Pasadena Is One of the Great Science Cities on Earth
Pasadena is known for the Rose Bowl, but it’s also home to Caltech, JPL, Carnegie Observatories and the Planetary Society. Here’s how a pleasant Southern California suburb became a science powerhouse.
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Yeah, yeah, you know the Rose Bowl.
But Pasadena is also one of the great science towns on the planet. Behind the Craftsman houses and the tree-lined streets, there’s a startling amount of brainpower. Ask Einstein.
How did a pleasant suburb at the foot of the San Gabriels end up like this? Part of it is the weather. Clear skies were great for astronomers, and the mild climate made it easy to lure scientists from back East. But a lot of it came from World War II. Caltech was already here, skilled workers poured into Southern California, and the region became the center of the American aircraft industry, with Hughes, Douglas, Lockheed and North American Aviation all nearby. By the end of the war, 60 to 70 percent of the U.S. aerospace industry was in Southern California.
Planetary Society Headquarters in Pasadena (Erik Olsen)
Then there are the people. Richard Feynman, who won a Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics and was probably the most entertaining physicist who ever lived, taught at Caltech for decades.
Theodore von Kármán, a Hungarian-American engineer, did foundational work on how air flows around objects at supersonic speeds. His name is on the Kármán vortex street, the swirling pattern that forms when air or water flows past something round, which you can see in clouds downwind of islands. He also helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Cal Tech (Erik Olsen)
Albert Einstein spent three winters at Caltech, from 1931 to 1933, lecturing and working with the physicists there.
Albert Einstein in Pasadena (CalTech Archives)
Caltech is the core of it all. It’s small, but it’s one of the best science and engineering schools in the world, and dozens of Nobel Prize winners have worked or studied there.
Up the road is JPL, which Caltech runs for NASA. Technically it’s in La Cañada Flintridge, but it has a Pasadena address. JPL is the country’s main center for robotic exploration of the solar system. It built the Mars rovers, the Juno spacecraft at Jupiter and the Voyager probes, now beyond the edge of the solar system.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Erik Olsen)
The Carnegie Observatories have been headquartered in Pasadena since the early 1900s. They run some of the world’s big telescopes and do major work in cosmology and astrophysics.
Jupiter as captured by NASA JPL’s Juno spacecraft (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/David Marriott)
In the mountains above town is Mt. Wilson Observatory, founded by George Ellery Hale. Its 60-inch telescope and 100-inch Hooker telescope were the most powerful in the world in the early 20th century, and the Hooker is where Edwin Hubble found that the universe is expanding. (See our story.)
The Planetary Society is here too. Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman started it in 1980 to get the public excited about space exploration and the search for life elsewhere, and it’s still going strong.
Mt. Wilson Observatory (Erik Olsen)
And there’s a whole private-sector scene. Pasadena is full of tech companies and startups, many of them spun out of Caltech and JPL. Idealab, the startup incubator Bill Gross founded in 1996, has launched companies in everything from energy to the internet. And there’s a surprising number of robotics companies, like Honeybee Robotics, which builds hardware for space missions. (We’ll do a separate story on those someday.)
So the next time you’re in town for the Rose Parade, look up the hill toward JPL. Some of the people who worked there built machines that are now driving on Mars and flying out of the solar system.
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