Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–19
ASPATURIAN: Your thesis topic was—
TOMBRELLO: Thesis topic was on a model of the light nuclei with a theory we had that turned
out later was very similar to something [Princeton theoretical physicist] John Wheeler had done,
called the resonating-group method, but there were also some experiments in it. My master’s
thesis was entirely experimental. Again, it dealt with stuff in the light nuclei reactions,
polarization of the outgoing particles. It was good training, but I hadn’t been at it long enough to
really learn to be a decent experimenter, though I had the summer jobs, which had certainly
helped a great deal.
I even wrote an undergraduate thesis in mathematical physics with a friend of mine,
which we probably could have published, but we weren’t very sophisticated about things like
that. It was a nice little piece of work, but entirely mathematical physics, and it was based on the
fact that we had access to the Shell development computer at a time when very few people
programmed or had access to computers. My best friend, Tom Kitchens, and I talked Shell into
letting us have access after midnight to an IBM 650 they had. The world was much less formal.
They let two Rice undergrads have access to what was then the equivalent of a supercomputer. It
filled rooms and had air conditioning, lots of punch cards and stuff. It had about the capability of
an HP 15, which is a little pocket calculator that you can buy today for, I don’t know, $30, and
has been around for almost thirty years. It had 2,000 words of drum storage. It took half a
second to divide. That’s what I had at Rice, and we made great use of it, because very few of the
students knew how to program. We just taught ourselves how to program. We had access to it
and other people didn’t, so we wrote this paper. We were considered a bit of a prize by one of
the theorists in the Rice Physics Department.
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T