Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–129
ASPATURIAN: Someone else you mentioned to me was Ahmed Zewail.
TOMBRELLO: Zewail is one of the great Caltech success stories. He came here young, as a
junior faculty member. He came and did all the development of the femtosecond spectroscopy.
Maybe modeling himself a bit on Linus Pauling, he built a scientific empire that still does
interesting things. I do not see that winning a Nobel Prize has in any way slowed the kind of
science that Ahmed does. It’s quite remarkable science. He’s an interesting, interesting man.
There’s a story about him that connects to Physics 11. A few years ago, I asked a student in
Physics 11 named Milo Lin to look into the question of putting a big diffractive-optics
telescope—a Fresnel-grating-type telescope—into space. Let’s say a 30-meter one for, you
know, surveillance. You could look down with it, read people’s license numbers, whatever,
from space. What are the technical problems of doing that? Milo did a good job on that
problem. But I had originally gotten the idea because there was a project like it at Livermore
[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]. So the next summer I said, “Maybe you’d like to go
up to Livermore.” He did. And he worked in a group doing theoretical chemistry. It was
basically molecular dynamics that was sort of time-dependent—how complex molecules move
around. He came back and told me about it and how marvelous it was. He was by then starting
his junior year. He said, “What should I do?” I said, “You should go over and talk to Ahmed
Zewail, because what you’re giving him is the ability to mathematically model the stuff he’s
going to try to do in this new time-dependent femtosecond spectroscopy.” I said, “This is
perfect.” It worked. They published some papers together while Milo was an undergrad. He is
still here as a grad student working in this field and is clearly going to be one of the powerful
people in the field. And Ahmed has done a wonderful job of developing this guy. It’s one of
those cases where Caltech can utilize its unique advantage of being very good and very, very
small. We all know one another. You can be a physics student and somebody can give you a
shove in the direction of something in chemistry that you really ought to look at because what
you’re doing now really fits it.
ASPATURIAN: That’s right.
TOMBRELLO: So, Ahmed is interesting in that though he still wins a lot of prizes, he is still
clearly in the thick of a lot of activities. I think he’s on this education commission [President's
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