Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–126
government, should think clearly about. He had taken a job at, I believe, Goldman Sachs, having
been a professor at MIT [Sloan School of Management]. Anyway, somebody said, “Well,
what’s the difference between being at a university and being on Wall Street?” He says, “Well,
market efficiency looks a lot different from the banks of the Charles than it does from the banks
of the Hudson.” That’s a way of saying that assumptions in modern mathematical economics
finance theory are sort of like the old joke about the physicist being asked to explain an elephant
and saying, “Imagine a spherical elephant.” Well, the spherical elephant, you might say, is
market efficiency. And some of the things that have happened financially in the last couple of
years show that maybe someone should take a very hard look at that assumption.
ASPATURIAN: That’s for sure. You asked me to remind you about Clair Patterson.
TOMBRELLO: Ah, Pat Patterson. He never used Clair. A genius. A very unusual genius. Lots
of stories and I know some of them, and I knew Pat pretty well. There were times when I knew
Pat extremely well. Pat had done something absolutely remarkable. He never won a Nobel
Prize, but he won the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement [1995].
ASPATURIAN: Yes, he did. Not long before he died.
TOMBRELLO: The whole lead thing. The lead thing was an enigma, because you knew there
was a lot of lead being dumped in the atmosphere because so much tetraethyl lead was being
used as an anti-knock agent in gasoline. And yet every sample you looked at had the same
amount of lead in it. It was a lot of lead, but it was the same everywhere, no matter how you
measured it. There was one interpretation of that: The environment is full of lead and it’s
always been full of lead. Then along comes Patterson with his assumption, which was that
everybody has been running contaminated samples for years and they haven’t figured out a way
to get rid of the contamination. And Patterson figured out a way to get rid of the contamination
and measure what was really in samples. The ice cores from the South Pole appeared—I must
have been a postdoc that year, and I remember, it was so striking. You could see, you could
track human development through the amount of lead in the environment as you went deeper
into the ice. You could see the little blip—the amount rising—when humans first started making
bronze. You could see the big increase when the Romans started using it for piping and plates
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