Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
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<strong>Tombrello</strong>–116<br />
And that, of course, showed up in the LIGO project. Robbie Vogt guided LIGO through<br />
building a very successful prototype and achieving a design, but it was Barry Barish who carried<br />
the project through to completion. The whole LIGO story, again, shows how important it is that<br />
you have a project director who has, first, the vision to know you need something extra and the<br />
will to change the project’s course and change the people running it when you have to.<br />
Now, there’s another interesting Oppenheimer story about another little Los Alamos<br />
project that started on almost day one. He had Edward Teller—a group of one, because Edward<br />
couldn’t work <strong>with</strong> anybody else—who was very interested in fusion bombs. As I said in<br />
something I wrote, it didn’t pay off at the time, but you might say it represented a move in the<br />
direction of a totally new product line that had considerable significance in its own right. It’s a<br />
bit pedantic to say it that way, but it was true. Out of that little one-person wild-card project<br />
grew a whole other direction in nuclear weapons. I think that booting Teller out of the fissionweapons<br />
group, while keeping him on and keeping him thinking about this, shows<br />
Oppenheimer’s wisdom, too. Someday somebody is going to write a book about Oppenheimer<br />
as a project manager. I tried to convince Jeremy Bernstein to do it.<br />
ASPATURIAN: Jeremy Bernstein being The New Yorker writer for physics.<br />
TOMBRELLO: He did write a book about Oppenheimer [Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma<br />
(2004)] , but he was tantalized by the possible romance between Oppenheimer and Ruth Tolman.<br />
Jeremy and I were corresponding, because he wanted me to find out, Was it true? Some other<br />
author had published a book <strong>with</strong> that in it. I said, “Well, I’ll look into it.” So I talked to Margie<br />
Lauritsen [widow of Tommy Lauritsen]. And Margie’s first reaction was, “Nothing to it. I knew<br />
Ruth very well. Never happened.” So I got back to Jeremy and said, “This is what I learned, but<br />
you have to be careful. Everyone adored Ruth Tolman and would probably do anything to<br />
protect her reputation.” But <strong>with</strong> Kitty Oppenheimer, they didn’t care, and she didn’t have any<br />
reputation as far as they were concerned. I said, “You don’t have very much information about<br />
the Ruth Tolman thing. You have a somewhat ambiguous, flowery letter she wrote to<br />
Oppenheimer. You also have to fold in the fact that people tended to write a lot of letters in<br />
those days, and the style of writing them could be a little bit over the top by present standards.<br />
http://resolver.caltech.edu/<strong>Caltech</strong>OH:OH_<strong>Tombrello</strong>_T