STAR TECH : Caltech Began as a Manual-Arts Training School. Now It’s Out on the Frontiers of Science, Looking for Wormholes in the Universe and Counting Time in Femtoseconds.

KIP THORNE’S TIME MACHINE BEGAN AS A small exercise in science fiction. Several years ago, Carl Sagan, the popular astronomer, asked the Caltech professor for help with his science fiction novel, “Contact.” One thing led to another, and pretty soon Kip--everyone calls him that, for forms of address in this familial community of scholars are as informal as the clothes they wear--and several graduate students were thinking seriously about wormholes. They published a paper in the utterly serious and rigorously edited Physical Review Letters in 1988 entitled “Wormholes, Time Machines and the Weak Energy Condition.”

“If the laws of physics permit an advanced civilization to create and maintain a wormhole in space for interstellar travel,” Thorne and his colleagues wrote, “then that wormhole can be converted into a time machine with which causality might be violatable. Whether wormholes can be created and maintained entails deep, ill-understood issues.”

In his Caltech office, Thorne, 51, places two oranges--representing distant parts of the universe--on his desk so that they touch. Ordinarily, he says, a worm would crawl over the oranges on the outside, traveling forward in time. But wormholes in the universe--if they exist--would allow the worm to travel faster through the oranges--faster than the speed of light--from one orange into the other, then emerge from the second before it entered the first. So you could, theoretically, travel swiftly from one part of the universe to another and, perhaps, backward in time.

Some newspapers had picked up the time-machine story, posing some non-academic questions: For instance, was Thorne saying it is possible to violate the “grandfather paradox”--that is, to travel into the past and kill your grandfather? “There is a side to the universe of which we have very little knowledge,” Thorne says, smiling in his gentle, friendly way. “I prefer to work in areas where not many other people are working,” he understates.

Not far away from Thorne’s rather spare office, with its complex mathematical equations on his blackboard, in another building on Caltech’s well-tended 124-acre campus, Mary E. Lidstrom, professor of applied microbiology, is trying to undo an unpleasant effect of man’s inventiveness. She is working with bacteria that convert the powerful industrial solvent TCE--trichloroethylene--into harmless components.

Lidstrom, 45, and her 10 graduate students and “post-docs”--new Ph.Ds doing research--are trying to figure out the nature of the enzyme that eats the TCE in order to create an environment in which the bacteria can function faster and more efficiently. Her goal is to use these and similar organisms to undo naturally the malign effects of such a man-made chemical compound. “I have always wanted to understand how things work,” she says. And there are few better places to do that, she adds. “Caltech gave me anything I needed for my labs.”

Thorne and Lidstrom roughly represent the two poles of Caltech science: pure theory and applied science with foreseeable applications. Both symbolize the institute’s desire--its demand--for nothing less than the best. “When we think about doing something,” Caltech President Thomas E. Everhart says, “We ask: ‘Is it fundamental to science? Is it fundamental to the human condition?’ ”

Thorne and Lidstrom are among 272 professors at the small school in Pasadena (which has 800 undergraduates, 1,000 graduate students and 700 research fellows and visiting professors) that since the 1920s has been one of the brightest objects in the galaxy of science. Caltech wraps up its centennial year, celebrating its past accomplishments (20 professors have won 21 Nobel prizes) and its current stars--the professors and students working on the frontiers of science and engineering. A small, lean, rich scientific institute, Caltech attracts these visionary men and women by providing enviable endowments and absolute freedom. Egyptian-born laser chemist Ahmed Zewail, 45, who in 1987 took the first picture of the birth of a molecule, puts it simply: “Doing science is not a job. You do science because you love it. And Caltech provides the intellectual atmosphere in which to kindle this excitement.”

“It’s really a very special place among institutions of higher education: It’s small and selective--and extraordinarily strong scientifically,” says Donald Kennedy, the biologist who is president of Stanford University. As a friendly colleague as well as a competitor, Kennedy recalls, “Caltech made me a job offer once, and I almost went there. Instead, they took new notice of me at Stanford.” Despite his decision to stay in Palo Alto, Kennedy concludes, “There’s nothing quite like Caltech. It’s a national treasure.”

Stanford and the University of Chicago are also celebrating their 100th birthdays this year--but those schools were founded to be first-class institutions. The school established in Pasadena in 1891, Throop (pronounced Troop ) University, started out as little more than a manual-arts training school.

