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Ψ(r,θ,φ) = υ(r,θ) sin mφ
in a series of eigenfunctions corresponding to the z-component of angular momentum."
On the final exam in Astronomy 1, Andelin explained how he would "determine the internal motions and the variation of ionization in a planetary nebula." In Physical Chemistry 21c, he was asked to "describe carefully the resultant change in state which occurs when at the temperature T one faraday passes reversibly through the cell, Cu, CuSO4 (0.01 f), CuSO4 (0.0001f), Cu." In Mathematics 114a he had to prove Lagrange's identity "or complex numbers:
Meanwhile, he took his share of history, literature, economics, French and German, for right from the start Caltech insisted that students spend 25% of their time in the humanities, not only as undergraduates, but also through their fifth year. Characteristically, it refuses to dilute the humanities courses by turning history into —The Effect of Science on the 18th Century" or literature into "The Industrial Revolution and the Novel." Like every other division, the humanities under Elizabethan Scholar Hallett Smith is a place for purists.
Working on the Railroad. It is strange in a sense that Caltech should have become the place it has, for it emerged from an unlikely background. The nation's first technical education was an eminently practical affair in which science played an almost invisible part. It has been said that the first American engineering university was really the Erie Canal; the first school of railroad engineering, the B. & O. Railroad. Outside of West Point and Annapolis, even the regular technical schools were largely subservice stations for industry.
In 1910 the future Caltech was still little more than a progressive vocational training institute founded by Pasadena Philanthropist Amos Throop. It was not until the public schools took over that function themselves, that the institute's trustees began asking various scientists just what they should do with the place. What the country needed, replied Astronomer George Hale, was a first-rate scientific school in the West that would "choose a few things and do them well." Though enrollments plummeted from 600 to 30, the trustees took the advice. They invited Robert Millikan out full-time from the University of Chicago in 1921 ("Millikan," protested President Harry Pratt Judson of Chicago, "if you go way out to California ... it is the end of your scientific career"), accumulated a galaxy of names from Chemist Arthur A. Noyes and Nobel Biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan to Political Scientist William B. Munro. For 24 years, Millikan ruled as the genial autocrat and expert collector of talent. By the time young Lee Du-Bridge arrived on a National Research Council Fellowship in 1926. the spirit of modern Caltech had already been set.