Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
<strong>Tombrello</strong>–175<br />
And then in the summer of 1971—so now we’ve moved ten years forward—I’d been<br />
doing some work on accelerator design. The people at Los Alamos got interested in some of<br />
those designs and invited me to come. At the same time, I was on a time-allocation committee<br />
for an accelerator that was just being built there called LAMPF [Los Alamos Meson Physics<br />
Facility], which was a high-energy nuclear physics facility, <strong>with</strong> a big linear accelerator. The<br />
whole family went, and it was a wonderful experience that was repeated for the next two<br />
summers, most of which I spent on this accelerator design project. It didn’t go anywhere, but it<br />
was a lot of fun, and I published some papers on it. And of course, the scheduling committee at<br />
LAMPF continued, so I continued going back and forth to Los Alamos after that. It all worked<br />
well until the early eighties, when Jay [George] Keyworth, who was head of the physics division<br />
at Los Alamos, went off to be Reagan’s science advisor. I think that they wanted to burn all<br />
trace of Jay and anybody who had had anything to do <strong>with</strong> him. Suddenly, I discovered I was no<br />
longer welcome at Los Alamos. They canceled my security clearance—not that I’d been doing<br />
very much that had anything to do <strong>with</strong> national security at that point. But a friend of mine, Tom<br />
Sugihara, who had been dean of science at Texas A & M and had gone on to become a kind of a<br />
guru to the head of the chemistry directorate at Livermore, realized suddenly that I was up for<br />
grabs. He got me involved <strong>with</strong> Livermore. I’d been up there; I’d given talks. I knew people<br />
there, but I’d never really had any relationship <strong>with</strong> them.<br />
What he wanted me to do was some organizing. They had two new visiting committees<br />
there, but they were rather haphazard and really didn’t do much. Tom said, “I’d like you to<br />
come here. Organize a committee—two committees; one for the materials science half of this<br />
directorate and the other half for the chemistry side. I want them to look like the reviews of<br />
Argonne National Laboratory.”<br />
At the time, actually, I was on the Argonne review committees, so I knew about how it<br />
worked. At Argonne, you had a number of diversely organized committees, reporting to the<br />
University of Chicago, but at Livermore we were reporting to the lab’s upper management and<br />
the University of California. I agreed to study it and to set up the two committees. All this<br />
began to really happen about the time I went to Schlumberger. So I was doing it while I was at<br />
Schlumberger, too.<br />
ASPATURIAN: Two management portfolios at once.<br />
http://resolver.caltech.edu/<strong>Caltech</strong>OH:OH_<strong>Tombrello</strong>_T