Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–125
ASPATURIAN: That would be a very difficult one to parcel out, I think.
TOMBRELLO: Except I think it’s very clear Thorne’s going to be on it. The others I’ll not
speculate about. But there might be others at Caltech. Certainly, Thorne himself has been the
driving force in that whole thing. But again, it’s a crapshoot, because they haven’t detected
gravitational radiation. [Russell A.] Hulse and [Joseph H.] Taylor [1993 Nobel laureates in
physics] made the discovery of the indirect effect of gravitational radiation some years ago now
by looking at the orbital decay of binary pulsars, binary neutron stars. It was a brilliant piece of
work but not a direct observation; it was more calorimetry. It said that the binary system is
losing energy at a rate consistent with gravitational radiation. They studied it for a very long
time to prove that. So in some sense, there has already been a prize for the discovery of
gravitational radiation. But the direct detection, as in the case of the direct detection of the
neutrino, is an important thing that still has to be done. It could be done tomorrow. I was hoping
it would occur while I was division chair, but it didn’t happen. Though it might take years
before the prize actually is given. Because that’s what happened with the Politzer prize.
ASPATURIAN: Thirty years.
TOMBRELLO: That’s right. In the case of my brother-in-law [Robert C. Merton], who won it in
economics with Myron Scholes, it took twenty-four years, because the first papers, the Black-
Scholes paper and then Bob’s paper, which was back-to-back with it, came out in 1973. The
history of that was a bit weird, too, because Bob didn’t try to publish his paper, because he knew
that Myron and Fischer [Black] had actually come up with an important part of the idea first and
their paper had been rejected for publication. It was only later, when their paper was published,
that they put the two right together and published them. That was certainly a gentlemanly
approach to it. The sad thing was that Fischer Black died of cancer beforehand, or it would have
been a three-way prize.
ASPATURIAN: That is sad.
TOMBRELLO: Certainly, Fischer Black was a very interesting man. There’s a quotation of his
that’s absolutely perfect and that lots of modern-day economists, including some that advised the
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