Arnold Beckman, 91, who entered Caltech in 1923, founded Beckman Instruments and became a major donor to the institute, quotes the late chemist Arthur Amos Noyes: “ ‘Caltech shall remain small, but in those disciplines in which it engages, it shall remain second to none.’ By keeping it small,” Beckman adds, “they have preserved the close relationship between the faculty and the students.”

Caltech’s endowment is $550 million, a large sum for so small a school. Earning an average of $77,500 a year each, its faculty is generally the best paid in America; Caltech pays more than its principal rivals for scientific excellence: Stanford, UC Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Cornell and Princeton. About half its $225-million annual budget comes from the federal government. (All of the $1.15 billion budget of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory--which runs the nation’s unmanned voyages into space and which Caltech manages--comes from the government.)

Caltech has a notably trim academic administration: just the president, the provost, the heads of the six academic divisions and the faculty. “This is much leaner than any place I’ve ever known,” says Everhart, who, as an electrical engineer, has himself taught and been an administrator at Illinois, Berkeley and Cornell.

Caltech goes for the best. Top science students tend to go there. When Caltech wants to add faculty, at any level, it determines who the best are and sets out to get them. If it fails, it doesn’t go for second-best; it just waits until it finds another first-rater.

And Caltech emphasizes interdisciplinary scientific work. “Because Caltech is so small, it can cut across fields of inquiry more readily than almost any other place, “ Everhart says. There, at the intersections of the traditional fields of study such as physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics, is where the scientific “action” is, Everhart says. “That’s where the great discoveries are going to take place, and Caltech has always gone for the great discoveries.”

IT’S SEMINAR DAY, AN UPDATE ON SCIENCE FOR RETURNING alumni, and Peter Dervan, 46, is lecturing with that mixture of intensity, charm, clarity and deceptive simplicity that makes him popular with undergraduates.

He’s explaining his work--chemical approaches to reading the genetic blueprint. He stalks around the platform, he chops with his hands, he smiles, he laughs. That’s the way he teaches his undergraduate classes. Describing something on the blackboard, he suddenly stops, points to one of his students and asks a question. If the student knows the answer, he or she gives it. If not, the student must say, simply, “Duhhhh.”

“It’s a friendly game that keeps the students on their toes and conveys Dervan’s own sense of excitement about his science,” says one former student.

Dervan and his group study how and where certain molecules bind to DNA; their work has greatly refined the precision with which the human genome can be mapped and could lead to new chemical principles and concepts. Describing the mapping of the human genome--determining the 100,000 genes’ locations on the DNA--Dervan says, “We’re just trying to find out who we are, why we are human, what makes us different from other organisms (for instance, from our closest relative, the chimpanzee). It’s no big deal, it’s just the next logical step in following the Greek maxim, ‘Man, know thyself.’ ”

Dervan and Jackie Barton, 39, new parents of an infant daughter, are working on separate aspects of the same general question: the chemistry of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, which contains, in humans, the 3 billion bits of information in each cell that transmit the genetic code.

Barton, small, animated and boundlessly enthusiastic about “the beauty of chemistry,” was a catch for Caltech, which lured her from Columbia in 1989, where she had become a full professor of chemistry and biological sciences at the age of 34. The year before, she had received the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, given to the outstanding young scientist of the year. As is the custom in the experimental sciences when a star is enticed from one institution to another, she brought her 10 graduate students with her to Caltech.

She was amused to find herself regarded as a “role model” for younger women at Caltech. As recently as 1975, when literature teacher Jenijoy LaBelle brought a federal complaint, there were no tenured women on the faculty; LaBelle reached a settlement with the school and is now a full professor. There are currently 18 women on the tenured faculty; as of last year, 19% of the undergraduates were women; this fall one-third of the entering freshmen are.

“I didn’t want to be a role model,” Barton says. “I wanted to be a scientist. I didn’t think there was anything weird about women doing science.” She was graduated from Barnard College at Columbia summa cum laude and had, as a matter of fact, some science teachers who were women.

“I am a woman who happens to be in science,” she says. “I try to get across to the young women scientists, ‘Don’t have a chip on your shoulder, just do good science.’ The best thing I can do for women in science is just do good science.”

Barton designs molecules that explore variations in structure and shape of the DNA helix. The more DNA is understood, the more readily it can be manipulated. Such tinkering with the stuff of heredity may someday eliminate inherited defects, some of them fatal.

