Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–124
finish, and they both had gotten the answer. Whether [Gerard] ’t Hooft had done the work
earlier is a more interesting matter. Because I think he asked a very careful question when he
won, a few years earlier [1999], of exactly what had he gotten the prize for and realized that the
committee had left an opening for honoring the discovery of asymptotic freedom as a separate
prize. ’T Hooft certainly deserved his Nobel too. The question is whether he had claims that
were not being considered because they knew they had another prize. That I don’t know. But I
did know his reaction to it, which was, What exactly did I win it for? How broad were the
claims? They had left an opening, and we knew it at the time. It had left an opening and it might
be a future prize.
ASPATURIAN: If you had to handicap future Nobelists out of the division, do you have any?
TOMBRELLO: I had one and he committed suicide this year: Andrew Lange. I think he certainly
was one of those people who went to the next stage in the interpretation of anisotropies in the
Big Bang radiation.
ASPATURIAN: That was a major breakthrough.
TOMBRELLO: That was a major breakthrough. He was the first to get real numbers out of it with
the BOOMERanG [Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and
Geophysics] experiment. BOOMERanG, of course, was a work of genius in its own right,
because it was a cheap way to build a satellite that went around the Earth; it merely orbited the
South Pole, as a balloon. But he got there before WMAP [Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy
Probe] by years, and you might say skimmed the cream off what WMAP has done. They’ve
done a marvelous job with WMAP, but Lange got there first with a very clever experiment.
That’s solved one of the potential political problems of where to assign the credit—Lange is not
here to get the prize anymore. It’s very sad. If I had to guess, and this is nothing but guesswork,
I think some of the things that Jeff Kimble has done in quantum communication have been quite
remarkable and very interesting. If something happens with LIGO detecting gravitational
radiation, I believe you can begin trying to figure out who might be on the prize, but Kip Thorne
has to be there.
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