Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–117
Did she have an affair with Robert Oppenheimer? You may never find out for sure. Certainly,
no one who was there—none of the women there—are likely to tell you.”
ASPATURIAN: While we’re on the subject of titans of 20 th -century theoretical physics, in these
oral histories there’s always the inevitable question about Richard Feynman. Or if you have
anything you want to say about both Feynman and Gell-Mann, I tend to think of the two of them
both together and in counterpoint.
TOMBRELLO: Oh, let’s start with Feynman. I have to say, I did not know Richard well. I was
his colleague for many years. Knew him, talked to him, but never worked with him. But you
have to keep something in mind about Richard Feynman. Richard Feynman was always, to
some extent, performing. He was always on stage. And part of this, I think, was a way of
preserving a certain amount of privacy. He was such an attractive figure that, I believe, to
generate any sort of private life he kept people at a distance by wearing, effectively, a mask.
That came home very strongly when he died and there was a memorial service at Caltech. I
remember sitting there thinking, None of these people really knew this man. He was always on
stage to some extent—I don’t mean that in a negative way. He was an attractive man. He saw
the world from a vantage point that few people ever reached. Many, many times. I mean the
stuff on liquid helium shows that. The stuff on the Feynman diagrams shows it. Truly one of the
most original people at Caltech.
There were two extremely original people I knew at Caltech—neither very well, but I did
know them and talk to them. The other one was Fritz Zwicky. Zwicky did all sorts of things.
Zwicky was, of course, the man who discovered dark matter, because he looked at the rotation
curves of galaxies and said there has to be something there that we don’t see or Kepler’s laws are
wrong. Of course, that led to a lot of studies of that, and now to one of the great mysteries of this
century that we hope to solve. But he had a very different memorial service. Zwicky was very
irascible, far more irascible in public than Feynman. It was interesting to watch Zwicky at
somebody else’s seminar, when he pointed out to them that he’d done that work twenty years
ago and they hadn’t quoted him. But at his memorial service, suddenly a side of Zwicky
appeared that I think few of us knew anything about. After World War II, he knew that a lot of
the scientific libraries in Europe had been destroyed. And he set out on a one-man crusade to
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