Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–146
silently applauded and gave me a better budget. But I had to prove it. I had to prove I could do
it. There wouldn’t be any outcry. There wouldn’t be any obvious financial irregularities. You
have to put an underline under obvious. It worked. So working with him was a lot of fun.
Never perfect, but very, very good, because we’d known one another a long time. We knew
where we were coming from. It worked very, very, very, very well. And worked to the benefit
of the division. We started the Thirty Meter Telescope project, the two of us, and brought the
astronomers in.
ASPATURIAN: I’m going to ask you to hold on that until we get to your years as PMA chair. But
at the time Koonin became provost, you were still dealing with, was it, the staffing committee for
physics?
TOMBRELLO: Oh, yes, I had the staffing committee, except for that break at Schlumberger, since
1986.
ASPATURIAN: So that must have been—
TOMBRELLO: That caused some interesting problems. Because I don’t believe that Koonin had a
huge amount of respect for Charlie Peck. Not as much as he should have, actually. Part of that
was, of course, that Peck had been chosen over Koonin. Peck had been chosen over me, too.
But, you know, I figured, Hey, I can work with this! I’m still running the staffing committee,
and Charlie isn’t getting in my way. Charlie did one thing that I had to be myself about. I’d
been teaching Physics 11. That was the deal. Charlie then, basically, tells Frautschi to tell
Tombrello—
ASPATURIAN: [Professor of theoretical physics] Steve Frautschi—
TOMBRELLO: Yes. He tells Frautschi, the executive officer [for physics], “Go tell Tombrello
he’s going to teach Physics 1 for a term.” I tell Frautschi, “No!”
ASPATURIAN: That’s the introductory course?
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