Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–213
realized it was a workable strategy. You now had to implement it. Just because somebody has
given you the key point doesn’t mean it all happens. The site survey has turned out well. Was
the Mauna Kea location the best site? That’s a complicated question. At the longer wavelengths
it was clearly going to be best, and if astronomy keeps moving to longer, far infrared,
wavelengths, it’s clearly going to be the best site. If we’re stuck in the near infrared and visible,
it’s as good as what we have with the Kecks. Maybe we had better sites in Chile. But Gordon, I
think, was happier with Hawaii. We seem to have solved, or are on the road to solving, all the
local political problems with Hawaii. I don’t know how big the incentives are that have been
created for local cooperation, but I think the Moore Foundation is willing to pay them. But I
think the key to the whole thing was Henry Yang.
ASPATURIAN: His intuition was that you deal directly with the Big Island rather than with
Honolulu?
TOMBRELLO: That we divide ’em. [Laughter] We played to this division. Henry knew how to
do it and did it. A quiet man but extremely sound. He and his wife wrote us the nicest letter in
Kerstin’s last days. I think at some point in his life he must have—they must have had to deal
with some sadness of their own, because it was a letter that was very important to us. Anyway, I
think we’ve probably said as much as we can about TMT. We’ve talked about CCAT.
ASPATURIAN: I was going to ask about personalities and politics within the PMA division. I
mean, it’s quite a division. You’ve got three different disciplines.
TOMBRELLO: Yes. I created this analogy early on, once I saw the IACC and the other divisions
in operation. I said, “You know, Engineering and Applied Sciences—the division is Yugoslavia,
with all the internal divisions, all the history that people weren’t even part of but remember:
‘You can’t imagine what they did to my great, great, great grandmother back in 1403’—that kind
of thing.” All these old feuds, and EAS suffers from all of that. I said HSS [Humanities and
Social Sciences] was Belgium—split between two groups that are never going to get along. You
know, it was that kind of divide. Somebody said, “Well, what about your division?”
ASPATURIAN: Can I take a guess?
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