4 Caltech and Pranks
4.1 Caltech
Caltech caltech.1-14 Korean War caltech.1
Altadena / Leighton caltech.1 Garbage In, Garbage Out caltech.2 OSHA Inspector caltech.3 Ecology at Caltech caltech.3 Math at Caltech caltech.4 Pauling caltech.5-10 Feynman caltech.6 Apostol caltech.7 Computers / Carver Mead caltech.10 Toffler / Sociology caltech.11 Einstein caltech.11 Feynman and Dyslexia caltech.12 Tesla caltech.13
4.1.1 History 40s-50s / Famous People
I was growing up in the 30s during the Depression around my grandfather at Caltech. It was incredibly active down there at Caltech in all sorts of fields. In the 40s at the end of the war, I was sort of into high school. It took a while to really transition the economy.
At the end of the 40s and beginning of the 50s, I started to go to places that were tied to Caltech students. Carter Labs was completely formed by a group spinning off of Caltech students. Every place I worked was directly at Caltech or with people from a small entrepreneurial company. This was a gap before I went to work at JPL and did the satellite stuff later on, starting in the mid-50s. It was fun, it was a very remarkable time to have grown up in that area.
There were other people. The name Izvicki (?) pops in mine, as a person in quantum mechanics. I used to ask him questions because quantum mechanics is a very bizarre area. It’s weirdness in the extreme, and people were having a very hard time achieving that level of weirdness. Another thing was nonlinear dynamics. Another person that was really neat was Tito Carmen (?), who worked on vortices, like a little donut of smoke in the air. Carming was one of the pioneers in the stuff that eventually led to nonlinear dynamics and the peculiar stability that extremely nonlinear processes can have.
4.1.2 Korean War
I have a picture of Bland and I in my wallet from that year that I was going into the 7th grade and he, at that point it was the Korean War, and he got drafted and mother had portraits taken of us at that point, just in case I guess, and Bland only survived the service the first three months. Did he share that with you?
*No, I haven’t heard anything about this. I didn’t know about it.
Oh yeah, they were going to train him to be a paratrooper and because of his wonderful legs from all the running he’d done, long distance running he’d done, and he just totally went to pieces on them. I mean he just had a terrible nervous breakdown so they let him out of the service with a medical discharge, you know you’ve got to be in at least 90 days to have veterans benefits. Well they let him out a day early.
*That was kind of mean.
Yeah. So my mother went to Fort Ord. He had been basic training at Fort Ord and at that point I guess they practically had him in a padded cell, and mother went to rescue him with our attorney helping too I guess with whatever legal things had to be done to get him out of the service.
4.1.3 Altadena and the Leightons
So at that point mother started looking for a place where we could all be in, started telling friends and stuff, and we had some friends who lived in Altadena that he worked at Mount Palomar. He was an astronomer and his name was Bob Leighton and I can’t remember his wife’s name. They actually lived on Ewing Street in Altadena. But anyway, they found this crazy little place for us to move there in Altadena and basically what it was was a second kind of an art studio for the artist. They owned this huge piece of property there in Altadena.
*The Leightons owned it?
No, the people that we rented the house from, their name was Washburn, and Marjorie and oh god I can’t think of her husband’s name, but their name was Washburn and she was the artist, and they raised their family in this huge family home right next to the Leightons on Ewing Street and then they parceled the property off and the part that we got was actually her art studio and it was just a one-bedroom place with a fireplace in it, small kitchen, small closed in glass porch. I mean it was tiny but it had all of this yard around it, incredible yard that they’d done, this huge what they called the barbecue, what we called the barbecue pit and they brought in all this rock stone and built this beautiful barbecue pit with a roof over it and this huge driveway that was all, had a, was big enough for a badminton court and they did have horses when their kids were growing up so there was this great big manure pit that they had built. It was all sunk underground where you could put the manure in and compost it and then there was a small tack room and barn there and all of this, originally all we did was to rent like where this badminton court was and this little tiny house. Well then, oh well to get back to Bland, so anyway we finally got a place where we could live.
*This was like early 50s.
Early 50s, right, it would have been 1951, and so anyway Judith went, you know, rescued Bland from Fort Ord and brought him down there and we set up the household together, and then through my teenage years, I mean he just, I don’t know what I would have done without him because Judith could just send me straight up the wall, with everything and anything, boyfriends, school work, you name it, and so when she’d just really get to me, I’d go to Bland and I’d say well what do you think about this? I mean how do you feel about this? I mean should I really, you know, put up with what’s going on, and he was always my incredible, my incredible confidante that just could always make things smooth and make things better and whatever. I just absolutely adored him, you know, he was like right next to Jesus Christ as far as I was concerned. So that part was really, really, really neat.
Bland’s Effect on People / Shoes / Nature
Yeah, usually my own. More trying to stay out of the frying pan. Bland had affected me a lot more than that. Some of the things, just, you know when we were down there a year and a half ago, I still wear the same shoes he does. Well, OK, not right now.
*I’ve got a pair in my trunk.
Yeah, it was like some time after I left Berkeley I got a pair of Clarks and I’ve worn Clarks ever since and partly it was because Bland liked them and so I tried them and damn, they’re nice shoes.
*Well on that trip I had a pair of Eccos and they’re the same kind of sole. Those are the only two companies that make that kind of sole. Mine wore out a couple months ago and I bought a pair of Clarks. I had never had Clarks before and it was like I put my foot in there and it was nice. It’s nicer than the Echo.
Yeah, well I like them because they’re really wide. Sort of like wearing Birkenstocks only a little more. But the other things. I learned so much from him.
4.1.4 Garbage In—Garbage Out / Data
So you see that’s another aspect so as things have to be careful how you automated them and you don’t automate you obliterate the very data you want. On the other side of that one, you may actually make something too sensitive, in order to read ___ was the ___ you thought it was this Nobel prizewinning thing and what it really was, was the thermostat switch for a ___. So sometimes it goes one way, sometimes it goes the other.
