Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–128
ASPATURIAN: It sounds like you were very fond of him personally.
TOMBRELLO: I really liked him. I liked a lot of the people over there very, very much.
ASPATURIAN: It’s a good division. Who else over there comes to your mind, in geo and
planetary?
TOMBRELLO: Well, I think hiring Goldreich was an absolutely brilliant thing. The story of his
being hired [1966] is probably in the Archives somewhere. Let’s see—John Bahcall was at
Caltech then. He and I had come about the same time.
ASPATURIAN: This is the neutrino astrophysicist John Bahcall [d.2005]?
TOMBRELLO: Yes, and we were young professors, untenured, I think, when this came up. We
heard about this guy Goldreich at Cornell who had solved the three halves problem for the orbit
of Mercury, and we decided we could offer him a senior postdoc position, which he turned down
and took an assistant professorship at UCLA. That was OK, for a while. Goldreich was a bit of
a jock. More than a bit of a jock. One day he was waiting for a squash court. The person using
it was staying overtime, and I guess Peter knocked on the door, the window, and said, you know,
it’s our turn. This guy was, I believe, a quarterback. He took this badly and tried to beat Peter to
death with a squash racket. Peter’s very strong, but this was a full-time, much larger jock, and
the encounter was clearly somewhat one-sided. The university basically tried to whitewash that,
and Peter came to Caltech. And the rest is history. Peter is—
ASPATURIAN: A brilliant man.
TOMBRELLO: A brilliant man. He is remarkable in— People tell me about the importance of
citation indices and things like that. I say, “Well, there’s Goldreich.” He never published very
many papers, but every one of them was a gem, an absolute gem. They opened up everything.
He and I used to run together, be jocks together. Very competitive person. Very interesting
person. As I say, in addition to the science, he did one big, wonderful thing, which was to make
sure Patterson got a professorship.
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