

just because you're buds with Kip Thorne, who was co-executive producer on that movie, who was a professor of physics at Caltech.

It's not just because you're friends with

him.

In 1974, Richard Feynman, that's a name you've heard many times on our podcast.

He used that story in a commencement speech at Caltech to describe something he called cargo cult science, doing everything that looks right while missing what actually makes it work.

Developers do it too.

Today we're talking about cargo cult programming.

ASU's research enterprise has grown at a breathtaking pace, with expenditures increasing more than sevenfold since 2002, from $123 million to over $900 million annually.

The university ranks fifth in the US for research expenditures among universities without a medical school, ahead of institutions like Caltech, Princeton, and Carnegie Mellon.

This growth hasn't been accidental.

It reflects ASU's strategic decision to organize its research not around traditional academic disciplines, but around solving complex societal challenges.