So that’s another aspect of, and you know I really liked , I really thought he was a neat guy, the guy that used to run the lab, the computer system there. You see and he just had a big sign on the wall, garbage in, garbage out, because people were so convinced they had the data ___ you take the ___ garbage collection of data, carelessly put together a measure, ran through the ___ statistics and even ___ somehow good data was ___ you see. ___ discouraging, but there were people that seemed to think this.
*There’s still a lot to do.
So why can’t you fix my data, with the statistical part ___ should be able to fix it. ___.
*Well in an ideal world a computer can help you find where there are problems, but you got to fix it yourself, or realize that it’s unfixable and go back to the drawing board and start over.
Or remember the other one used to joke about is all that incredibly ___ data over here are getting some of his data all from trees and all the other , really what we should have done is trip at the first, on the first landing going down to the basement, and by the time you’ve gone to two of steps and then picked all the data off the ___ it would be completely normalized. So you can always cure things that way. And so and so and so and so.
4.1.5 OSHA Inspector
*Yeah. I was just remembering that you once told me that you were an OSHA inspector once. Didn’t you do some inspecting where you did air quality testing? I remember you telling me about going into some sort of a plant and there was all this particulate, all this asbestos I think that was in the air and you immediately turned around and went out. Does that ring a bell?
There were a couple of places where I ran into levels of asbestos that were out of sight but that’s how I . It’s interesting that lots of the standards that were set to Washington for calibration and never even went. When the group there at Caltech were doing that first work on the problem of pollution, and the effect of pollution on plant growth and acids and other things that were formed, and I can’t think of the guy, he was a bio___ quite famous in Cal, I’m not sure he ___ but he certainly was well-known for his work he did. It was very well done, and ___ he had off ___ campus but at any rate one of the things he found was that, what he ran, you know, he turned ___ samples out of lead and other materials, heavy metals, in the soil and sample cuz it was ___ from the ___ air onto the plants and then going up there for the ___ so he sent these to Washington and he found a sample that came back _. So much for . So he finally went off to some private lab _ totally off of base.
It’s a ___ you see they were still using the old, at that point they were still using lead pipe for ___ for piping. At that time most drinking fountains used a lead container to hold the cold water, interestingly enough. Now ____ so if your job was to pick up the ___ how serious a problem was the plant growth, you suddenly found . So one of his great was indeed ___ heavy metal damage to plants and ozone damage to plants ___ But in most cases there, we had a problem trying to get standards especially for things like that.
4.1.6 UC Riverside
*Yeah, 1970-76. 71 to 76. So you were at Riverside, you got there in 60?
Yeah, 60, exactly, because that was as I said. I had already set up to go there because there was a changing with Caltech, and I was sort of waiting around Caltech, have a certain, have a person working there, have an employee at Caltech. Sometimes in the geology department, sometimes the biology department, and so on. And sometimes just working with my father and Pauling. So there was always that echo and so when Nick recommended Riverside being the place that I could just, straight across transit, back and forth, and they had a real good place that actually had ecology.
You see I’ll try to dig out the ecology manual and the entomology there at Caltech. Guess what?
*Well I was there in the 70s and there wasn’t much ecology at that point, so I can imagine in the 60s there wasn’t any at all.
What I found was that all the ecological manuals that get sent to the library just, you know. They had a place down in the subbasement to store these things in boxes. And boxes and boxes, I would dig through these boxes to find back issues of some of the ecology journals, but they’re there.
So that’s why I thought of that book by [Fritjof] Capra, “The Web of Life”, fascinating. I got to sit down and carefully read the book, entire book, because it has a truly amazing theoretical physics that cross over with deep ecology. Mindboggling.
*Yeah, isn’t that interesting?
And living in a place that’s tough for that type of approach. Berkeley is very, only one niche away from Caltech and MIT. It’s a difficult place to have the kind of attitude and direction. Capra’s a very tough person. How does he pronounce his first name?
*Frit Joff.
Terrible, terrible, terrible. You’re going to have to write out something for me so I can do it right. What I do is I work with those phonetic type ways of spelling and pronouncing things but I can’t, I notice that the new one doesn’t have it, the original books and some of the encyclopedias sometimes will have phonetic type spelling stuff. And that’s an incredible help to me. I’m the worst pronouncer of things like that. But at any rate, I read part-way through, sampled beginning, end top and bottom and sample started with a yellow thing [Post It’s], we, it blew my mind some of the timing on some of the. I hadn’t realized when they had happened or to the degree things had happened.
*Yeah, it’s amazing.
4.1.7 Math at Caltech
Spline function, and I was always finding that damn high degree polynomials were blowing up on me when I tried to do something with them on a computer, and so, what do you do to get around them? You could ___ away, in some ways being numerical knowledge is very much an art form.
*Still is, yeah. But the kind of approach that you’ve taken through your life of not, of trying to look at what’s really there, and the relationships that are there in a general way sort of leads you to that kind of approach. It doesn’t lead you to polynomials. Doesn’t lead you to straight lines.
It had an effect on my life, which is really because they were such excellent teachers superb teaching that they made such a profound effect on me. So that’s the stuff I want to get into some. I have something I really want to say, and it’s about teaching and the quality of teaching, and it’s especially the kind of quality of teaching that Pauling and Feynman did and then later on the Apostol.
4.1.8 Caltech Mentors
My own father, and Pauling for example, were these people that could switch gears, in mid-stride. They could be doing the most complicated visualization and stuff and protein structure and my father was the one that worked out the original protein structure where you’d have to hang these models all over the office. And he’d be doing something in far-out math and the next minute he’d be doing something in writing. My father and Pauling always just blew me away with their facility with writing. Pauling was an incredible writer. So was my father, and he just figured that if you needed to argue it, if you needed to visualize something he visualized it, whatever the problem at the moment.
