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Sewing Machines & Flying Trips. Today, after eight years as president of prosperous (endowment $30 million) Caltech, Lee DuBridge is still a man who will happily spend an afternoon fixing an ailing sewing machine, and then fly off to Washington for a top-secret meeting of the Science Advisory Committee. He runs his campus much as he did the radiation lab, and nowhere is the open-door policy more faithfully followed. Though his days are filled to capacity, he seems always to have time for the unannounced visitor, the troubled student, or for a session of weighty talk punctuated by friendly jokes. But beyond Caltech and Washington, Lee DuBridge plays another role: that of the dedicated spokesman for scientific and engineering education at its best.
In the rapidly changing nature and role of science, that education carries an increasingly heavy burden. The physicist of 20 years ago, says DuBridge, would be lost in a modern laboratory. "Not only would he be unfamiliar with mesons and V-particles and bevatrons and cosmotrons, he would also be nonplussed by [such phrases as] security risk, Q-clear-ance, confidential, secret, top secret." More important, he would find that the old compartments of knowledge no longer have their old rigid meanings. At Caltech it is possible to find a top geologist, e.g., Harrison Brown, who has never taken a formal course in geology. It is not only possible, but standard operating procedure for the scholars of Caltech to invade each other's fields as if no walls had ever existed between them at all. "Nature," says Physicist Bacher, "is not physics or chemistry or biology. It is all three—and much more besides." As one alumnus put it to Scholar Hallett Smith: "When I was an undergraduate, I majored in biology. But, of course, Caltech's biology is really biochemistry. Now everybody knows that chemistry is only a branch of physics, but it took me until my senior year to realize that physics is a branch of philosophy."
That being the case, says DuBridge, it is all the more tragic that the goals of science are so little understood, that science is regarded as either in a mysterious category of its own or merely as a producer of bombs and security risks (having testified for his old friend J. Robert Oppenheimer, DuBridge is all too familiar with the trying ways of security). Apparently, says DuBridge, "it has become fashionable in some circles to say we have had 'too much science'; that 'science is the cause of most of the world's troubles' . . . You would think that the fate of the world rested on the outcome of some sort of race between scientists, on the one hand, and all the historians, philosophers, writers, economists, poets, preachers, and political and social scientists on the other, with the implication that if science wins, the human race will be blasted to oblivion."