Jacob Aaron Barandes

Thank you Dean Colombo. President Bollinger, deans, faculty, friends, and family, it is an honor to address you today. I'd like to begin with a story.

In 1874, a 15-year-old immigrant from Serbia arrived in New York with five cents in his pocket. Several years later, he found himself at the steps of Columbia College as a newly admitted undergraduate. He went on to become one of our country's great inventors (with 34 patents to his name), served as an adviser to Woodrow Wilson, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography. His greatest achievement, the overload coil, made long-distance telephone calls possible. A member of Columbia's engineering faculty for over forty years, his life has inspired generations of Columbia students. His name was Michael Idvorsky Pupin, and in recognition of his lifelong dedication to science and to Columbia, our physics building now bears his name.

We are gathered here in a momentous year, the 250th anniversary of this institution. Over the past year, the Columbia Spectator, our daily student newspaper, has honored the achievements of Pupin and other "Columbians ahead of their time." Like Howard Dietz, class of 1917, who chose the Columbia lion as the fledgling MGM Studios logo, and Bennett Cerf, class of 1920, who decided that his new publishing company would just "publish a few books on the side at random," thereby founding Random House. From Alexander Hamilton to John Jay, from Richard Simon and Max Schuster to Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, from George Stephanopolous to Ben Stein, Art Garfunkel, Brian Dennehy, Lou Gehrig, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, Isaac Asimov, and Tony Kushner, Columbia's legacy includes some of the greatest minds in the history of our country and of our world.

As an aspiring physicist who has your undivided attention, I'd like to take this opportunity to mention the great contributions Columbia has made to physics throughout its history. The American Physical Society is the primary physics organization in our country today. Founded at a meeting of just 36 physicists at Columbia in 1899, the Society's stated mission was "to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics." Today it has over 43,000 members, and oversees the most important physics journal in the world, the Physical Review.

The graduate department of physics at Columbia granted its very first PhD to Robert Millikan in 1895; Millikan later won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that electric charge comes in elementary, indivisible units. In fact, in the hundred years since its founding, the Nobel Prize has been awarded to some 11 physicists for work done at Columbia.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, theoretical work by Tsung-Dao Lee and experimental work by Chien-Shiung Wu, both members of Columbia's faculty, led to the prediction and verification that the laws of physics would actually look different seen in a mirror. Lee went on to receive the Nobel Prize for his contributions, and Wu became the first woman to be elected president of the American Physical Society.

In 1951, Columbia physicist Charles Hard Townes had an idea for a device that could amplify microwaves by the stimulated emission of radiation. The result was the laser, and Townes was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery.

James Fletcher, class of 1979, became chief administrator at NASA and negotiated the creation of both the first Space Shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope. Launched in 1990, Hubble orbits above Earth's atmosphere and has taken pictures of galaxies at the very edge of the observable universe, a distance that would take light billions of years to travel. Hubble currently generates thousands of astrophysics research journal articles each year.

Lifelong Columbia physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi won the Nobel Prize in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance. His work led to the development of MRI, a noninvasive medical technology that allows doctors to see inside living patients. In his honor, Columbia's science departments founded the Rabi Scholars Program. The program provides funding and other research support to undergraduates with a passion for science. Researching leukemia, weighing the universe, smashing protons together, and studying endangered bird species in Bulgaria, Rabi scholars in our graduating class have participated in projects that cover the scientific spectrum, and they will no doubt help shape the future of our society.

At the same time, scientific investigations can have less benevolent effects. In 1939, the United States Navy awarded its first atomic energy grant to Columbia's physics department, and the infamous Manhattan Project was born. Begun at Columbia, it arrived at its intended result—the first nuclear fission chain reaction—at the University of Chicago. The minds behind the Manhattan Project, which included the renowned physicists Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, and Robert Oppenheimer, saw the technology of nuclear power as an exciting challenge to their intellectual curiosity. They rarely considered the possible consequences of their research, which opened the door to the possibility of global annihilation for the first time. Since that time, other scientific disciplines have made their own contributions to the growing world arsenal, from nuclear warheads to chemical and biological weapons.

As future scientists, writers, political leaders, lawyers, and doctors, it is therefore important for us to remember that we must temper the intellectual freedom that we have learned to enjoy with an awareness of the effect our work will have on the world. To this end, Columbia University has founded the Earth Institute, an interdisciplinary organization that brings together top minds and utilizes political and scientific means to address issues of global importance, such as disease, poverty, and environmental degradation.

Around the world, universities like ours are graduating bright, energetic, idealistic young minds. As we leave our campus and enter the world, we look forward to great opportunities as well as great challenges. I believe we, the students of Columbia College's class of 2004, who graduate on this the 250th anniversary of the founding of our alma mater, are uniquely prepared to make the future better for the generations to come. Let us all carry in our minds the legacy of our institution's past 250 years as we prepare to leave our mark on the next 250. Thank you and congratulations.