Barton worries that too few people understand science; the number of Americans going into science, especially chemistry, is dropping. She worries that not enough people are thinking about the ethical questions that will arise when we acquire the knowledge to manipulate DNA more readily: It is one thing to cure a disease, another to produce more profound variations in human beings.

Last June, she was one of three Caltech faculty members named MacArthur Fellows by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation out of 31 nationwide. Her stipend, to do with what she wants, is $250,000 over five years.

Her husband, who speaks in the accents of his youth in the Dorchester section of Boston (his parents were immigrants from Ireland) and with the intensity of the sky-diver he once was, emphasizes that he does science for the “pure joy of discovering scientific principles.”

He went to Boston College High School--”those four years were the toughest in my life”--and there fell in love “with the beautiful logic of chemistry,” he recalls. He rose swiftly, as so many of these bright scientists do, making major discoveries fairly young, and was assistant professor of chemistry at Caltech one year after he got his Ph.D from Yale. Like his wife, he has won an array of awards for his work, and, like all the top scientists at Caltech, he gives papers and lectures all over the world.

“To do successful research science,” he says, “you have to be able to do hard work--blue-collar sweat. You have to be able to deal with delayed gratification. You have to be able to deal with ambiguity--you don’t always ask the right question. It turned out I was good at it. I found something I loved, and I have never looked back.”

Science does not move ahead on predictable straight lines. “It’s a turning, twisting, serendipitous road to discovery,” Dervan likes to say.

KIP THORNE HAS JUST FINISHED TEACHING HIS LAST CLASS IN physics for the spring semester. He brushes his thinning hair back with his hand and grins through his gray-brown beard at the thought of leaving for his house on the Oregon coast, where he can do what he likes to do most: think about time.

But, just as he has to have long stretches of quiet time in Oregon to think about time, so he has to communicate with other people around the world who are working on the same kinds of questions. “There are about a dozen,” he says; they communicate mostly by computer. One of them is the British physicist Stephen Hawking, who wrote the best-selling “A Brief History of Time.” “It’s fair to say he’s as confused as I am about (the wormhole),” Thorne says.

Thorne is much less confused about his other major project, the gravitational-wave detector. He wants it built. He thinks it will work. He believes that “it will teach us things about the fundamental nature of space and time.”

No one has ever conclusively detected a gravitational wave, although their existence is predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. As Thorne puts it, “Einstein says gravity is the curvature of space and time.”

The more massive an object, the greater it warps the space around it. In the solar eclipse of 1919, photographs proved that the mass of the sun bends light, thus confirming the general theory of relativity. Later experiments confirmed that mass bends radio waves.

Gravity is one of the four forces in nature, the others being the strong force, which binds atomic particles together; the weak force, as in radioactive decay, and the electromagnetic force. Gravity keeps our feet on the ground and the planets in their stately ellipses around the sun, but it is actually a very weak force. Thorne and other theorists believe that large, violent astronomical events create detectable gravitational waves. One such would be a supernova, an exploding star. Another would be a neutron star, an intensely dense object, about 7 1/2 miles across, formed from the core of a collapsed star. Another would be the coalescing of two black holes, objects in the universe so dense, with such a strong pull of gravity, that no light or radio waves can escape from them. Another would be the faint but still pulsing gravity waves arising from the explosive origin of the universe 15 billion years ago--the “big bang.”

“There are probably a lot of black holes colliding,” Thorne says. They revolve around one another, exerting ever-greater gravitational force, until they coalesce into a large black hole. “Their collision creates huge, violent vibrations of the curvature of space and time in their vicinity,” Thorne says.

The waves are believed to move unevenly through space and time, like ocean waves, and with different oscillations, depending on their source.

To detect them, Caltech, with the assistance of MIT, wants to build two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories (called LIGOs for short), one in the Mojave Desert and one near the East Coast. Using lenses, mirrors and lasers traveling at right angles through two steel pipes in a vacuum, LIGO will measure the distance between weights suspended 2.5 miles apart. As gravity waves pass through Earth, they should shove the weights in one of the pipes apart, ever so slightly, then squeeze the weights in the other pipe toward each other, ever so slightly. How slightly? The beams will be able to measure movement at 10 to the 16th power of a centimeter--about one hundred millionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

The project, approved by the National Science Foundation, would cost $200 million, to be provided by Congress. So far, Congress has voted all $23.5 million in first-year funding that Thorne had wanted to start building a gravitational-wave detector, a prototype of which is stored in a shed on the Caltech campus.

