The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes of technology in the United States that are strongly devoted to the instruction of pure and applied sciences. Due to its history of technological innovation, Caltech has been considered to be one of the world's most prestigious universities.
Ivar Giaever is a Norwegian-American engineer and physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson "for their discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids". Giaever's share of the prize was specifically for his "experimental discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in superconductors".
Burton Richter was an American physicist. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974, alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) team led by Samuel Ting for which they won Nobel Prize for Physics in 1976. This discovery was part of the November Revolution of particle physics. He was the SLAC director from 1984 to 1999.
William Alfred Fowler (August 9, 1911 – March 14, 1995) was an American nuclear physicist, later astrophysicist, who, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is known for his theoretical and experimental research into nuclear reactions within stars and the energy elements produced in the process and was one of the authors of the influential B2FH paper.
John Henry Schwarz is an American theoretical physicist. Along with Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielsen, Joël Scherk, Gabriele Veneziano, Michael Green, and Leonard Susskind, he is regarded as one of the founders of string theory.
Mark Brian Wise is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist. He has conducted research in elementary particle physics and cosmology. He is best known for his role in the development of heavy quark effective theory (HQET), a mathematical formalism that has allowed physicists to make predictions about otherwise intractable problems in the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. He has also published work on mathematical models for finance and risk assessment.
David Louis Goodstein was an American physicist and educator. From 1988 to 2007 he served as Vice-provost of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he was also a professor of physics and applied physics, as well as the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor.
JASON is an independent group of elite scientists that advises the United States government on matters of science and technology, mostly of a sensitive nature. The group was created in the aftermath of the Sputnik launch as a way to reinvigorate the idea of having the nation's preeminent scientists help the government with defense problems, similar to the way that scientists helped in World War II but with a new and younger generation. It was established in 1960 and has somewhere between 30 and 60 members. Its work first gained public notoriety as the source of the Vietnam War's McNamara Line electronic barrier. Although most of its research is military-focused, JASON also produced early work on the science of global warming and acid rain. Current unclassified research interests include health informatics, cyberwarfare, and renewable energy.
Maria Spiropulu is a Greek particle physicist. She is the Shang-Yi Ch'en Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology.
Raymond Thomas Pierrehumbert is the Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. Previously, he was Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He was a lead author on the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC and a co-author of the National Research Council report on abrupt climate change.
The MIT Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) is the hub of theoretical nuclear physics, particle physics, and quantum information research at MIT. It is a subdivision of MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Department of Physics.
Raymond Lee Orbach is an American physicist and administrator. He served as Under Secretary for Science in the United States Department of Energy from 2006 until 2009, when he was replaced by Steven E. Koonin. Until his resignation in December 2012, Orbach was director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Orbach continues to do research as a tenured professor in the Cockrell Family Dean's Chair for Engineering Excellence at the University of Texas.
Steven Chu is an American physicist and former government official. He is a Nobel laureate and was the 12th U.S. secretary of energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.
Steven C. Frautschi is an American theoretical physicist, currently professor of physics emeritus at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He is known principally for his contributions to the bootstrap theory of the strong interactions and for his contribution to the resolution of the infrared divergence problem in quantum electrodynamics (QED). He was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015 for "contributions to the introduction of Regge poles into particle physics, elucidation of the role of infrared photons in high energy scattering, and for seminal contributions to undergraduate physics education".
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science is a book written by American science author Natalie Angier.
John Francis Clauser is an American theoretical and experimental physicist known for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics, in particular the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality. Clauser was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science".
Hugh David Politzer is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics.
Novim is a non-profit group at the University of California, Santa Barbara that organizes teams for objective scientific study of global issues and identification options for addressing the concerns, based upon a collaborative problem-solving approach used in the field of physics.
Ernest Jeffrey Moniz, GCIH is an American nuclear physicist and former government official. From May 2013 to January 2017, he served as the 13th United States secretary of energy in the Obama administration. Prior to this, Moniz served as associate director for science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and undersecretary of energy from 1997 to 2001 during the Clinton administration. He is currently the co-chair and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), as well as president and CEO of the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI), a nonprofit organization working on climate and energy technology issues, which he co-founded in 2017.
Glennys Reynolds Farrar is a professor of physics at New York University who specializes in particle physics, cosmology and the study of dark matter. She has made several significant contributions to the fields of hadron and dark matter phenomenology, helping to develop the working "Standard Cosmological Model". Farrar is a figure in developing many modern particle-search techniques, achieving numerous recognitions including as the Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences and Sloan Fellowship. She holds a faculty position at New York University (NYU), where she has been since 1998.
