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>–210<br />
located above 14,000 feet in the Atacama Desert in Chile. We’re at a point in time where it<br />
finished quite well in the Decadal Survey [of astronomy and astrophysics]. That came at exactly<br />
the right time. I felt very good about that survey. Two of the projects I started at <strong>Caltech</strong><br />
finished high up in that ranking—TMT and CCAT. I was very, very pleased. I keep hearing,<br />
“Well, you picked good ones.” The answer was, “No, we made them good and therefore the<br />
Decadal Survey had to pick them.” [Laughter]<br />
ASPATURIAN: That’s an interesting point of view.<br />
TOMBRELLO: You had better try to work very hard to make things that people will have a hard<br />
time turning down.<br />
ASPATURIAN: I wanted to ask you about the TMT vis-à-vis Carnegie’s telescope project.<br />
TOMBRELLO: That’s an interesting story. It goes back to the previous director, before Wendy<br />
[Freedman, director of the Carnegie Observatories].<br />
ASPATURIAN: Wendy being the current director.<br />
TOMBRELLO: Yes. I have always gotten on very well <strong>with</strong> Wendy. The previous director was<br />
Gus Oemler. He wanted to be part of CELT, as the TMT was known then, but he didn’t want to<br />
put up any money. We reluctantly told them no, that everybody had to contribute. You couldn’t<br />
have partners who weren’t contributing something. He could have figured out a way to<br />
contribute in kind. So this was one of the great losses, I think—that Gus didn’t have a vision,<br />
and by the time Wendy, who does have a vision, came in [2003], it was too late. It was a lost<br />
opportunity. There were several tries to do things <strong>with</strong> Carnegie. I had hoped we could set up a<br />
joint institute in theoretical astrophysics. Wendy even found some money from Richard<br />
Meserve, head of Carnegie [Institution for Science], for that. But that has never really taken off,<br />
either. I didn’t get much support on that from David Baltimore, because he had another idea<br />
about a joint project <strong>with</strong> Carnegie, in biology. That was because Maxine Singer, who headed<br />
Carnegie before Meserve, was a friend of his. That never worked either. No. Not bringing<br />
Carnegie on board was one of the failures. I tried a number of times, even after it fell apart <strong>with</strong><br />
http://resolver.caltech.edu/<strong>Caltech</strong>OH:OH_<strong>Tombrello</strong>_T