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