I was too afraid of Apostol. It was only much later that I came around to asking for his books, as he was getting them out, and he actually came down to see who was asking for them because they weren’t printed yet. I was getting the preprint of these books before they were published. So he was curious who was asking for the preprints. He came down to see me. So we talked and visited a couple of times like that and he did indeed give me the preprints so I could teach myself in his style. That’s the way I taught myself calculus, out of his books before they were actually printed. I loved his books that taught calculus in some reasonable way.
The odd thing is that it was much later on when I began to see the directions that Carver Mead started about electronics where microcomputers would be headed and the shift in quality. Mead found the bottom line in size for integrated circuitry. That really was the only thing holding people back. Every step along the way somebody found some interface and it’s been upscaled, dropped the voltages, dropped the power way down. The functionality goes up and up. Reliability goes up because it becomes more closely related to quantum theory. You tried to make a model, but everything was highly unreliable. And every downscaling, your margin had underlying quantum mechanical principles. And guess what, they worked better and they were actually more reliable. So, boy did he nail that one dead center. I think he was also one of the co-founders of Intel, if I vaguely remember, for he was incredibly wealthy too.
I used to borrow Mathematica Principia, which was locked away as if it was pure gold or platinum. Interestingly enough the chemistry department had Mathematica Principia and my father used to check that one out and give it to me. I would take it home and read itl. That’s where I got to really love set theory thinking of Whitehead and Russell. The set theories were just beautiful, clean design ways of expressing logic, proofs.
I liked Polya: How to Prove It, and his things on induction. Polya did a whole group of books on inductive reasoning, which I thought were really neat. I originally used his work to learn how to do inductive proofs.
Feller discovered fractals by coin flipping with his students in his first volume. And Mandelbrot talks about his own background and Feller’s influence. I had already taught myself finite statistics from his volume. I had no real calculus in place. He essentially made statistics available to me through his book on finite math. I was never able to master his second book, the volume on continuous functions. That one was really hard. I never could digest major theory reasonably.
My father was always trotting out Courant, major theory stuff. I couldn’t get to zip with Courant. Without that, I couldn’t make much progress in Feller’s continuous volume. Then I got Apostol’s major theory book. Here I made some real progress for the first time in my entire life. But that was years later. I taught calculus to myself.
I wasn’t a regular student, but at that time I was an off and on employee there at Caltech. So while I was a Caltech employee, I tried to sit in on this stuff. If I wasn’t in their courses, at least I was attending every lecture they gave that was open to the public. I probably hit every Feynman and Pauling lecture that was open to the general public at least once. Not Apostol, interestingly enough.
4.1.9 Pauling and Feynman
I never had to unlearn anything. I can’t say that was true of many other people but as far as Pauling was concerned, as far as Feynman was concerned, ___ is it possible I never had, I ___ later years, decades later, I never had to unlearn a single piece of information that they had screwed up on. ___ teaching ___ a beautiful job of presenting ___ They were indeed truly wonderful and gifted teachers.
*Directly from them, or did you just read their books or?
No ___ places in their books and all their published papers and all that junk.
*Did you go talk to Pauling and Feynman?
Feynman a few times, Pauling a lot, and I sort of grew up with his kids and when he would go to Europe, my father would baby-sit and I would stay at his home and swim in his swimming pool and things like that. He had a pretty red Porsche too that I thought was kind of neat.
*A pretty red what?
Red Porsche machine, car, you know. Which was sort of, I thought it was a very, if I were going to have a sports car, that wouldn’t be the one I really would go to. At that time it was So all sorts of echoing back through with Pauling. Feynman I just thought his talk was so neat and I used so much of his stuff. But he, we just didn’t cross paths that much. And then as I say, I thought what he’d done was so great.
4.1.10 Linus Pauling
You see as I was growing up, my father returned in the mid 30s to get, finish up his Ph.D. and it was Pauling, he had taken the original ___ and then ___ to Caltech to finish up his degree. My father returned to Caltech to finish up his degree in chemistry and of course at that time was also the time, this was in the mid-30s that Pauling was doing his pioneering work on the application of quantum mechanic into chemistry. It totally changed the approach that chemistry had up to that time. It was absolutely, it’s a radically different approach when you take quantum chemistry as the underpinning of what you’re doing. Up to that time chemistry had just been sort of ___ subject that people would sort of cut and dry, actually organic chemistry went on its way a little longer than some of the theory, like physical chemistry and so forth, but it was all so that hard cut and dry and here quantum chemistry all of a sudden on one hand it was based on probability theory, totally based on probability theory ___ and all that jazz. Had a precision to it that was totally unknown before in any other area of science, any area.
So ___ said you could do things, do a precision you just couldn’t and of course Pauling and one of his students was my father who then also helped him do this pioneering work in structural chemistry and everything all based on quantum mechanical principles and so it was this incredible, you see this was the time when I was growing up and also the time when I used to hide under the table to listen to people’s discussions about science and how things could or should be done, and of course that was the time, to say that the __ the traditionalists and any of the other field, whether it be chemistry or physics. I guess physics was a little ___ but boy chemistry was ___real growing pains at right that moment in time.
It was fascinating hiding under the table and listening to all this talk and at the same time, you see, my father was commenting on the fact that Pauling, or that Caltech was such a remarkable place cuz here was Pauling the most famous chemist in the world doing this pioneering, and here he taught the undergraduate courses for introductory chemistry, and he never stopped. And this totally also blew my father’s mind that he did this. That, as I understand it, he never stopped teaching the introductory until he finally, essentially retired, is that right?
*I don’t know. I’ll find out.
But as I understand this is what I was told by my father, and it totally blew his mind because he used this as a tack separation between under, what the undergraduate did and the professor of any should be out there going out for the largest grants and all that good stuff. My perception here may be wrong, but anyway that’s what I was told and taught. Pauling was world famous and not only did those pioneering incredible work but he also did all the, he did introductory courses right on.
