Cal Tech is a truely tree laden place with Jacaran...

Cal Tech is a truely tree laden place with Jacaranda's and some decent (actually brilliant works of art). This prestigious university is under the careful direction of Dr. Thomas A. Rosenbaum, Physicist.

I attended a lecture give by Don Pettit titled "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation." Making my way through the campus---as the orange light was fleeting--- for the eight o'clock lecture held in a building that looked like a "white wedding cake" as described by Michael Brundage (Cal Tech Graduate and Principal Data Scientist at Microsoft ).

To me the building looked like "Braut Kuchen mit Mozartkugeln" which is German for: Bride cake with chocolate covered marizipan balls (an Austrian specialty). Dr. Pettit had us wide eyed and forgetting about our stashed Iphones with his Power Point presentation on Zero-G Plasma Circles and the strange effect of rubbing a knitting needle with fur...can you guess what happened?

He stressed the varied ways one may view a "Space Photo" and showed us live examples of how linear thinking does not always apply. In space one may want to use "Off the Planet" and "far out of the box" thinking. For problems in space he says there are "no answers at the back of the book" and must be solved in real time.

Dr. Pettit pronounced cupola most uniquely as (cup-o-la) and kept interest for over an hour on his amazing adventures in space. Delightful! Funded by the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS). Well organized and helpful staff on site sporting smiles and water. Truly enjoyed the lecture and campus.

Indy's notable mention: Einstein lived on this campus for three winters, initially in a bungalow located at 707 South Oakland Avenue.

Update in progress post Feynman 100. Auditorium packed in honor of a Nobel Prize winning physicist that did not sound like a machine and engaged many into a simple understanding of universe with common paradigms. Speakers of note, Dr. T.F. Rosenbaum, Leonard Susskind and Robert Dijkgraaf (Die Leuven so hell und wie ein roboter nicht).