Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–198
But maybe if we form a strategic alliance with, for example, USC—which also had a small string
group—we could create something there. Now, the whole deal was an interesting package. I
was doing it with money from Gordon Moore—at least a couple of million dollars.
ASPATURIAN: So he was on board with this.
TOMBRELLO: Absolutely! We remodeled the Downs Lab. We moved a bunch of the
astrophysicists to sub-basements, where they had better labs. We moved the shop. We created a
floor for these people in string theory. I had by that time hired three young string theorists:
[Anton] Kapustin, [Hirosi] Ooguri, and [Steven] Gubser. Kapustin and Ooguri are still here.
Gubser, because of a two-body problem, ended up going back to Princeton. Still I’d made a
great leap forward, hired some people. Got this deal running with USC—a joint theory institute.
Somewhere in there I got a professorship offer out of them for Chiara. David Baltimore thought,
“It’s all over.” I wish it had been. We had done a great job. Witten and Chiara spent two years
here; everything worked very well. But Curt [Curtis] Callan, who was chairman of the Physics
Department at Princeton, saw his own opportunity, and without asking the Institute for Advanced
Study he created by magic, out of nothing, an offer for Chiara at Princeton. That meant they did
not have to leave Princeton, and I lost.
However we got a very good string theory group started. We got some space remodeled.
We were put on the map, basically, by trying to do it, even though we failed. I don’t like failing,
but we really had done a good job with it.
ASPATURIAN: Do you think Witten was really such a loss?
TOMBRELLO: Don’t know. I do know that trying to hire him was important to establish this
credibility with the division. And to make it clear in the outside world that Caltech was really
willing to play major league ball. We went after him, and people noticed. It made recruiting
easier, rather than harder. One of the Princeton students who was involved in this was Sergei
Gukov. He is one of the best and the brightest, and I ended up hiring him. So all that led to a
rather powerful string group. You might say the string quartet—quintet, if I count John Schwarz
[Harold Brown Professor of Theoretical Physics], who was the founder of the field. It’s an
interesting group. It’s a bet on futures. There is a bit of a joke about that, because in ’99, while
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