“LIGO is a speculation and a dream,” says Everhart, “but then lots of science is based on speculations and dreams.” Thorne’s speculation, his dream, is that LIGO will advance human understanding of the universe as dramatically as radio astronomy has with its revelation of a seething, violent, turbulent universe scarcely detected by even the most powerful optical telescopes.

Thorne got into his dreams, his science, as many scientists do: through his family’s interest in it. His father was a professor of soil chemistry at Utah State University; his mother, an economist, later founded the department of women’s studies there. The entire Thorne family had been Mormon since the establishment of Utah, but recently Thorne and his parents and siblings, two of whom are professors, have asked to be excommunicated in profound disagreement with the church’s treatment of women.

“Personally,” he says, “I am an agnostic. I see no incompatibility between the spiritual life and science.”

TO AN EXTENT THAT MIGHT ASTONISH A STRANGER, THE ATHEnaeum is a critical part of Caltech’s distinctive culture. It is the agora, the forum, the place where the members of the Caltech community meet and exchange ideas.

Designed by Gordon Kaufman in Spanish or Mediterranean villa style--columns, porticoes, patios and a red-tiled roof--and built in 1930, it is the most handsome structure on the campus. Its principal first-floor public rooms have high ceilings, some beamed and painted; plenty of wood paneling; portraits--some better than others--of Caltech worthies, and a general air of prosperity, comfort and amiability. It looks much like a turn-of-the-century New York club mellowed by French doors, sunshine and California ease.

Lunch is meeting time, and at the heart of lunch are six round tables of eight seats each, at which faculty members can sit without having a reservation. Scarcely any faculty member fails to mention the pleasures of the round tables as one of the keys to the excellence of Caltech, because physicists don’t just sit with physicists or astronomers with astronomers. People from diverse fields gather to find out what others are doing and to discuss topics of general interest. They go to the round tables, deliberately, to converse.

At one round table recently, there were a seismologist, a chemical engineer, a historian, a professor of English, a visiting British mathematician, an environmental engineer and a physicist who is a professor of chemistry and biology. The discussion included standards for storing nuclear waste, the changing American demographics, the “Western civilization” controversy at Stanford, how American attention tends to focus on symbols instead of important things, scientific fraud, the controversy about Dr. David Baltimore, now president of Rockefeller University, and how various fields have different practices on the number of names affixed to scientific papers.

The round tables are where such scientists as these are often found: Don Anderson, who is overseeing a new system of instruments to measure earthquakes in California; Harry Gray, who is trying to figure out if chlorophyll can be used to help find a way to derive energy from sunlight; chemist Zewail, who took that first photograph of the birth of a molecule with a laser in a few femtoseconds--a femtosecond being a millionth of a billionth of a second; Ed Stone, director of the JPL, who is chairing the Caltech-UC committee that oversees the world’s largest telescope as it looks outward in space (and back in time), toward the beginning of the universe 15 billion years ago; Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann, who is trying to figure out why the simple fundamental laws of nature create such complexities.

When scientists leave the luncheon tables, they return to remarkable equipment: Caltech has long had superior scientific instruments and laboratories. The new Beckman Institute, devoted to interdisciplinary experimental science, is one of the most recent examples; another is the new Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, with a twin telescope to follow. And everyone agrees that the JPL connection has been invaluable.

The booklet Caltech produced to celebrate its centennial (and to entice private donors) divides the institute’s research into the following categories: Foundations of Life and Mind; Informatics and Complex Systems; Molecules, Materials and Microdevices; the Universe; Earth and Environment, and Human Values and Institutions.

The categories are significant, Everhart explains over breakfast at the Athenaeum. He says he wants the booklet to reflect the reality of the kind of interdisciplinary science done at Caltech and also to impress on the scientists themselves new ways of looking at the work they do. The booklet is not intended to lure more people to Caltech, which trebled in size under the leadership of Robert A. Millikan (president from 1921 to 1945) and trebled again under his successor, Lee A. DuBridge (1946 to 1969). The institute has since been growing very slowly, just 1% a year.

“I don’t see any desire to make it larger,” Everhart says. “For one thing,” he adds, looking around the dining room, “this room can’t really hold any more people at lunch.”

