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Ah, yes. But Berkeley has changed a lot, especially between Feyerabend and BSD days. The only reason I could partake of both was because my kid went there and brought home the BSD stuff.
This reminds me, the real education at Berkeley was always with and among other students and all their auxiliary groups (politics, science, art, lit, phil, soc, law, etc). That's were I learn the most. (And it was great having a kid who brought that stuff home, twenty something years later.) Some of that student tradition was still working in the early 90s. That's were my kid picked up the comp sci stuff, which he never would have been exposed to as a chem major. Some of his friends were computer geeks running the student network system for the campus.
But the real, that's the most critical learning, goes on in the labs attached to faculty. The brief exposure I had (part time temporary job in two labs--corn genetics and ion membrane channels) gave me an insight into how to build science and scientists.
At Berkeley the lab `culture' was fabulous, exciting, fun, and pushed everybody to their limit and beyond. It was collaborative and competitive in a great balance. I just wish I had the background to participate in some form beyond the low grade job of bibliographical research, and quick summaries on current publications for a post-doc who worked in these labs. I used to wish I was a twenty-something bio-science hot-shot, and not some interesting but weird bald guy who sort of worked there.
My recent readings on the Manhattan Project reminded me that Berkeley's labs in nuclear physics and chemistry in that era were like that and must have set the `culture' during the cold war 50s, and it became institutionalized. My limited dealings with the old Biophysics labs had the same feel. I also used to visit a rock climbing friend in his post-doc physics lab. He experimented on different ways to amplify the micro-resistances and voltage changes in super-cooled semi-conductors used in receiving CMB.
And then there were various contacts with the Math dept. Two math professors at UCB are disabled and use wheelchairs. Guess who was their favor wheelchair mechanic? One day I went on a random rift on number theory to the number theory guy and we had a great time as he corrected me and re-steered my thoughts onto the right path. They were as nutty as I was. It was great fun. Hell I didn't know what I was talking about but it didn't matter. The other guy was into probability theory, but that is something I have a very limited interest in. But he was also interested in mathematical physics, so we could speculate about gravitation which was something I wanted to know more about...
I could tell these guys were used to this kind of totally open ended no holds barred crazy math talk among themselves. They were dying to teach somebody, just about anybody, even their wheelchair mechanic, what they knew. For some reason their teaching assignments never gave them the chance to unwind. It was like the old days when I would argue with other students about literature, art and politics.
In my imaginary mind, those kinds of experiences were (hopefully still are) the heart of Berkeley.
So Ravi, with luck and a kind of persistent and open interest you would have had a great time. Sure you might have flunked out or pissed off your thesis adviser or threatened the turf of some unknown power somewhere in the great hierarchy and risked it all---but so what? What is an education worth, if you don't make enemies forever?
The deepest problem with Berkeley is that the administration, for example the oversight of research, grants, and contracts is a separate culture---a culture with priorities that are completely disconnected from its overseen minions---not at all unlike the Manhattan Project under General Groves...the other culture from the cold war.
Well, never mind. As a valued team member of some nebulous backwater research on corn mutations it was essential that I have an LBL DOE security ID complete with dosimeter badge so I could use the Cobalt-60 source of the United States of America to blast corn seedling DNA into oblivion---and by God Almighty, I relished the patriotic duty before me---there in a concrete labyrinth arranged so that should the worst happen, the radiation could not get around the angles of concrete that surround me. I felt safe until I looked at the plexiglas fixtures I was about to set up. They were extremely yellow---the effect of high gamma radiation. The air was stale, warm, strange, ugly. It gave me the creeps. But hell, this was the belly of beast, the very epicenter of thermonuclear war, laid bare for peace, prosperity, and the benefit of all humanity. I did my duty... The corn seedlings died a meaningless death as they should.
Bottom line? Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell suck my dick.
``I guess more obvious one would be IAS/Princeton in the Einstein-Godel period. von who??''
John von Neumann. Inventor of just about everything important in the 20thC. Should have been at Berkeley. Died of leukemia in 1957, a good twenty years before his time. A real sucker for ivy league prestige...
CG
ps. Yes, I've been drinking.