Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

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