Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–246
TOMBRELLO: Yes. There’s no obvious reason to go back. Given the choice, I would go to Paris
any day. Better food; better walking around—though I gather the subways are now improved.
We got a Christmas card from somebody in Shanghai saying that they’ve extended the subway
network. Hey! It’s getting to be a very efficient city.
ASPATURIAN: Anything else you wanted to talk about? We mentioned a couple of people you
thought you might want to discuss a little.
TOMBRELLO: Oh, you want me to talk about the story of Fiona Harrison.
ASPATURIAN: Fiona. You also mentioned Anneila Sargent.
TOMBRELLO: OK. Let’s start with Fiona, because that’s an interesting story. It starts before I’m
PMA chairman, about 1995, when I’m running the staffing committee. There was some sort
of—I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was a set of presentations on some new projects
in 114 East Bridge. One of them was something called AMANDA [Antarctic Muon and
Neutrino Detector Array], which later [2005] become part of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
[AMANDA/ IceCube was decommissioned in 2009.—ed.]. It used the Antarctic ice as a
detector for high-energy particles, particularly neutrinos. You drill holes into the ice deep
enough for the pressure from the overburden to squeeze out the bubbles. You put
photomultipliers down there and run cables out. And you see the Cerenkov radiation from the
neutrinos acting on and interacting with the ice. So you have one of the world’s biggest neutrino
detectors, done cheaply. I can’t remember the name of the postdoc at Berkeley who came up
with the idea. But Barclay Kamb was involved—he was down there studying the motion of the
Antarctic glaciers. He used hot water to drill through the ice—which is thousands of feet thick—
down to the basal plane, where it interacts with the surface. He’s approached by this postdoc,
who says, “What do you do with the holes when you’re through with them?” Barclay says, “We
pour water into them and freeze them up.” The guy says, “What if I put something down in the
hole.” Barclay says, “You don’t want to get it back? Fine with me.” So that was the beginning.
That was AMANDA.
So anyway, this was early in the game, and I am sitting in East Bridge next to a friend of
mine named Buford Price, who is a professor at Berkeley. I was still riding high, because two
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