ABSTRACT
Fritz Zwicky (Figure 6.1) is the best proof of the truth that great discoveries that change science and our lives require true Renaissance scholars and global men, or simply successful engineers, a concept we introduced in Section 3.2. Zwicky was born (1898) in Bulgaria to a Swiss father and a Czech mother. He spent his first 6 formative years in Bulgaria and the next 21 years in Switzerland. In 1925, he moved to the United States to work at Caltech, California. As a result, he lived in three different cultures and had to understand and accept them, and he spoke at least three languages fluently. Also, his academic education was exceptionally broad: He studied engineering, mathematics, and experimental physics at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. Therefore, his understanding of science was truly interdisciplinary, if not transdisciplinary.
