A few months ago I was up in LA at sunrise and then had a few hours to kill before my next stop. So I drove over to Caltech to see if they had finished refurbishing the pond in front of the Library Formerly Named After Robert A. Millikan.
And they had! So I took some bright, morning pictures and then launched the drone to take some pictures from up high. This is a case where I'd say the ground level picture is quite a bit better.
In case you're wondering, Robert Millikan may have been a Nobel Prize winner and the man who put Caltech on the map, but he was also affiliated with the eugenics movement in the 20s and 30s. For that reason, his name was removed from the main library earlier this year and it was renamed Caltech Hall, which is sort of an odd name for a library, don't you think? My old dorm, Ruddock House, also got a new name for the same reason, and is now Grant D. Venerable House. It's hard to argue with the logic of naming the house after Caltech's first Black graduate—who was also a writer for the California Tech—but "Venerable House" sure is going to be the butt of hundreds of obvious jokes. Oh well.
yep. ground level works much better.
" 'Venerable House' sure is going to be the butt of hundreds of obvious jokes."
That's a shame, isn't it?
(1) The jokes are not obvious to me, and I'm guessing they wouldn't be funny.
(2) Grant Venerable's son, Grant D. Venerable II should get to enjoy that recognition of his father. Grant II has also distinguished himself in the world of academe, and it's a family to be proud of.
The building formerly known as Millikan Library hasn't been the main campus library for quite a while. There are some collections still there, but most of the library holdings are in other buildings. "Caltech Hall" is mostly administrative offices now.
Looks kind of like my bass speaker on the stereo
Interesting article on nuclear physicist Chien-Shiung Wu in the Washington Post, written by her grand-daughter, Jada Yuan. Chien-Shiung Wu preformed the first experimental confirmation of the non-conservation of parity, a controversial theory that had been put forward by Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang. Lee and Yang won the Nobel prize, Wu (perhaps because she was a woman, perhaps because she was an experimentalist, perhaps because she was a bit slow to publish) missed out. The article is full of interesting tidbits. In WWII when Enrico Fermi was frustrated that the first plutonium reactor at Hanford kept shutting down, he spoke with Emilio Segre who told him to talk to Madam Wu. He did and Madam Wu correctly diagnosed the problem as Xe-135 poisoning. The article includes a picture of Chien-Shiung Wu and Yuan Chia-Liu on their wedding day at the Pasadena home of Robert Millikan.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/12/13/chien-shiung-wu-biography-physics-grandmother/