Then Pauling sort of echoed into my life a little later on because I needed to somehow make sense out of chemistry and also I wanted to understand more of the physical ___ but I explain that, I was told he also taught the introductory courses and even after he had a Nobel Prize he still taught the introductory courses there at CalTech. I would be very interested to know if this is true, but this is what I was told. Then Pauling came out, I’m not quite sure, it seems like he came out with the general introductory chemistry book, may have been two volumes but it may, I’ve only got just that one very thick volume for introductory chemistry but it was aimed at __ audience of people who are into technical things, but are definitely at the introductory level in chemistry, and that was the book that I used totally. I ___ some other texts in chemistry and here this work that he did was so incredibly clearer and better and easier for me to understand.
So here later on after I heard all this stuff and I used to, and my father went back and completed his degree and did all that good stuff, and then like you said I go back through the campus there and later on when I actually worked there and so forth, I used to drop my father off because he still was __ with Pauling off and on from there. His books and other stuff and doing the ___ chemistry stuff, and also the fact I wanted to learn more about how physical world worked and I had a real interest ___.
*This is when you were a teenager?
Yeah, late teens.
*So the end of the 40s.
*Can you recall specific incidents with Pauling and anecdotes or, I’m just kind of curious what it was like to hang out with him, what it was like to learn from him?
Very gentle, very quiet, very funny, but I sometimes saw also in him, it wasn’t humor where he’d say I’m going to go be funny. But it was the kind of humor where he sees certain different ___ or something and then he’d make some comment about some and you realize you know 5 minutes later, 10 minutes later that hey that was a joke and a very funny joke and then you’d start laughing totally out of sync with what probably it seemed like it was appropriate. That’s the sort of thing I remember most about him, as a young kid growing up. He was very polite, very quiet, totally strange off the wall humor, at least for me. He’d catch me totally ___ and I wouldn’t even, you know, I wouldn’t even be sure that this was supposed to be funny, you know. It ___ on me that he would, he’d just, ___ pulling my leg ___ all at once. Without my even noticing it. Then I would catch up and break up. So that’s what I remember as a child. And the funny thing is my father never had that kind of humor. He was always kind of serious, and he never was a good teacher either, you know, ___.
Pauling and the Double Helix
*I was curious about Pauling and the double helix.
My memories are so happy and yet in some ways very sad. Boy.
*So one day Jim Barbieri told me that your father was working with Pauling at the time that he was trying to unravel DNA, trying to uncover the structure of DNA.
Oh yeah. If he had glanced at the x-ray diffraction under what was the name? and they won’t come to me. Mind boggling ___ for the two Nobel Prize winners that unraveled the structure of DNA, but it was a woman who did the crystallization work and the x-ray work. They looked at that time and there could only be one answer and the one that Pauling had guessed from bad ___ fuzzy stuff couldn’t be right. They were Crick? Watson and Crick?
*Yeah.
How’s that?
*And Rosalyn Francis was it, Rosalyn Franklin.
Yeah, but her x-rays of that stuff given that my father even glanced at them because that was his interpretation x-rays and he used to string stuff all over the office because he did all the time and structural work and he had seen one glance at her work it would have been bing like that. He would have write off to Pauling his best friend, and said you got it totally wrong, sorry, and of course Pauling was one of those people that wasn’t the least bit embarrassed about taking up ___ or something, you know. ___ for nobody else to go back. So he wasn’t the least bit shy about that either which was a neat thing about him. So if my father had seen one of those x-rays at a glance of 20 feet, ___ interpreting that stuff ___ really difficult he would have instantly known the answer to the structure of DNA and he would have understood the type of structure to make it so it could be replicated and how that could be absolutely fundamental to ___ and everything. So you see, maybe ___ handled that x-ray ___ about all the time they had. Just about.
*So your father and Pauling were racing with Watson and Crick?
Yeah. And ___ they nailed the whole ___ truth and primary structure of protein. What is it called? The alpha structure or something, I don’t know, it’s so far out of my vein that I just. But some very thing just popped out of my head and it may be totally garbage.
*The alpha and the beta folding?
Right. And ___ first two levels of folding, they were ___ worked itself out and there was just one niche for working the DNA structure and it was the terrible x-ray diffraction stuff ___ badly crystallized things were splitting them up.
*So how come Rosalyn Franklin was able to do it? Get such beautiful pictures.
It turned out , you normally don’t because you know they don’t ___ the brain ___ logically and systematically. I mean ___ Watson and Crick ___ four off the wall people at the time, nothing at all ___ let a sharp woman do her thing without bugging her or interfering with her and letting her follow her intuition and what she used to do to get some ___ crystals. You got to get absolutely perfect crystals first, often by some incredible ___ process ___ takes a lot of intuition ___ and you also have to deal with, at the same time, in a very systematic logical way, at the same time. A very hard combination of skills . And it was a damn woman that had the skills and they turned to us, and she did . The x-ray pattern of the ___ crystals ___ go from there was absolutely clear once the zippered structure ___ and also the zippered effect ___ was also implied. So that’s my ___.
*Yeah, I remember reading the Double Helix in college and hearing about Pauling working at Caltech and trying to get this going and it’s.
And the thing is if my father had seen that, because that was his specialty was x-ray interpretation, he could have seen the thing at 20 feet. Wow. Guess what?
*That close.
That close. No, about that close. [Pinches fingers together.]
*So I’m trying to remember when that was. Was that in the late 40s or the early 50s?
Early 50s I think but I may be totally off the wall on that. Cuz I totally garbage those things. Totally lose track of, hopefully when I read ___.
*Were you still in high school or were you at Carter Labs? Do you remember?
I think I was at Carter Labs. No, where was I? I can’t remember the date and so I can’t, don’t even try.
4.1.11 Richard Feynman
Yeah, end of the 40s, end of the 40s. 45 through 50 I was there.
