Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–41
my teaching assignment. I want to design a course that gets the youngest of them into research.
I’ll take the freshmen, and I will show you that you can get them into meaningful research when
they first get here.” They said, “Is that all? Hey, that’s wonderful—we’ll do that.” Ah! You’ll
hear more about that. And so the first class was in 1990. But I was getting the course—the
Physics 11 course—organized in ’89. And now we’re still doing it.
Also, something important happened in ’86 that I left out. Ed Stone, who was then still
the division chair, came to me and said, “I want to do something different about staffing in the
division. It’s not clear that we do this now in a systematic way. I want you to take a look at that
and run a staffing committee.” Because before, we’d been doing it sort of piecemeal, field by
field.
ASPATURIAN: When you say staffing, you’re talking about the academic personnel?
TOMBRELLO: Hiring professors.
ASPATURIAN: OK.
TOMBRELLO: I took a look at it and thought, “OK, I can do that. But it’s going to be different
from what they’ve done in the past. We’re not going to have nuclear physics doing its own
thing, high-energy physics doing its own thing, and so forth. Too much horse trading; too much
emphasis on the best person in a field. I don’t want the best of breed, I want the best in show—
the best person out there.” That should be the motto of the committee—to get the best people
regardless of what they are doing. The first thing people tell you when you propose something
like this is that you can’t choose between apples and oranges. And I said, “We’re going to have
relatively few appointments. And so I guess you’re just going to have to choose, aren’t you?
And you might even have to choose a kumquat. I mean, you’re going to have to break through
this, because if you’ve got one appointment we just can’t get into a fight among ourselves.
We’re going to have to decide which one is the best. We’re just going to have to do that.”
Of course, one of the first things we did was pick Robbie [Vogt] as head of LIGO [Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory], and that whole story is in the Archives oral
histories on the LIGO project. But two things happened. First, you begin to hire people outside
your major fields. We hired [Valentine Professor and professor of physics] Jeff Kimble—very
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