Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–241
ASPATURIAN: How did you know something was going to happen at Whittier Narrows?
TOMBRELLO: We didn’t. We knew that there was a block there that hadn’t moved, while
everything else along the fault had moved. We were playing the odds. We didn’t just pick one
area. We picked as many as we could cover out in the field with these dozen robots. But, as I
say, I don’t know what would have happened— If you don’t have the data, you can’t say we
would have seen a precursor. Anyway, it never happened, because the instruments were all
closed down. I left Kellogg in about ’82, and in ’85 the program was shut down. It was a lost
opportunity, one where if we had still been there in 1987 we would have known whether or not
there were precursors for that earthquake. It was really too bad that within two years we could
have potentially answered that question.
ASPATURIAN: You mentioned China. You’ve had quite an extended relationship off and on with
various aspects of Chinese society—government, academia. Do you want to talk about that?
TOMBRELLO: Oh, sure.
ASPATURIAN: Particularly in the context of China’s emerging now as a real superpower in a
number of these areas.
TOMBRELLO: My first trip to China was on a delegation in 1979 in nuclear physics. Allan
Bromley was leading it. He later became Bush 41’s science advisor. I’d worked for Allan at
Yale, and we’d stayed friends. Most of the people on the delegation were orthodox nuclear
physicists. They were much desired by the Chinese, who wanted to hear their talks. I was
mostly giving applied physics talks. The only people who wanted to talk to me were people
who’d read my papers on accelerator design and wanted to pin me to the wall about details of
how these particular resonating structures worked and where did I think the field was going. I
didn’t belong in this delegation as far as the Chinese were concerned. So it’s very interesting
that three years later, in 1982, my wife and youngest daughter, Kerstin, and I went to China for
an international conference on earthquake prediction. Kerry Sieh [professor of geology] and his
wife had been living over there—that was before Kerry came out of the closet. Suddenly the
Chinese were eager to have me come talk at various places around China.
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