Amphibious Clean-Up

While touring the Caltech campus the other day, my friend Barbara and I witnessed the finals of the 2008-2009 ME72 Engineering Design Contest, also known as Amphibious Clean-Up. You may have read about it here. The students had been working hard for months, and Tuesday was the culmination.

The young men standing on the bridge were about to throw lightweight balls into the water to serve as "floating debris." Amphibious robots then dove in, cleaned up the debris (well, some of it) and crawled out the other side, scoring points. The robots were cheered on by the crowd at Millikan Pond, an ordinarily tranquil body of water that lies shimmering outside the Millikan Library.

The pond would be a good place for students to gather between classes. Yet I remembered there hadn't been a soul around when I'd photographed it last February. Barbara said it's unusual to see many students hanging out on campus. At Caltech they have too much work to do to.

Tuesday, however, they were enjoying the fruits of their labors. At least the engineering students were. I got the impression they enjoy their work. If you can turn what you love into what you do for a living, you're creating the good life.

Bragging Rights

Pictured here is the Millikan Library, named for Robert Andrews Millikan, an experimental physicist who joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology in 1917, back when it was still called the Throop College of Technology. Millikan earned the 1923 Nobel Prize in physics "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect."

Before you start thinking Millikan was some kind of big deal, get this: more than one in 1,400 Caltech alumni have received the Nobel Prize. That's better than any other university, anywhere. Them's good odds. (Grammar's not a Caltech specialty.)

Other Caltech Nobel laureates include Linus Pauling (who received two Nobel Prizes: the Peace Prize and the Prize for Chemistry), William A. Fowler, Carl D. Anderson and Edward B. Lewis. Oh and a certain Albert Einstein was a visiting Caltech professor back in the day.

It's possible I could have a future Nobel laureate for a neighbor. Seriously. I already have a rocket scientist living across the street.

When I was in college, nerds were not cool. Times change.