The thing is, was that I had a ___ couldn’t go very far ___ without at least some physical so then I started digging around about physics, and I found it’s a three volume and I guess it was a fourth volume eventually added to it if my memory serves me, but again I might be totally off the wall on that one but I seem to distinctly remember three volume ___ and plus a thin fourth one tacked on some years later.
*Feynman’s Lectures on Physics.
Yeah, right.
*I have a copy at home.
Do I remember correctly, there finally were four? Three main ones ___.
*Yeah, with problem sets. Then Leighton was involved in that.
Leighton was a part of it, it was another author.
*Yes.
Always ___ always, that’s why I always wondered. I never saw a single paper that didn’t either involve Leighton or some other people, and almost always Leighton, always Bob Leighton, but the thing is the Feynman taught again as I understand it, he also still taught the introductory course to students there and continued to do so even after he had the Nobel Prize _ Again that was just, that wasn’t necessary, I mean it was really fun place, not like the University of California say at Berkeley or something. There was a huge difference between the full professors and so forth.
*Yeah, I believe he continued teaching the introductory course through the 60s but when I got to Caltech he was no longer teaching it.
That’s too bad.
*Yeah, so I didn’t get, I heard him lecture a few times but he didn’t actually teach the introductory courses.
Tom Apostol
But these are my understandings and those are the . And then the thing is, I needed some kind of math and I calculus books and we pretty much hated them. Then somebody had mentioned I really shouldn’t look at some ___ Apostol’s work in mathematics, introductory calculus course, first year calculus, and as I understand he ___ three-quarters of the students at Caltech can and then when I went around there it was, I found his notes before he published his book and he had apparently just finished a new thing of the fourth, third, I think they were in three chunks. I think it finally got bound into two volumes of calculus, but as I remember the preprints of that, were spread across three as I remember because I went there to get them and asked him if I could get the new one because I had heard that he was working on the new stuff and he came down and actually handed them to me in the office in the student place. It was crazy. So I got essentially a preview of the book that came out It was clearly __ complete and for the first time I really got a ___.
You have to realize that partly I’m a , partly I’m a biologist, I’m a weird kind of ecologist which people just weren’t so I also had some kind of sort of interdisciplinary. I mean how a body can use some of the, rise to the point of view of the superspect. And ___ I didn’t even have to add or subtract or do anything. I could just memorize most every problem which I ended up doing. I looked at every single problem in these books So that’s but there was a long history there at Caltech of doing ___ when absolutely nobody else was doing it. And the quality of the books was so wonderful, and the teaching was so wonderful, and it just sort of is a teaching that I can, it’s not, it just.
Carver Mead
*OK. Now you mentioned Carver Mead. Did you know Carver Mead or mostly through his writing?
You know ___ had profound effect upon me because of what they had done but came along enough later from the time I was getting my, first growing up and then getting my first __ of education in 50s and then going about and finishing up a formal education in the 60s so ___ integrated circuits so scale ___ forever, boy am I ___ that business I can see that that is going to ___ money and all of a sudden I’ve got to find some way because ___ so it kept influencing me that way, and then he came __ and things like the silicon ___ universe with people _ stuck together with rubber glue.
Every woman in the entire universe at this point in time would be employed trying to ___ first computers, the ones that even the ___ that was the last cut of ___ let lose control. They tried to make ___ cut and guess what? The guys that pioneered they couldn’t take ___ and yet that was all glued together with basically mechanical drawings and tons and tons of ___ to do the ___ photographic And yet somebody had to hold the whole at one time makes them ___ and figure out ___ layout logic ___ in small scale integration but ___ is trivial. Medium scale integration was easy. Large scale integration was hard, very hard, scale integration turned out to be impossible.
*And now they’re talking about 100 million transistors on a chip.
So Carver Mead ___ new thing with ___ to prevent totally different way of approaching the problem, a systematic way of approaching the problem. Do you realize how hard that would be from happening?
*Yeah.
So how do you ___ a person like that ___ every time you try to build a new company you try a new thing, you try a new ___ Carver Meade comes along and he uses . So what do I say about somebody like that? And yet he was totally out of the teaching thing or the learning thing. I’m not quite sure how much of a teacher he . I’ve never attended a lecture of his so and yet Pauling and Feynman ___ influenced my life the most of anybody else out there. So what do I say about people like ___ it seems like every time I turn around, he comes up with some new way of doing things that just blows me away.
*I was thinking about switching gears.
Pardon?
*I was thinking about switching gears and asking you about something totally different.
Well, before you do, I mean just, there are some books that I would like to show you because they were useful to me to help get some perspective on say Carver Mead’s sweep across the entire industry. And even though they’re ___ exponentially ___ the stuff that Carver Mead essentially predicted and did, and the way he did it. He just ___ so even though the book seemed like it would be terribly dated, I ___ that there are some books that were written by people ___ in sociology for example. I can’t think of his name. He’s the future ___.
Toffler and Sociology
*Toffler?
Toffler, thank you. Topfler’s name ___ but Toffler to me is one other person that’s helped me try to ___ and he ___ was able to get inside ___ to the point that say I could go back and read this ___ and still find it was basically right. So there are people, so that kind of quality is what I mean for some of the structure, it sounded like it should be terribly out of date and the field is changing ___ so many type where somebody from the outside has written about it. They were very good.
*Do you have books you want to show me in the other room?
Yeah, but not now. I just wanted to throw that out as another piece of something to be done.
*Sure, sure, cuz we can.
But also, and the thing is I wanted to pretty much stay out of ___ read a book, you know, fierce with the type of thing I’m ___ particularly trying to dig out ___ 40 years ago, 50 years ago, 60, or some of the stuff is 60 years.
*I understand.
But trying to pull out little things ___ 60 years ago, and certainly 50 years, so I have to be really careful to not garbage everything by reading something else. So that’s it.