TCE, THE REASON BEHIND MARY LIDSTROM’S RESEARCH, IS ONE of those human manipulations of nature that turned out to contain a nasty surprise. It does not occur naturally; it was first patented in Germany in 1907 and came into wide use after World War II as a solvent for removing grease from metal and as an ingredient in dry-cleaning processes. The trouble with TCE is that it’s toxic to humans and animals. When it’s dumped into the ground, it seeps into the water supply and poisons it. TCE is the most common component in the Environmental Protection Agency’s identified toxic-waste sites.

There is no efficient technology in use for getting rid of the underground TCE. It sticks to sand in the aquifers, so the contaminated water is pumped up from underground and cleaned.

“In some places, you could pump for 100 years” and still not have the job done, Lidstrom says. So the idea is to find a way to clean up the toxic material where it is, underground, without having to go through the laborious and expensive process of bringing it to the surface.

“I work with bacteria that feed on methane (natural gas),” Lidstrom says. “These methanotrophs (methane eaters) are widespread in the soil, in lakes, in the oceans. They feed on methane and turn it into carbon dioxide and water. They also eat TCE (which has some of the same elements--carbon and hydrogen--as methane), but very slowly.”

So she and her students are trying to find ways to speed up the process. “I’ve been studying these organisms for 18 years. I love them,” the serious, self-confident microbiologist adds with a laugh.

Lidstrom acquired her interest in science while growing up on a ranch in eastern Oregon. Like many other scientists, Lidstrom had a teacher whose enthusiasm inspired her, a “fabulous” physics and chemistry teacher in 300-student Prineville high school. Then it was on to Oregon State, the University of Wisconsin, post-doctorate work in Sheffield, England, and a faculty position at the University of Washington, from which Caltech lured her, giving her the lab she wanted and the space to do her work.

“Caltech is very supportive,” she says. “Its very liberal about maternity leave, for instance.” (She has a young son and a husband who spends most of his time in the state of Washington, where he’s a professor of pharmacology. For now, it’s a commuter marriage.) And “because I spend less time on bureaucratic details,” she says, “I have time to think.”

Lidstrom is an example of what former Caltech President Marvin L. (Murph) Goldberger means when he says his “secret” for Caltech was to to get the best people, get the best facilities, and then stand aside.

JOHN HOPFIELD, 58, IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE INTERDISCIPLINARY work going on at Caltech. One of his interests these days: the sense of smell.

Tall, lean and wry, Hopfield walks across the campus fast, leaning forward eagerly as he goes. He grew up in suburban Washington, a child of scientists. A former professor of physics at Princeton, he is professor of chemistry and biology at Caltech.

“I work at the interface between neurobiology and computer science and electrical engineering,” he says. He runs Computation and Neural Systems at the new Beckman Institute. He and his colleagues are trying to understand the brain and to build chips and computers to mimic some of its actions. The brain is the most complex system in biology; more than half the 100,000 human genes are expressed only in the brain.

Hopfield is currently working on the sense of smell and its close relation, the sense of taste, as a means of understanding the workings of the brain. The olfactory sense is very old, he explains, going far back in the evolution of life. A one-celled animal, for instance, has a sense of smell; it can swim toward an amino acid, which it then eats. “A garden snail or slug has a well-developed sense of taste and smell; if you put something nasty on a food that it likes, it won’t go back,” he says. But, curiously, human beings do not perceive this basic sense when they dream.

Hopfield believes that working on the olfactory sense may be the way to understand perception. “The fact that simple animals do it can (provide) questions of the whole system,” he says. “Once you find out how one thing works, you can go on, for biology tends to repeat solutions.”

For some scientists, thinking about their subject leads to thinking about the very nature of things. Hopfield is one of those. In a series of lectures he gave at Cornell, he concluded with a symposium on “free will,” in which he took the position that, although the “myth” of man’s free will is useful, in actuality what appears to be a rational choice is the result, for evolutionary biological purposes, of the enormously complex evolution of immensely complex biological systems over perhaps 3 billion years of the existence of life on Earth.

Another scientist who ruminates on the nature of things is Christof Koch, assistant professor of computation and neural systems, who is building a little car that can travel about on the surface of Mars and “see” things it has been programmed to recognize. Koch, 34, who was educated in Germany, is also trying to work out, with La Jolla’s Francis Crick--discoverer, in 1953 with James Watson, of DNA--a neurobiological theory of consciousness. Koch ponders, for instance, whether a patient who is anesthetized during brain surgery is “aware” or “conscious” in a way that allows him to answer questions when various parts of his brain are touched with electrodes, but who, upon awakening, remembers nothing.

