<p>Let’s remember that all I said initially was that you’re still far more likely to bump into a Nobel laureate faculty member here than anywhere else; the number of Nobelists per student is highest here.</p>
<p>But since we’re doing this, I disagree strongly that the glory days of Caltech were solely before the war. The output of physicists in the 60’s and 70’s, when Feynman was here, was just phenomenal. Since physics is widely-acknowledged to be a “late” Nobel – most winners get it quite late in life – most of those guys aren’t due yet; but they will be. I can almost guarantee a wave of undergraduate and grad school alumns winning the physics Nobel in the next decade or so.</p>
<p>One of the things to remember is that Caltech’s sample sizes are tiny, so a smaller number of undergrad postwar Nobelists doesn’t necessarily mean anything when the undergraduate population is so tiny; the law of large numbers hasn’t kicked in yet. It could just be a statistical blip, which another decade will remedy, as I predict above.</p>