Tesla
*Well Bland, I found a book that I thought you might be interested in or you might at least want to know that it exists.
__ That’s very intriguing because the Irish regarded him as being very short changed both in terms of history and in terms of what __ did for him. He really sucked and what happened, you know, it was basically not Edison __ system that became everybody’s thing. He was the only one that had the foresight to see that there should be alternating current and how to make devices for changing current __ current __ by way of transformer and all that good stuff. So as I remember, he didn’t get credit and he sure died in poverty at the end of his life.
History is very weird in the way it treats people. I would be, I keep talking __ things that fascinate. I thank you very much for that because it’s __ from a piece of my own history and my own view of things. My own suspicion is that he actually managed to create . But creating such unwieldy nonlinear systems for his high voltage, high frequency system that he was actually able to do some of the linear facts of bolt lightning but people had done it. But it’s never been a thing that people could really study.
It’s been only pieces of science that’s always remained on the fringe, and yet all of a sudden a huge chunk of things are beginning to drop into areas where either the study of very nonlinear(?) systems is becoming more popular or possible and all that energy and voltages up in the range where he was mapping before and hardly anybody in between them at all. So anyway, thanks.
*Sure. Yeah, I thought you’d be interested in that. Well, I wonder if we should take a break and give you a little chance to rest and then I come back later and we go to dinner.
Dyslexia
Dr. Fernald at UCLA couldn’t figure out why I had wild kinds of results on different kinds of IQ tests. I was just all over the map. If it was very word oriented, like a crossword puzzle, I did terrible on it. If it was mathematical, or even better, three-dimensional organization, then I could do very well. She did pioneering work with people that had dyslexia of various kinds and other reading and writing problems, that weren’t necessarily exactly dyslexic but nonetheless cripple reading and writing ability. I went there for an entire summer. I took some really intensive courses with her and her graduate students.
It turns out that was partly due to eye correction. I’d try to read for hours. I’d get really bad and then not so bad but slight astigmatism in both eyes. Correcting the astigmatism gave me reading glasses. By practicing a reading technique, I was able to pretty much get up from under that. I’ve had to practice Fernald’s methods the rest of my life. My retention and comprehension was very very high and that was the way I got through courses because my speed was very slow.
My writing just was never strong, my weakest skill. They could help some but I’ve always been there, I’ve always had to find some way, one way or another, to work my way around a large writing task. Never been good. That’s that little piece.
Now IBM has new upcoming applications of computers in society to translate speech into writing. And speak in your voice or another voice by changing the shape of the ring. And distinguish multiple voices at once. And disabled voices, such as Lou Gehrig’s disease (Steven Hawking). Steven Hawking has a totally different pattern of processing, he gradually evolved so he was able to communicate. But it’s radical you see systems processing at this moment in time. It still seemed to be better in writing with the problems I have with Huntington’s Chorea.
And I always had my entire life some funny kind of disability in the writing thing. It showed up in kindergarten. My kindergarten teachers didn’t even want me around. And then by first grade I guess there were some echoes that, even my Uncle Buddy had some problems and came to the same Jefferson Grammar School. So she had me sent to a school for retarded children at the beginning of first grade. So I started out my first grade for retarded children. And then they gave me an IQ test, an abbreviated IQ test— I got something like 135—so they gave me a second one and I got 154 or something like that.
So they sent me to the school for gifted children that was just north of Caltech. It was later closed because people got really unhappy about paying extra money on gifted children. It’s funny how the public is ready to put money for people that had writing or reading disabilities and other things like that, or disabled or anything, but for the gifted, no. So they yanked the plug on it while I was in about third grade. I’ve always had a very crazy mix of every extreme all the way through school. It’s always been that way.
I took the remedial courses for reading and writing and the reading one I was able to make some real progress with but the writing was a lifelong problem to me. Somebody at a UCLA clinic threw out a couple words to see if I could spell them and I couldn’t. He said, your whole problem is that you can’t spell and if you corrected that problem, all your writing disabilities would disappear.
So I went to this course that I got from McEwen. He made a whole career out of teaching impossible spelling to people that were terrible spellers. Apparently he always gives a test to find out where people are coming from. He always made a very subtle test in the first hour of the first day so people really couldn’t tell what was going on or why they were taking the test. Probably I was the worst speller of anybody there in the entire class. He included an interesting history of the English language, which intrigued me. He showed me ways of doing, tricks to remember numbers, and picture rhymes and all that jazz. In the end, he gave me an A or B for radical improvement. But one year later I couldn’t access it. It was like a piece of my brain was missing. Even the simplest child crossword puzzle I can’t solve. It’s basically a frustration.
Fortunately I kept my hearing, and I’ve kept my fine coordination of my cerebellum untouched, and I can smell. My color vision lets me make very fine distinctions. So there are lots of areas of my brain where no cell death seems to be occurring. But there are also pieces in the midbrain that constantly get screwed over by HD. It’s an ongoing process of learning and relating, and yet realizing that I can’t.
Here I ended up at the end of high school really having an ongoing problem with writing and reading dyslexia both.
The reading dyslexia wasn’t as severe. That was the time that I went to Dr. Shalol, the original pioneer in trying to help people in a systematic way. I still to this day find I have to keep convincing myself I can read more than one word at a time. I keep dropping back to where I’m saying reading simple words again __ and then I have to start thinking about the lines again, and grab in as much of a sentence as I can in a sweep. That was the first work I ever did to help my reading dyslexia.
But the writing dyslexia seemed to be much more embedded. Tricks would help a little bit, just within a very direct practice and then it would disappear again. And I couldn’t write again. I’ve always depended my entire life on somebody being able to write for me. Talk about a frustrating thing. Some resistors screwed the circuits, the wiring inside of me.
Feynman and Dyslexia
When in high school, I learned physics out of Feynman’s books. Feynman was my idol for that, just as Apostol was for math, and Pauling was for chemistry. Pauling, Apostol and Feynman were just my gods when I was growing up as a kid.
