Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–87
Remington bronzes but not much else. Now, the obvious thing when somebody like Agee comes
is, “Why don’t we sell some of the Remingtons and get a more balanced collection?” And they
went crazy. They could not deal with that. They had a hard time accepting the idea that they had
this wonderful collection, but it was just one thing. It was just one bronze after another of
cowboys and Indians. I love Remingtons, but when you have a room full of them, they all sort of
look alike.
Universities can be that way. They will have one strong group and they can’t get around
it. They don’t realize that unless that strong group gets weaker somehow—or smaller anyway, it
doesn’t necessarily have to get weaker—the rest of the department’s not going to change. You
find that at universities that have, by one piece of luck, hired a star, or a person who became a
star, and are then unable to get past it—to grow anything else. Caltech could have almost done
that in physics.
ASPATURIAN: What do you think saved it?
TOMBRELLO: I’d love to think it was my staffing committee.
ASPATURIAN: Which was initiated when, again?
TOMBRELLO: 1986. There was a general agreement that we should do something, even before
that, but we never seemed to get anywhere. Gell-Mann always called solid-state physics
“squalid-state physics.” He realized there were bright people in the field; he just didn’t want to
hire any of them. It was hard. You get into gridlock; it’s hard to get out unless some of the cars
just go away. By 1986, clearly, Feynman was two years away from dying. It was the right time.
It was hard to get appointments through; you could only get them one at a time. LIGO, you see,
got started with essentially no faculty participation except Thorne, and then you can read in my
Archives LIGO oral history about how Robbie [Vogt] got chosen to head LIGO. But there are
still relatively few professors attached to LIGO. [Barry] Barish [Linde Professor of Physics,
emeritus] came in sort of part-time to be director. It’s a great thing to have happened for LIGO.
Robbie had run to the end of his tether and couldn’t go on any further. They needed somebody
who would pick it up from there. Robbie had done an enormous amount—they wouldn’t exist if
it hadn’t been for Robbie. But he’d gotten to the point where somebody had to carry the project
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