On May 27, California Senator Adam Schiff visited Caltech for a tour that moves from the hardware of quantum computing to the philosophical puzzles of quantum mechanics. Schiff, joined by his wife Eve, toured Professor Manuel Endres’ lab, met with President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, and spoke with John Preskill about entanglement, hidden variables, many worlds, time travel, and what Feynman might have thought of AI-generated Feynman lectures. Schiff came to campus not as a passive dignitary, but as a self-described quantum enthusiast.
There is a specific kind of silence that lives inside high-achieving students. It is not the silence of a quiet library or a sleeping dorm room. It is the silence of a mind that has been running for so long, so loudly, that the noise has become indistinguishable from who you are.
Serving as Editor-in-Chief of The California Tech has meant learning that a newspaper is never simply present to itself. Each issue arrives as if final (laid out/proofed/printed/distributed), but it is also always provisional. A trace of arguments not fully resolved, conversations still unfolding, absences we could not quite make visible, and futures we did not yet know how to name.
Hi Tech readers! I’ve been very busy these past two weeks — nonstop lab work on weekends as I finished preparing for one beamtime, and am starting preparations for a second beamtime now! As a result, I did not have time to review any of the remaining restaurants in the SGV Food Passport yet. I will have more time in July, so I will try to swing by them then!
In Chen 100, the evening’s panel wasn’t your typical academic climate discussion. Sure, there were JPL scientists who operate Mars rovers and analyze biodiversity with terabytes of satellite data. But these researchers had something else in common: they’re also union organizers, tenant advocates, and community activists who’ve learned that solving climate change requires more than just better science.
On May 16, in Frautschi Hall, Katherine Vondy’s The Heat of the Sun’s Rays received a staged reading as part of MACH 33, Caltech’s festival of new science-driven plays. Two earlier glimpses of the play had already entered the campus conversation: on April 11, during festival auditions at TACIT House, and on April 21 — during Earth Week — when the Resnick Sustainability Center hosted a reading of a selection from the script.
