A Mile Apart, A Century Together

On a February evening at The Huntington, Founders’ Day began by looking a short distance away—to the California Institute of Technology. 

The guest was Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, a condensed-matter physicist who has led the institute since 2014 and will step down at the end of the academic year to return to laboratory research. 

“On Founders’ Day, it couldn’t be more fitting to look down the street a few blocks and tell the story of how our two institutions began—and how they can continue to guide us in the future,” said Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence. 

She turned to the early 20th century. An astronomer arrived in Pasadena looking for a place to see the stars and, finding none, built Mount Wilson Observatory. Within a generation that stargazer, George Ellery Hale, had helped shape Caltech and persuaded his friend Henry E. Huntington to turn a private estate into a public research institution—on the premise that science, history, literature, and art should grow together rather than apart. 

Lawrence then introduced Rosenbaum as “a scientist who reads novels and poetry,” recalling a dinner he once opened by quoting W. B. Yeats. “You could say he had me at the first line.” 

Rosenbaum responded with Octavia E. Butler: “‘There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns’—so that’s how I’m thinking about tonight.” 

Observed annually in honor of Henry E. and Arabella Huntington, Founders’ Day returns to a founding question: what an institution created for knowledge owes the public that sustains it. 

A Shared Origin 

Today, the campuses sit about 1.1 miles apart — a distance students and faculty routinely cross for classes, research, and conversation. Rosenbaum noted that Hale imagined Caltech science, Mount Wilson observation, and “history and literature” at The Huntington working within a single intellectual community. 

Rosenbaum described the partnership as depending less on formal programs than on people comfortably moving between different kinds of knowledge. 

“The kinds of people that we attract to these joint programs are able to walk back and forth between those worlds, use those kinds of insights to enrich their studies,” he said. “And I think that’s the power of what we’re talking about.” 

Rosenbaum also pointed to the routine movement between campuses: 

“Our students come here [to The Huntington]. We have people from The Huntington coming and teaching at Caltech. And I think it enriches both our institutions in remarkable ways.” 

Over time, the movement has taken different forms. Since 2014, the Caltech–Huntington Humanities Collaborations initiative has organized multiyear research groups around shared questions. A Mellon-funded Program in Visual Culture (2019–24) created undergraduate courses at Caltech using materials from The Huntington while expanding digitization and public programming at the Library. 

More recently, the Eleanor Searle Postdoctoral Instructor program supported by the WHH Foundation has placed an early-career historian at both institutions. The current fellow, Cristiano Zanetti, teaches undergraduates at Caltech and conducts research at The Huntington using engineering manuscripts from the Medici court in Florence during the astronomer Galileo’s lifetime. 

The Evidence of Objects 

On Founders’ Day, the conversation returned repeatedly to physical records. Astronomical observations, anatomical illustrations, and literary manuscripts preserve knowledge not as polished conclusions but as work underway—in the form of arguments crossed out, diagrams revised, and competing explanations visible on the same page. 

Earlier that afternoon, Rosenbaum visited the Library vault with Dibner Senior Curator Daniel Lewis. The Caltech president paused over Hale’s copy of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger) with its revolutionary, telescopic sketches of the moon’s surface, and over early printed editions of Euclid’s Elements. Nearby lay Henry David Thoreau’s handwritten drafts of Walden, or, Life in the Woods, and a Gutenberg Bible—one of twelve surviving copies printed on vellum. 

“I think one of the special aspects of Caltech is it’s very idealistic about the creation of knowledge,” Rosenbaum said. “We do believe in … understanding primary sources and not just reading summaries of what somebody has discovered or what their ideas are, but reading the original portions. I think we share that [with] the humanities.” 

Lawrence connected that idea to the experience of handling rare materials directly: that encountering an original object reveals the thinking behind it—not only conclusions, but hesitation, revision, and effort—something easily flattened when knowledge is encountered only in reproduction. 

At Caltech, Rosenbaum continued, students are trained to interrogate original materials rather than rely on interpretation alone—a practice that links laboratory work to archival reading. The scientist examining data and the scholar tracing marginalia follow a similar discipline: test, revise, and seek coherence. 

The Library holds such annotated records across centuries, from Ptolemy and Vesalius to Darwin and Hubble, and these books and documents continue to function as teaching tools. “Beautiful Science,” a longstanding Library exhibition, drew from these collections, and a new permanent history of science exhibition is in preparation for 2029. Galileo’s

Lawrence reminded Rosenbaum of something he had said during his 2014 inauguration—that the arts provide an “elasticity of thought” necessary for problems that resist existing frameworks—and asked whether he still believed this. 

He did. 

Raised by European parents, drawn to science during the Apollo era but equally devoted to literature and history, Rosenbaum described an education shaped by breadth. He recalled a moment during his career at the University of Chicago when he sat on a plane next to the university’s president, a musicologist, who was reading Science magazine while Rosenbaum himself was reading The New Yorker. 

“This captures exactly what we should be doing,” Rosenbaum said. 

Lawrence asked how that sensibility helps students navigate a world defined by artificial intelligence, climate change, and geopolitical strain. 

“… if you don’t understand that you have to contemplate what history teaches you to be able to grapple with what’s going on now, whether, you know, it be legal, ethical, moral, and if you don’t have the release and the education that comes from great literature, I think you’re at a huge disadvantage in terms of functioning in and contributing to society,” Rosenbaum said. 

The difficulty, he suggested, is interpretation: discovery advancing faster than societies decide how to live with it. 

“I personally don’t believe the robots are going to take over,” he said, drawing laughter. 
 
“That’s heartening to hear you say that,” Lawrence replied. 

The humor gave way to discussion of risk. Rosenbaum pointed to AI-enabled warfare, surveillance technologies, and quantum computing’s implications for encryption—developments that cannot simply be stopped. He questioned how to establish guardrails before consequences dictate them, citing the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, where scientists gathered to define boundaries in advance of regulation, as an “effective model.”

An audience question shifted the discussion from ideas to geography: how institutions built for global research remain accountable to the city around them. 

Rosenbaum answered concretely. Caltech students tutor in nearby schools. After regional fires, institute laboratories tested soil and water for contamination. The university is planning an innovation center intended to keep new companies—and their jobs—in Pasadena. 

Lawrence described a parallel responsibility at The Huntington: science education for local elementary students, expanding digital access to the collections, and widening entry without narrowing scholarship. 

Rosenbaum framed the relationship with The Huntington as reciprocal: the stronger the surrounding community, the stronger the institutions within it. 

For much of the evening, the discussion had traced how earlier generations understood nature and knowledge. Lawrence then pointed to work concerned with what comes next. The Huntington participates in international efforts addressing the illegal plant trade, ethical sourcing of botanical material, and long-term conservation of species through cryopreservation—research where historical understanding informs future decisions. 

“We’ll leave that as something ongoing,” she said, “because we promised not just to talk about the past, but to talk about the future.” 

The evening ended without resolution, only continuation. A century later, The Huntington and Caltech’s collaboration advances much as it began: people moving between places and ideas. 

Watch the full recording of Presidents Karen R. Lawrence and Thomas F. Rosenbaum here.