As for the little car, “it’s very exacting, for you’re trying to be a biologist and an engineer at the same time,” says Koch, 35, who talks with explosive energy and speed. He and his students have designed prototypes of the car that can “see” the line between black and white and follow on the floor a tape that is half white, half black.

The car uses a retina chip designed by Carver Mead, professor of computer science, called by an administrator one of the four or five people most important to Caltech for his imagination in creating microchips of enormous power using his Very Large Scale Integrated (VSLI) circuit technology. Mead’s chip, Koch’s car--these are offspring of the marriage between outer-edge science and advanced technology that is a hallmark of 1991 Caltech.

MOST OF CALTECH’S DEFECTS ARE BORN OF ITS VIRTUES.

Undergraduate education is limited. Roughly one-fifth of all undergraduates’ courses must be in the humanities and social sciences, and Caltech has some noted teachers and scholars in the humanities: Daniel J. Kevles, for example, the eminent historian of science, author of “In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity,” and Charles R. Plott, a renowned figure in experimental economics, among them. But, at Caltech, science is the main point.

And Caltech students are legendary for their skillful technological pranks--such as flashing “Caltech 40, Ohio State 0” on the scoreboard during a Rose Bowl game--and for being long on brains and short on social skills. They are certainly bright. They work hard; since the begining they have been required to take two years of physics, two of math and one of chemistry.

“If an undergraduate wants much more than science, Caltech really isn’t the place to go,” says one professor of science, who himself has broad humanistic interests. For Caltech’s undergraduates, the intense focus on science, and the heavy load of study, leave less room for diversity of study--and for diversion--than at most other schools. Still, more than one faculty member remarks on the importance of the fresh, nimble minds of the students to the success of the institute. “You could take away the faculty, and Caltech would still exist,” Jackie Barton says.

Caltech’s much-praised smallness makes it perforce less diverse than, say, UCLA. And its size means it must pretty well succeed in whatever it does. “It does have a tendency toward conservatism,” says former president Goldberger, “because, being small, you can’t tolerate too many failed enterprises, unlike MIT, which is five times as large.”

Goldberger adds that smugness, too, is an obvious hazard at a place so good. Caltech can’t afford to take its pre-eminence for granted. Just this month, one of its brightest stars, molecular biologist Leroy Hood, a leader in developing machines to map the human genome, was lured away to establish his own department at the University of Washington’s medical school.

Caltech is not, and never has been, like Princeton, a leader in mathematics, but it has held commanding positions in physics, biology, chemistry, seismology and engineering since the 1920s and ‘30s. The school, which took its present name only in 1920, was propelled to greatness by its “holy trinity”: physicist Millikan, astronomer George Ellery Hale and chemist Noyes. By 1930, Caltech produced one-quarter of all physics papers published in the country, Judith R. Goodstein discovered in researching her new book, “Millikan’s School.” Leading German physicists, including Albert Einstein, came to Pasadena to teach and lecture. After Einstein left Germany with the advent of Hitler in 1933, Caltech could have hired him, and nearly did, until a difference over salary took him to the new Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J. “Millikan was tight,” Goodstein says.

By the 1930s, Noyes and Linus Pauling had made Caltech a leader in chemistry; Thomas Hunt Morgan, the eminent geneticist, was there at the same time. The institute, naturally enough for a California school, took up seismology and quickly became the world leader in both the geology of earthquakes and the engineering and design of man-made structures to resist them. Naturally also, it became expert in early aeronautical engineering and so helped develop the West Coast’s young aircraft industry. And by the late 1940s, the 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain made Caltech synonymous around the world with the study of the universe.

During its early years, Caltech was bankrolled by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and local tycoons and supporters. Now about half its income comes from federal research funds. Yet, like all private institutions and many public ones, it must ceaselessly raise its own funds to chase after ever-expanding scientific horizons.

“I sometimes think,” says Everhart, “of science as an expanding sphere, in which the volume increases as the cube of the radius (r3) and the surface area increases as the square of the radius (r2)--and I sometimes think our minds just go with the radius (r).”

Or, as Richard Feynman, the late Caltech Nobelist in physics, known simply as “God” to the undergraduates, once put it, in words Caltech recalled for its centennial:

“The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. . . . The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, come again and again when we look at any problem deeply enough. With more knowledge comes deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing, but with pleasure and confidence, we turn over each new stone to unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries. . . .”