Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–20
THOMAS A. TOMBRELLO
SESSION 2
December 26, 2010
ASPATURIAN: When we stopped, you had just received your PhD from Rice.
TOMBRELLO: Yes. I wrote a thesis fairly quickly and published some papers. Then I was trying
to decide what to do next, and I applied for an NSF [National Science Foundation] postdoc. I
figured I would take my wife and young son off to Europe. The chairman of the Rice Physics
Department, Tom [Thomas W.] Bonner, had been a postdoc here, in Kellogg [Radiation
Laboratory]. And he said, “That’s ridiculous. You’re not going to Europe. You’re going to
Caltech.” I thought, Well, for someone who’s never been to California, it’s probably just as
exotic to go there as Europe, so why not?
ASPATURIAN: How did he make that determination?
TOMBRELLO: Caltech had been very good for him, and he figured it would be good for me. He
wasn’t my advisor. We yelled at one another. He didn’t like being yelled at, so being my
advisor wouldn’t have worked. But we respected one another quite enormously. He felt he
could tell me what was in my best interest, and he believed that was it.
So off we go, in the summer of 1961. This upcoming summer, next August [2011], I will
have been here fifty years. And we got here and realized this was an extraordinarily interesting
place. I fell into the Kellogg Lab and started doing experiments. They had a new accelerator
down in the sub-basement of Sloan [Laboratory of Mathematics and Physics]. They had a bunch
of grad students who were probably not getting as much attention as they thought they needed.
And I was younger than some of them, older than very few. I was twenty-four when we got
here. It was a marvelous time. For the first year, all I did was just keep my head down in the
lab, and on weekends we would go to all the free and wonderful places in Southern California.
You know, Griffith Observatory, the zoo, the beach. Every place. We discovered a bigger, more
interesting world. Texas is pretty dull compared to Southern California. We just had a
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