Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
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<strong>Tombrello</strong>–206<br />
ASPATURIAN: What are your thoughts about some of the other observational astronomers on the<br />
faculty?<br />
TOMBRELLO: Shri [Shrinivas R.] Kulkarni [MacArthur Professor of Astronomy and Planetary<br />
Science] is a genius. He has a completely different style. He’s across the map. He does a little<br />
bit of everything. He is clearly one of the world’s great astronomers <strong>with</strong> a completely different<br />
style than the others. [Stanislav] George Djorgovski is the kind of astronomer who—I think he’s<br />
frustrated by being in the same group as Steidel. Steidel would just reach down and find the gold<br />
coin. George would have to shovel through all of it and might then find the gold coin. It’s got to<br />
be frustrating to be around people like Steidel. Just totally frustrating. He’s just too good. It<br />
looks like luck, but it can’t be if you do it over and over again.<br />
So, anyway, now we’re moving TMT forward.<br />
ASPATURIAN: Right. You’ve got two $17.5-million commitments.<br />
TOMBRELLO: And we’ve got a commitment for some matching funds from the Canadians.<br />
Clearly, we had what we thought was the beginning of a critical mass. We had money. We had<br />
the design study started. Now we have to sort through other big proposals. The next thing was a<br />
nanotechnology center. We could clearly get money for that, but when Dave Tirrell, chairman in<br />
chemistry [Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering], and I saw the proposal for it, we<br />
thought it looked like an entitlement proposal. The last thing we wanted was to have a project<br />
where the money came in, got spent, and was gone.<br />
ASPATURIAN: The proposal came from whom?<br />
TOMBRELLO: It came from PMA, engineering, chemistry, and maybe biology.<br />
ASPATURIAN: So it was a very interdisciplinary proposal.<br />
TOMBRELLO: Yes, but Tirrell and I didn’t like it, although we liked the idea of the center. We<br />
thought that we needed to get to a situation in nanotech where it isn’t just each person having one<br />
little widget that they do something <strong>with</strong>. We needed a facility where there were lots of different<br />
http://resolver.caltech.edu/<strong>Caltech</strong>OH:OH_<strong>Tombrello</strong>_T