Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–119
questions. But Murray, being Murray, got up and said, “Good. I’m glad that’s over with. Now
we’re going to talk about what I’m interested in, which is Regge poles.” And we took off on
Regge poles. I never thought about the book very often after that. Some years later, when I was
running the research lab for Schlumberger, somebody said, “Could you get Gell-Mann to come
here and give a seminar?” I said, “Sure. But why would you want to?” “Well, he’s a great
man.” I said, “True. But he’ll come here and insult you.” “We don’t mind,” they said. “We
don’t mind.” So we got Murray there, and in introducing him I told that book story. He looks at
me and says, “I didn’t do it.” I said, “You did do it.” He said, “Well, maybe I did it.”
[Laughter]
Murray was a showman, and he baited us sometimes. There was one class where he was
deriving something. We’d gone back to how you turn Feynman diagrams into integrals—
because that’s what they are. They’re a type of shorthand for writing down a certain set of
integrals, which gives you the probability of that particular reaction occurring. Murray is at the
board, dropping all the constants. Pi’s have disappeared. 2’s have disappeared. Velocity of
light has been set to 1; e has been set to 1. At the end of it, somebody—probably Eric
Adelberger, who was, I believe, a second-, maybe third-year graduate student [PhD 1967]—
sarcastically said, “You can’t calculate with it, Murray. It doesn’t have any of the constants in
front of it.” Well, Murray turns around slowly and sneers at us—Murray can sneer—and says,
“You want numbers.” “We want numbers.” And he says, “I’ll do it by dimensional analysis.” I
laughed. Everyone laughed, because how can you get four pi’s with dimensional analysis?
Maybe e and c you can get, but you’re not going to get four pi’s. So Murray races through this
with a set of arguments that no one can follow. At the end of it, there is not only the integral but
there are all these numbers in front of it. Well, nobody dares challenge it. But we write it down
carefully. Go home and of course every one of those four pi’s and whatever were there and in
the correct place. I am convinced he set us up, but I cannot prove it. It was—
ASPATURIAN: A tour de force.
TOMBRELLO: A tour de force, any way you describe it. It was an interesting class. You felt
physics was being created before your very eyes. We would go home after the class and try to
figure out if we could do something with it. It was magnificent.
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