Welcome to Caltech's Streaming Theater page.

This site houses streaming video of many of the programs that were available to the Caltech community from 1999 to the present. Most of these events took place on campus in Beckman Auditorium, and feature Caltech faculty, students, or distinguished visiting speakers.

For browsing ease, the offerings have been sorted into three general categories.

• Science and Technology includes (among many other topics) the popular Watson Lecture Series and the Everhart graduate student lectures, as well as the informative "Earthquakes 101."
• Campus Life showcases campus events such as Caltech's annual commencement ceremonies and Mechanical Engineering 72 competitions.
• Society and Culture encompasses varied topics including documentary filmmaking, voting technology, national defense, and diversity in science education.

To view webcasts offered by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), please see their Events site. To view webcasts offered by the Spitzer Space Telescope and NASA TV, please see the News Room site.

To view these streams you will need to download Real Player. For help deciding which version of Real Player is best for your system, please see our help page.

Many Watson Lectures are available for purchase on DVD. To request a copy, fill out the DVD Order Form (PDF).

Recent additions:

	Commencement 2008 6/13/2008 [view videos] 126 minutes These tribal rites have a very long history. They go back to the ceremony of initiation for new university teachers in medieval Europe. It was then customary for students, after an appropriate apprenticeship to learning and the presentation of a thesis as their masterpiece, to be admitted to the Guild of Masters of Arts and granted the license to teach.
	Jay A. Labinger: Seminar Day 2008: Natural Gas Conversion: A Piece in the Energy Puzzle? 5/17/2008 [56k modem] 37 minutes The conversion of methane to liquid fuels or chemicals has been an active topic of both industrial and academic research in recent years, including a program at Caltech. Starting from some basic principles of chemistry, Jay A. Labinger, Faculty Associate in Chemistry and Administrator of the Beckman Institute, explores why this is a challenging problem, the rationale behind Caltech's approach to its solution, and how this technology might fit into a complex network of issues that includes resource utilization, energy security, and global warming.
	Hirosi Ooguri: Seminar Day 2008: Black Holes and the Fate of Determinism 5/17/2008 [56k modem] 42 minutes When Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes are not completely dark but emit thermal radiation by quantum effects and may evaporate in some cases, he seriously challenged causal determinism, which is a basic tenet of the physical sciences. Physicists' attempts to solve this puzzle have inspired important theoretical innovations toward the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Hirosi Ooguri, Fred Kavli Professor of Theoretical Physics, explains how superstring theory has met the challenge and uncovered surprising properties of quantum black holes.