In some way biology didn’t overlap with anybody. The mathematics really didn’t overlap with anybody. My father came the closest to being a mathematician but his idea was of course to work through the Courant major theory. Except every time I picked it up, I couldn’t make zip of it. And yet I made it most of the way through, years later, most of the way through Apostol’s major theory. Totally different approach, totally different approach between Courant and Apostol. I still find it very hard, I still find it very hard. There was always this echo back for me to learn theory. Sometimes I found that it wasn’t all that much fun. Too much work and not enough fun. That was the down side, made me sad about it.
Feynman and I could talk about stuff because I loved his physics books at the very end of high school. I delayed college for a decade. I took courses there at Pasadena City College for years after the Second World War. This was almost at the very end of when Feynman stopped teaching his introductory course. I wanted to ask Feynman if he had the same kind of writing disability that I had, because I never saw a single piece of his own writing that wasn’t second-authored to somebody else. I almost reached the point of saying hey, I’ve always had this lifelong problem of writing and you never write directly. You’re the greatest actor, you’re the greatest drummer, you’re the greatest visualist I’ve ever seen in my life, but I’ve never seen you do a piece of writing directly. So it was always sort of a question with me. I never knew him well enough to ask him directly.
Ralph Leighton, son of Robert Leighton, co-authored several books with Feyneman, particularly his lectures. They were transcriptions of lectures. I’ve never seen him write anything, always transcriptions, voice, in one way or another. Incredible thinker and an incredible speaker. He was an individual thinker, pretty much.
I almost asked him a couple times in the hallway. “Hey, I have dyslexia. Do you have any ways around, or did you have similar problem?” I always found myself so embarrassed that I’d start, I can even remember crying after because it bothered me so much. Crying because here I stopped him in the hall to ask him this and I couldn’t do it. It was too personal. Way too personal. Personal to me and personal in my own views of him. So I never knew. I never asked him. Came close a couple of times but I never did. Just about nailed him in the hall a couple of times there at Caltech.
*Right, well some people do, yeah. I went to the bookstore and did some checking on names. We were talking about Leighton, about Robert Leighton. His son’s name was Ralph.
Ralph Leighton, great.
*Yeah. And the other thing was there were several books of Feyneman’s and they were all Feynman lectures.
With Bob, weren’t they? Or Ralph?
*With Ralph, but there were several other books at the bookstore. This was at Border’s Books. They had about half a dozen other books by Feynman but they were all identified as lectures so they were transcriptions of lectures.
So __ the question of whether he has ever written himself. I’ve never seen him written anything, always transcriptions, voice, in one way or another.
*Yeah, brilliant speaker.
Incredible thinker and an incredible speaker. I’ve always wondered if he had the same writing disability I have. I never knew him well enough to ask him directly. Bizarre sorts of twists and, __ I got. He also was an individual thinker, pretty much.
*Oh very much so.
But anyway, so that’s an interesting aside. So I was curious about that too.
*Yeah, that’s why I brought it up.
That’s what you actually found out when you did look.
*Yeah, I didn’t go into science citation index or you know, I just happened to be in a bookstore which had a good science section and found a number of books and there were no books with him as the author, as the obvious writing author. They all said lectures.
And it might very well be that he published in very __ and his own technology, his own people __.
*Yeah, that’s quite possible.
And did that all on his own.
*Yeah. And those may be very short papers too.
Anyway, thanks for checking that out for me because that was an open question I was curious about. So I managed to get through a number of things that seem to be crucial to try and make some progress on this and bring some of the worst problems and also some mention of my efforts and other people’s efforts ___.
4.2 Pranks
Pranks pranks.1-17
Altadena Sewer System pranks.1 Geology pranks.4 CMC Skunk Oil pranks.9 Red Phosphorous on the Ceiling at JPL pranks.15 Bonfires pranks.17
4.2.1 Pipe Bombs
Bland started really getting into science when he was 14-16. He and neighbor friends decided to start building pipe bombs that you just took and threw down in the street. They made this absolutely tremendous explosion and noise. He just thought it was neat as heck. They were over there doing that on the street behind us and I guess somebody called the police. There was a gate finally put in the back fence so I could go back and forth to my friends. Here come the cops in their blue uniforms. Bland was long since gone; he just melded into the background somewhere and disappeared. He got a pretty good scolding at that point and that all ceased to happen.
Altadena Sewer System
*I wanted to ask you about an incident that I heard about when I was a student at Caltech. It had to do with the sewer system in Altadena. Do you want to tell me about that? I don’t think there’s any danger in talking about it at this point.
Another first year chemistry student and I used to go around and try to figure out how we could build a bigger bomb, a bigger rocket, a bigger fancy display. We used to try to figure out the most interesting way to use the newest information that had just been taught in classes. There has to be some new and interesting material I just learned from Pauling this last week, OK? Pauling was still teaching at that time.
We saw a sewer gas explosion that had gone off in England somewhere. Natural gas had leaked into a sewer system and accumulated, and was ignited with some rather dramatic effects on the overlying road and street. We figured we’d each do the calculations so it wouldn’t be totally destroying the neighborhood by controlling the system. We wouldn’t hurt anybody, so it should be pretty much a free game.
They used carbide lamps in plants. I used to make a carbide cannon to scare people going by on bikes when I was about 5th or 6th grade. This great big huge cannon would fire a huge looking missile at some bicycle coming by with this horrible boom. It would go flop because even if it hit them, the way it was padded, it couldn’t hurt them. We got 100 pounds of calcium carbide from the hardware store, because it has different kinds of industrial uses.
