Public Profile
Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, situated at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains and best known for the Rose Bowl, the Tournament of Roses Parade, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology. It is a city of some 138,000 people, roughly four hundred of whom, by local estimate, are capable of deriving the rest of it from scratch.
Pasadena’s civic identity rests on an unusual pairing: it is at once a city of exceptional ornamental beauty — Craftsman bungalows, jacaranda-lined avenues, an annual parade whose floats must be constructed entirely of plant material — and a city in which the largest employers are institutions devoted to establishing things from first principles. The two cultures coexist without much friction and occasionally merge. The Tournament of Roses float-construction rules, which specify that every visible surface be covered in flowers, seeds, bark or other organic matter, are enforced by volunteer judges and have been the subject of at least three formal appeals filed by physicists, all of them concerning the definition of “visible.”
The city takes its institutions personally. Caltech’s undergraduate prank tradition is treated in the local press as a civic amenity rather than a nuisance, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s mission timelines are followed in Pasadena much as playoff brackets are followed elsewhere. Residents will correct a visitor who says JPL is in Pasadena — it is in La Cañada Flintridge, a distinction Pasadena maintains with the weary precision of a city that has explained it many times and will explain it again.
The signature local complaint concerns the 210 freeway, which residents regard less as infrastructure than as a shared condition. It is where the city does its thinking. More than one published result is understood locally to have been obtained between the Lake Avenue and Hill Avenue exits.
Articles
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — Dr. Rolf Ekelund’s ledger of every problem solvable at a desk, which ends in 1930
Articles
- Physicist Who Refuses to Read Philosophy Has Spent Eleven Years Deriving It From First Principles, Arriving at 1785 — Asked whether he had considered simply reading Kant, Dr. Ruhl said that reading Kant would be assuming the conclusion.