Walking through Caltech sometimes I feel like I'm in paradise.
Caltech is the destination for the world's brightest, most creative, most original people.
If you just walked through it you would think, "Wow, here's
this beautiful park-like place." You wouldn't realize that some of the most
amazing science on earth is happening inside those little windows everywhere you look.
Caltech is unique in the way that science is done. People take on problems
that might seem impossible. Creating the science of the future.
Searching for answers beyond the frontiers of knowledge - that's a very big part of Caltech.
Caltech's faculty and students have changed the world. This tradition goes
way back for a hundred years now.
We have more than 30 Nobel Prize winners.
Linus Pauling, and the nature of the chemical bond.
Richard Feynman, and his fundamental fundamental understanding of sub-atomic particles.
Moore's Law, Gordon Moore, he founded Intel, of course.
This has been the center of astronomy for more than 50 years.
Our understanding of life what genes are, DNA sequencing,
metabolic engineering,
xerox machine, microwave oven,
pH meters, robotic surgery,
semiconductors, quarks, nanotechnology,
an earthquake network up and down the west coast,
Caltech administers JPL,
Voyager spacecraft, rovers on Mars. The list goes on and on and on.
It's just mind boggling.
This all flows and the original decisions by Millikan, Noyes,
and Hale about how to structure the Institute to make it small, so that
people intermingle, exchange ideas, challenge each other. To make it
fearless so that great ideas rise to the surface.
Caltech is tiny.
It's like another university
shrank in the washing machine - it's about a tenth of the size. The entire scientific community
is in one big city block. That's one of the strengths of Caltech - its compactness
separates this institution from other places. You know you are on the doorsteps
of brilliant minds.
You can take developments from a completely different field that you
might have heard about at lunch at the Athenaeum one day. And, you can put that into
your research. You find physicist collaborating with biologists, and chemists
collaborating with geologists. It's organic. It's part of the fabric of this
place.
The learning environment at Caltech is phenomenal. Professors are willing to
talk to anyone it doesn't matter if your undergraduate or a Nobel Laureate. I started to
see myself less as a student and more as a scientist.
You can teach very adventurous courses on the frontiers. The undergraduates are reading
latest scientific papers. The most important thing I learned at Caltech was
definitely learning how to learn. To do the problems that no one else can. Doing
risky things is encouraged.
Caltech realizes the most important questions facing our society today are ones that
are not going to be solved overnight. You can explore the edges of what's possible
to create truly novel and innovative solutions. It just allows somebody
particularly somebody who's young to think bigger.
We take large bets to be able to seed new ideas that have a chance of changing the
world. It works beautifully.
A wonderful thing about Caltech is that they're willing to invest in the big ideas.
No one had ever gone to this part of the brain to record from single neurons.
To see it, it is mind boggling. The subjects just sitting there and are controlling things.
One quadriplegic is already controlling a robotic arm with his mind.
It tickles me even now to see it happening.
Thinking big is part of our culture. There is no fear of failure here.
Take the most important and challenging problem and try your hands. And drag your
students with you and then let them fly ahead of you.
In my lab, you walk in and you see students from biology, from applied physics, mechanical engineering.
These young minds clash as a result to create new ideas.
I think at other schools because I'm a theorist, Mike Brown is an observer,
our scientific existence would be somewhat segmented out. At Caltech we're thrown together.
It was a gravitational one way sign towards something distant and something massive.
I looked at Konstantin, if they're in these two locations that we're predicting my
head's gonna explode. It was this moment of amazement. Your jaw just sort of fell.
I just sat there completely speechless. This big finding and discovery in space
There might be a ninth planet after all.
There is a massive planet out there waiting to be found.
Caltech taught me how to think, how to tackle problems, how to solve puzzles
My group gave these compounds patients for the very first time.
Results were reported in Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times.
And an automatic death sentence has become a manageable condition. This has been
applied to more than 10 million patients throughout the world.
Not everything that's worth it comes easily.
We injected it into the instrument. And we just looked at a computer trace.
And then we saw this peak
We just started jumping around and laughed and high-fiving each other, because it worked.
The Caltech culture says you go after
the most important discoveries with whatever resources are required to have
success, especially if the payoff is enormous.
On September 14, 2015, I said to myself, "Oh my god, this may be it."
We have detected gravitational waves. We did it!
Something that we have never, ever seen before.
The discovery of gravitational waves. It is the creation of a whole new way to explore
the universe. This will be a huge piece of astronomy and cosmology for the next
several centuries, I expect.
It is an ambitious enterprise that will not always succeed. But when there is
success, it will be important and significant and fundamental.
Think of the most interesting questions, the deepest scientific riddles. People at
Caltech are working on those. And they're working on things you've never even thought of before.
Breakthroughs that are incredibly beneficial for society.
Caltech is the place which will set how the world works
a hundred years from now. If you ask me what is possible I would say, "There's no limit.
Everything is possible."