We bought about a pound of liquid sodium metal, which is packed underneath the carbide with kerosene or some oil. And we pulled off a sewer cover in Altadena, one that we knew had lots of water running in it. We waited about half an hour, quite a while actually, and poured liquid sodium down the manhole and ran about a block away. It made quite a boom. It made such a boom they actually had to repave part of the street because of the cracks in it. Apparently, there was this kind of a whoosh boom so all the johns in the neighborhood tore up backward. The johns had these internal checks to keep them from being exposed to the gas from the regular sewers and these had relatively straight short blanks. You’ve got this kickback effect because of the oomph of the boom.
I understand a few people got quite an effect, a shower from the thing. Reverse shower from the toilet. All sorts of manhole covers had this incredible blue white flame come out of each of them. They were quite light for a while because it blew them off under the boom, and it was a pretty good mixture of oxygen and lithium. It was like acetylene torches, which can carve up metal. Talk about pyrotechnics.
We watched it. We were visiting with all the people to find out what happened. Whoa, what happened to your house? Crazy. We were innocent as could be, interviewing all the people to find out what happened. Just a couple curious kids.
*And nobody ever figured out who it was?
No, they just figured that it was like in England. Nobody saw the color of the flame. It would have been a total give away if they’d seen the color of the flame, but it caught everybody by surprise and by then the last flicker was gone a minute later. Boy it was spectacular when it was first erupting and first blowing out of the things though. It was like you’d turned on an acetylene torch and each manhole cover went in turn. The manhole covers were part of our theory so we wouldn’t do sme real harm to people. Those were our safety valves. It was more powerful than I expected, but still contained. It was a total surprise that the johns would erupt backwards.
*Now that was probably in the 50s? I heard about it in the 1970s. I remember telling you about it in Berkeley and then you started laughing and saying that that was you. Well it was one of those Caltech pranks that keeps getting told and retold.
4.2.2 Caltech Department Pranks
I used to work for the geology department, Mudd Hall. My boss Chester Stock was head of analysis work where we burned samples to see what was in the rock. This paleoecologist would figure out what the temperatures of the definition what’s in there from calcite oreginite ratios. I sent him a Ouija board with all the chemicals that we were analyzing appropriately labeled. It was a rectilinear graph with points and curves for plotting, printed on a dental dam that stretches. He could stretch it to fit his data and underlying theory of ancient sea temperatures. It gave him a totally dependable way to calculate his results. At that time, paleoecologists tried to figure out the ecology of ancient times. When you ground samples down to crystals, you often shifted your results a lot. There was always some pretty wide scatter on the results related to temperature.
This one professor loved to chase across the desert at about 100 miles an hour __ students and people, to gun the thing and do his trick peeling out. One time we jacked up the rear of his four-wheel jeep and put some spokes under the rear wheel. At this point nylon twine was available that was incredibly strong and small. We dyed it so it looks like concrete. We wrapped it around his rear wheel with the invisible spokes so it would stay on the spool. Then we strung this invisible cord up where he would actually be walking. This guy went out there and climbed into his vehicle. He was in this tremendous hurry at the last possible moment. He revved up the engine to back out, but he just stays right in place. And here is this monstrous looking piece of building coming around the full length of the hall between the two buildings, headed down to the parking lot. He saw that coming toward him, so he gave it even more gas. Guess what? He had choked it in reverse, thinking he was going to back away. By that time he had bailed out and he was lying on the ground quite convinced he was dead. It was a completely harmless box that we had done that with.
We sent the head of the biology department, George Beadle, a live rabbit. They were so deep into molecular biology that they didn’t know what a real live animal looked like. It was outrageously funny if you knew what was going on, but from outside you wouldn’t realize how funny it was. An outrageously good joke on the person.
Claremont College Skunk Oil
Claremont College was nearby and had a competition with Caltech in every kind of weird sport and game. Some of that got transferred to Harvey Mudd. There was a cannon that would be stolen back and forth between Harvey Mudd or Claremont and Caltech for about 10 years, through the 60s and early 70s.
Mudd decided that they could empty a dormitory by dumping a stink bomb in it. They created a really nasty conventional stink bomb you learned how to make in high school. They really did a pretty good job of getting everybody out of the building, it was very unpleasant.
I proposed to the group in chemistry to use skunk oil, mercaptan. It was just incredible how hard it was to get rid of that damn stuff. Pure mercaptan is an equal mixture of putrescine and cadaverine, exactly like a dead body. We got somebody to break in with some pass keys that we’d managed to get. We snuck over and dumped it into the air conditioning system for two buildings and emptied them in a way that you just can’t believe. We poured it right into the air conditioning for the whole building. You can believe the putrescine and cadaverine in the ventilating system of a large building has some interesting effects. They were out for a long time, because it was very hard to get out of. It has a high molecular weight.
Red Phosphorous on the Ceiling at JPL
+You were making little red phosphorus bombs that you were giving to.
It was introduced to my father, who said you can make that by just combining hydrogen crystals and potassium iodide and ammonia. So simple ingredients and it explodes but only on contact, makes a great big puff of purple smoke. So that used to be my favorite explosive to go blow things around at JPL with. I used to like to pack it in people’s locker lock and they would dry between hours and the kid would come out and shove their key in the lock.
Bonfires
We were poking fun at each other, an outrageously funny time.
You would muck around with the crossing lights and the traffic lights. Everybody ended up going at once and then nobody would go and so on. It was assumed that as a graduate student, you would go on to bigger and better things.
*It was a pretty tolerant place in that regard. When I was a student there, they used to have bonfires when we won a football game. Now these are not your ordinary bonfires. They were in the middle of an intersection the rare time we won a game. One year they put some chemicals in the fire that responded to water so when you poured water on it, it burned more. When they brought the hose and tried to put it out it got bigger and ended up destroying the asphalt underneath because there was so much heat.
*And then they asked the crowd to disperse and this one guy said, how can I disperse? I’m only one person. There’s no way one person can disperse unless they explode, so they arrested him because he was being funny. They arrested him for resisting arrest and not cooperating with an officer.