Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–205
TOMBRELLO: Not exactly. We’ll have to step back to 1998. I’d been on the committee, because
I wasn’t chair yet, to hire Reinhard Genzel from Europe to come to Caltech. But he eventually
backed out of negotiations. I asked Roger Blandford, “What do we do next?” He said, “You
ought to look at Richard Ellis.” I did. At the time, he was at Cambridge. He had previously
been at Durham University, where he had made a name for himself. I got him over here.
Realized he was ambitious and hungry for a big telescope. Well, I had two big telescopes. The
British were not showing any signs of life on big telescopes. I also had a plan for an even bigger
telescope. I would have wanted Richard no matter what, but Richard resonated with the
telescope project. He would immediately have a piece of Caltech’s time—a lot of time—on the
Kecks, and he had the promise of an even bigger telescope. So, yes, I didn’t go after Richard
with the idea of TMT, but TMT went after Richard Ellis for me, you might say. Richard wanted
something big. People have said, “Oh, you’re going to lose Richard Ellis.” I tell them, “Not
unless they have a bigger telescope than I have.” He’s a good guy. We hit it off quite well, and I
think we did some nice things together. He replaced Wal Sargent as head of Palomar. He had a
vision that matched the vision that we were already working on, and it has gone very, very well.
Richard has a different style than some of our other great observers at Caltech, and we
have some really truly great observers at Caltech. Wal Sargent’s one of them; and of course
Maarten Schmidt was as good as we ever had. We have the former student of Wal Sargent’s,
Chuck [Charles C.] Steidel [DuBridge Professor of Astronomy], who has clearly become one of
the giants in the field. Chuck is an amazing man. I keep thinking of him as a young man; he’s
probably fifty now—still young, compared to myself. He has the ability— There’s this old joke
that Ronald Reagan used to tell about optimism. A kid is given the job of shoveling out a stable.
And the kid is happy as a clam; he’s whistling; and somebody says, “You’re shoveling shit, kid.
Why are you so happy?” The kid says, “With all this horse shit in here, somewhere there’s got
to be a pony.”
All I can say about Steidel is that I would be willing to bet that he can walk into any
stable and pick up the one gold coin that’s hidden somewhere by just reaching down and picking
it up. He has an absolute genius for doing the right observations. People talk about data mining.
If you’ve got Chuck Steidel, you don’t have to mine data. He just finds the soft spot
immediately. He’s a genius.
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