Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–123
ASPATURIAN: What I had heard, from somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody
else, was that someone on the committee that decides these things had such terrible feelings
against David Gross that he said, “David Gross will never win the Nobel Prize as long as I am
alive.” So when the word came down that the three of them—Wilczek, Gross, and Politzer—
were sharing it, I wondered whether this individual had passed on, or whether this was just all
purely apocryphal.
TOMBRELLO: I don’t know. Things like that occur. There was the book written by Diana
Buchwald—Diana Barkan when she wrote the book—about [Walther] Nernst [Walther Nernst
and the Transition to Modern Physical Science (1999)]. Nernst, I believe, ended up winning the
chemistry prize because he was blackballed on the physics prize. So Nernst had two pathways to
success. Whereas Arnold Sommerfeld—he’s the kind of scientist I mentioned earlier who has a
legacy of generations of successful students—had a blackball against him in the community.
And since he was only in physics, it held, and he never won the Nobel Prize. I gather that these
things happen; I don’t know for a fact. One thing I do know has happened in current years—I
will try to not be too specific about it. I think the committees try to do a very, very careful job of
sorting out who should win—who’d done the work and what were the circumstances. They even
commission—I’ve been party to that—various people who might at some future point be
candidates and get them to write a personal history of what they did. I was told explicitly they
were not to be modest. But they were to be accurate. I collected several of those and passed
them on. However, for any given Nobel right now, there are three prizes to be given. Not four.
Not more. Occasionally one person, like Zewail [1999], wins, but never more than three. So if
there are fields where there are legitimate claims for more than three people, there’s an awful lot
of vicious infighting out in the community to push particular candidates forward and to push
other candidates down. This is one of the least attractive things about the current Nobel
situation. I do not believe that extends back to the committees. I think they try to do a very good
job. At least, from what I know about it. Though it’s not to say there aren’t people on there that
say things. I don’t know if anybody said that about David Gross or not, but it is certainly
possible that somebody would take a dislike to someone or for reasons that may actually have
something to do with the science. Gross and Wilczek published, basically, a paper that was right
next to the one that David Politzer sent in. So, you know, it was clear it was a horse race to the
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