Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–25
ASPATURIAN: When you say that, you mean—
TOMBRELLO: I wasn’t trying to win any teaching prizes. I was trying to do a workmanlike job,
give the students what they deserved, but remember, I was still trying to get a lot of work done. I
became an assistant professor in 1965, but it wasn’t even driven by wanting tenure. It was just
being driven by the fact that there was great stuff out there. If you didn’t take it up, somebody
else would.
ASPATURIAN: What were you working on?
TOMBRELLO: Mostly reactions in the light nuclei, some of them of astrophysical importance,
because of Willy. Willy was really the man who directed the vision. We’ll talk about
personalities in later interviews. But certainly the nuclear physics—the spectroscopy—of the
light nuclei was drifting into things that were important for stars, how stars made energy.
ASPATURIAN: So you were looking at stellar nucleosynthesis.
TOMBRELLO: Yes, well, not so much nuclear synthesis in the heavier elements. It was mostly
the stuff that happened in main sequence stars. These were light element reactions.
ASPATURIAN: Light elements take us from where to where in terms of the periodic table?
TOMBRELLO: Oh, from basically helium and lithium up to maybe neon, somewhere in there.
The main sequence stars. The PP [proton-proton] chain, CNO [carbon-nitrogen-oxygen] cycle.
It opened up a new energy range, and you had new tools to play with. You had lots of very
bright students. That was the thing about Caltech; the students were so good—now we’re getting
on in the sixties. I’m spending more time teaching, probably. I guess I hadn’t quite gotten to
teaching freshman and sophomore physics yet. I was moved from the nuclear physics course to
teaching classical mechanics, which is a junior-level course, maybe with a few grad students, but
they were usually in a different section.
I usually taught one of the undergrad sections. I learned more things about classical
physics, particularly electromagnetism, which supplemented the stuff I had been doing in
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