Where Great Minds Meet Ideas in Style
“There is in Southern California the nucleus of a group of men of intellectual power and achievement as comprehensive and important as exists perhaps in any center in this country.”
--A memo, circa 1925, outlining plans for
the Athenaeum at the California
Institute of Technology.
*
Einstein slept here.
The room, No. 20, is duly noted with a few framed wall photos and a distinctive front door--mahogany, instead of white like all the others.
The so-called Einstein Suite is regularly rented out, but only Caltech VIPs need apply. It consists of a paneled sitting room and fireplace, a small bedroom and an airy balcony overlooking the commons. It lies at the end of the upstairs hallway at Caltech’s posh private faculty club, the Athenaeum, an inn and social hall for so many Nobel laureates over the years that no one can reliably count them all.
The figure is 28, if you list only Caltech professors and alumni, but that excludes others, like Einstein, who visited for days or months at a time. The Athenaeum was built to draw and help nurture them. Named after Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, the club was designed by architect Gordon Bernie Kaufmann to suggest both an Italian villa and a Spanish hacienda.
The lavish ceilings of the dining room and adjoining hall are examples of Italian Renaissance art, similar to the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Wrought-iron balconies, a circular marble staircase and a spacious central courtyard give the building, completed in 1930, a stateliness worthy of the great minds it was meant to attract.
Conversation is the main thing here--freewheeling, unstructured discussions that are important in ways far too subtle to chart.
No explicit value can be placed on the off-duty sparring of two Nobel Prize-winning physicists, but it can inspire, as Edward Lewis knows.
Lewis, an Athenaeum member for half a century, recalls one long-ago afternoon when he watched Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann go at it over some abstruse point related to the nature of matter. The two men, though colleagues, were polar opposites who seldom dined together.
“Feynman was more sociable--he liked to tell interesting stories,” Lewis says. “Gell-Man didn’t do that. He didn’t ever do small talk.”
That debate unfolded at one of the daily round tables in the Athenaeum’s main dining hall. It’s the same venue where Lewis, now a Nobel laureate himself, shares insights with other elite thinkers. Some days, when Lewis sits down with chemists Rudolph Marcus and Ahmed Zewail, three Nobel Prize winners trade banter at once. If Caltech’s president, David Baltimore, should happen by, the number jumps to four.
The informal lunch round tables are one of the hidden wonders of Pasadena. Seating is no more organized than in a warehouse cafeteria. The talk, though aimless, is rich with ideas, stories and allusions. It’s invariably livelier and deeper than anything you’ll hear on Oprah or Leno.
Today Lewis is dining with seven other scholars representing the fields of geophysics, seismology, biochemistry and astronomy. One is the project scientist for the Mars Global Surveyor Mission staged by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Lewis, a geneticist who studies the fruit fly, kicks off the discussion by telling a fly joke: A guy walks in and swats eight flies. How does he know that five were males and three were females?
Heads peer over the menus.
“Five were on a beer can,” Lewis says, “and three were on the telephone.”
Wisecracks ensue--”There’s your Nobel winner,” someone says--and the talk takes a desultory path to the difficulties of business travel and a distant awards dinner. Then a question: “Arden, what’s the latest on Mars?”
Arden Albee serves dual roles, exploring Mars and heading the Athenaeum Committee. He gives the weather report: “The storm has completely gone away.” It’s significant, he explains, because the thing covered the entire planet. It had been raging since June.
Nobody has yet figured out why the massive Martian dust storms occur some years but not others.
“What’s it correlated with on Earth?” Lewis asks, as if some monsoon in India might affect a planetary neighbor more than 40 million miles away.
Albee only smiles.
Human embryos come up in light of media controversy about cloning. John H. “Jack” Richards, an expert on protein function and the human genome, dismisses the claims in the news by saying, “They’re not even listed, that company. Four guys in a garage, that type of thing. It’s complete sensationalism.”
Pressed to comment on the state of biological science now that the genome has been mapped, Richards defers to Winston Churchill: “It’s not the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning.”
The discussion veers into genetic mysteries bounded in technical jargon. Geophysicist Don Anderson asks whether Lewis could distinguish a chimpanzee’s genome from a human’s. Sure, Lewis answers, the chimp’s would stand out immediately.
“It wouldn’t have a ‘soul’ gene.”
The joshing is purely for fun, but the blitz of ideas, the skewed ways of seeing things, breed other ideas that may merit more serious reflection.
“There’s often an exchange where somebody in one field . . . realizes they learned something at that table, and they go back to the lab and try something they might not otherwise,” Lewis says after the session ends. He experienced that himself in the 1950s, embarking on months of research into radiation and cancer based on the offhand remark of a physicist.
It is a phenomenon of the modern Western world that people can be brought together solely because of their intellectual gifts. Very few places, however, exhibit such careful filtering.
“The thing that’s crucial, that’s central, is the small size of Caltech,” says Richards. “You feel part of the entire scientific endeavor, rather than your own little niche of it.”
In addition to its 28 guest rooms, the Athenaeum features a library, where small banquets are held, an extensive wine cellar and a basement pub.
Albert Einstein was already world-renowned when he and his wife, Elsa, moved in during the 1932 and 1933 winter terms. It is said he liked to toss paper airplanes off the Athenaeum balcony.
Alas, the bed where Einstein once slept--and dreamed--is long gone. So, too, is his bathtub, replaced not long ago as part of a refurbishment.
“Believe it or not, our design committee spent hours discussing what to do with the bathtub,” apologizes General Manager Crystal Thomas, who blames it on bad pipes. They couldn’t be fixed without shattering the tub. “This was 1930 plumbing, and it had to come out.”
