The History of the Caltech Football Team

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The 19, I don't know what it is, 43 Caltech football team is in the collegiate sports hall of fame. During the war, a whole bunch of army soldiers who had been training at Stanford or something like that were moved to Caltech and they wanted to play football. So they hurriedly put together a schedule which consisted of two games against the University of Redlands and one game each against USC and UCLA JV teams. And so these soldiers destroyed their competitors by like in four games, the total score was like 230 to zero. That such a showman show of bad sportsmanship got them into the NCAA Hall of Fame for being one of the best football teams of all time

Science costs money. And for a brief, glorious period between the start of the Manhattan Project in 1939 and the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, physics was awash in it, largely sustained by the Cold War. Things are now different, as physics — and science more broadly — has entered a funding crunch. David Kaiser, who is both a working physicist and an historian of science, talks with me about the fraught relationship between scientists and their funding sources throughout history, from Galileo and his patrons to the current rise of private foundations. It’s an interesting listen for anyone who wonders about the messy reality of how science gets done.

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David Kaiser received a Ph.D. in physics, and a separate Ph.D. in history of science, from Harvard University. He is currently Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Professor of Physics in MIT’s Department of Physics, and also Associate Dean for Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) in MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing. He has been awarded the Davis Prize and Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society, was named a Mac Vicar Faculty Fellow for undergraduate teaching at MIT, and received the Perkins Award for excellence in mentoring graduate students. His book Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World is available April 3.

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