The best of the best.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here. OK, OK, so Caltech is not actually in New England ….

You would expect armies of white coated nerds running around on the way to clean rooms with multiple levels of security and AK armaments, wielded by 007 style villans, in what is arguably the greatest school of pure science and engineering on the planet. Far from it.

What you get is predominantly 1930s architecture housing some of the finest brains in the universe, all discreetly hidden away in largely unexceptional buildings. If Hollywood, just down the road, boasts of its accomplishments with glitz and bright lights, The California Institute of Technology keeps a very low profile by comparison.

Admission? Well, it’s largely fughedaboutit. You need a 4.0 GPA and 1600 on your SAT (well, used to, until SATs were suspended) just for your paperwork to make it through the door. And with Caltech closing in on 50 Nobel prizes in Chemistry and Physics (and one for the comically named ‘Peace’ prize) you can imagine this sort of brain power has been around quite a while, the first being awarded to Robert Millikan in 1923 for work on the photoelectric effect. Or something. (Millikan turned out to be a nut for eugenics, so is now persona non grata at the school. Not all Nobel prizes are created equal).

1930s architecture.

A lovely late summer day found my son Winston and I luxuriating in the dulcet tones of our guide, a long time friend who just happens to be a tenured professor at the school. I understood precisely 9.72% of what he said with my son maxing at some 31.45%. So follow up reading is strongly indicated and I now almost know what a polymerase chain reaction is. Or something.

Most science buildings at the great American schools flirt with ugly and if there’s the occasional outlier at Caltech it can be forgiven by the generally cohesive appearance of the campus. In this image my son, contemplating the complexities of gravitational waves, is following our tour guide. Those east coast losers at MIT actually also had something to do with these:

The occasional outlier.

And everywhere our splendid guide took us saw magic going on. In one area there were screens documenting in real time tremors across the earth, the area of focus switchable at will. A glance at the adjacent map of seismically active areas confirmed that Caltech is actually doomed and that my Scottsdale, Arizona home will soon be beach property. Have a big quake anywhere and the film crews line up with their broadcast vans, plugging in to the provided receptacles to advise Hung So Low that, yes, his former shack in Beijing is now so much rubble. Ah, science.

Even geniuses with no social skills need solitude for relaxation and the beautiful grounds of the campus provide plenty of opportunities for that increasingly rare experience.

Solitude.

Reading rooms are, as you might expect, everywhere, and if the British walnut and oak model is any guide, Caltech has adopted its forbears’ tastes with aplomb.

One of many reading rooms.

And everything is an experiment. This innocuous lily pond is actually used to demonstrate how methane is created by these plants with annual late night illustrations of the combustible power of the gas when ignited. As our guide told us, “Caltech students love to burn up things”. The campus provides for 900 undergraduate and 1400 doctoral students, and their aggregate IQ exceeds that of all but a small handful of nations. And there are so many faculty members that you cannot go a block without encountering a dozen. Add in a generous ‘prank’ budget and you have a combustible mix. Or something.

Explosive lily pond.

With an endowment of $4.6 billion for just 2300 students money is no object here and driving around it seems that the school owns most of the buildings in Pasadena. Come here as a visiting prof and you get splendid housing, perfect weather and the thrilling prospect of the Big One which will wipe everything out. Just avoid the freeways if you hate parking lots.

A beautiful place for your child genius.

Everything is an experiment.

Images snapped using an iPhone 12 Pro Max, much of whose tech content probably originated here.