Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–118
collect books, personally box them up, and send them to libraries in Europe to replace the lost
books. In the Feynman memorial service, I don’t think there was a huge amount of emotion,
because I think people had always been kept slightly at a distance from Dick. With Zwicky,
there weren’t very many dry eyes in the house. We were seeing that a man who everyone
thought was an ogre had a side that nobody had ever seen. It was very, very different. It was so
striking. We suddenly saw a Zwicky who certainly wasn’t obvious in public or in his dealings
with the rest of us.
Gell-Mann. Oh, yes! I knew Gell-Mann better. I still see Gell-Mann occasionally. I
guess I saw him a few weeks ago. He’s gotten interested in cancer and is working with a project
I’m associated with, down at USC. It’s a physical sciences approach to cancer, funded by the
National Cancer Institute. Murray and I are kind of wild cards in that. Murray is much more
overtly mathematical than Feynman. I remember Murray once saying, “Feynman is always
looking to see where the gears connect, and there aren’t any gears. There are just these
fundamental mathematical symmetries.” Well, they’re both right. There’s two ways of looking
at the world.
Murray could also be very difficult in public. I have a couple of stories. Well, the
standard one is of Murray coming to a seminar he didn’t like and just sitting in the front row
noisily reading the New York Times. That was hard to deal with. But I can remember that when
I came here as a postdoc, in 1961, I decided to sit in on Murray’s class on—well, it amounted to
field theory, but it was on whatever Murray wanted to talk about. He looked out at this first
class. Everybody wanted to be there, and there were probably a hundred people at that point. He
looked at them and just shook his head. “This will never do. The textbook is [Silvan]
Schweber’s book.” [An Introduction to Relativistic Quantum Field Theory]. This was a new
book, about two inches thick, on very, very fine, very thin paper. So it had a lot of pages, and
the pages contained few words and lots of equations. It was probably not $100, but for that day
and time, it was expensive. Next class is still pretty large. We all appear with the book, and he
says, “Oh, OK,” and thumbs through this book. He says, “Simple stuff. Read the first half for
the next class.” Well, the next class, there are many fewer of us. He looks out at us and says,
“Hmm. Are there any questions?” Questions? We can barely lift it, much less read it all. He
says, “Ah, good. I knew it was simple stuff. Finish the book for the next class.” Well, you
could have had the next class in a phone booth, and some of us actually tried to ask some
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