Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–238
worked for other people, but in actual fact their work was influenced a great deal by what I was
doing.
I always had a very good time at Caltech. For many, many years, it was idyllic, in the
sense that Tommy Lauritsen and Willy Fowler got the money and I spent it and did research with
it. It was only by the time we got into the late sixties, early seventies, that things got tighter, and
that’s when I started doing a certain fraction of my research in what you would call applied
physics or applied nuclear physics—techniques from nuclear physics adapted to materials
analysis, radiation damage, analyzing lunar samples. We talked a little bit about that [Session 2].
ASPATURIAN: Well, all of those are very interesting areas of investigation.
TOMBRELLO: It was slightly threatening to the people in Kellogg, because they did not want
Kellogg to change and Kellogg had to change. As it turned out—if we jump ahead—it really did
change after Willy retired and Koonin took the lab off in yet another direction. I think—I like to
take the credit partly—that Koonin dared to change things because he’d been influenced by me.
ASPATURIAN: Jumping back for a moment to when you were doing these applied studies that
kind of went against Kellogg’s traditional culture, did that result in a certain amount of friction?
TOMBRELLO: Friction that I have to admit I probably ignored until it was too late to ignore—
when they basically tossed me out as PI. We went through the story of how I got to be PI, and I
think at first that a lot of people didn’t like that. A lot of people did not like what I was doing
because I would go off into things
For example, in the seventies the Chinese seemed to be making progress with earthquake
prediction, which would be a big deal in Southern California. And so I got into it. Developed
some new instrumentation, working with a guy named Mark Shapiro, who is a professor down at
Cal State Fullerton. We came up with some very clever ideas, basically robotic instrumentation,
which was totally new to geology in those days. We got the idea that we could put stuff out in
the boonies if it could be kept safe. We put small robots that took radon data near ranger stations
and things like that. It was done very cheaply. They grew to where they could take all kinds of
data about things like gases dissolved in groundwater. In the mid-1970s, Intel and Motorola had
brought out the first pretty-high-performance microprocessors. We took a look at them and
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