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