Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
<strong>Tombrello</strong>–52<br />
[Stephen] Padin [senior research associate in astrophysics], and they worked on designing<br />
segmented-mirror telescopes and they published a paper on it—this is a freshman. He won the<br />
Green prize for research for that. But by the beginning of his sophomore year, <strong>Caltech</strong> is driving<br />
him crazy. I had to get him out of <strong>Caltech</strong>. <strong>Caltech</strong> is a wonderful environment, but if you don’t<br />
fit the environment, it’s a terrible place. So I got Dario a summer internship at Schlumberger in<br />
Cambridge, England. He had just finished his sophomore year, and he was now competing headto-head<br />
and winning against the postdocs in seismology. He published two very mathematical,<br />
very interesting papers in seismology. And the postdocs are not exactly idiots. One of them had<br />
been a Miller Fellow. It’s clearly kind of a mistake to send him, because it’s hard to sell<br />
anybody else to Schlumberger now that they’ve seen Dario. They know perfectly well that, you<br />
know, they all should look like that, right? Well, they don’t. He then finished his undergraduate<br />
years at Stanford. He’s now about to finish his PhD at Princeton, in physics, but doing<br />
neuroscience.<br />
ASPATURIAN: So he left <strong>Caltech</strong>. What was it that didn’t work for him here?<br />
TOMBRELLO: If you don’t fit into this environment, you’re never going to fit. It is a very narrow<br />
social niche. Places like Stanford and Berkeley have many social niches. <strong>Caltech</strong> has one. With<br />
Dario, it was very important that he not stick it out. This is a national treasure.<br />
The latest verse on this is that he’s now looking for a job. He was being propositioned by<br />
Nathan Myhrvold, who runs something called Intellectual Ventures. Nathan was the first chief<br />
scientist at Microsoft, and he’s got lots of very interesting people who work <strong>with</strong> him on<br />
intellectual ventures. But Dario is considering this, and I say to him, “Look, you’ve always got<br />
to watch out for Peter Pan.” He says, “What do you mean?” I say, “Because Never Never Land<br />
is very exciting. But some Never Never Lands don’t have Wendy to take care of the Lost Boys.<br />
You don’t want to become a Lost Boy. Some of these places are extremely attractive. But you<br />
can very easily become a Lost Boy—in that you are in a place that you can’t escape from.<br />
You’ll have pirates, you’ll have the crocodile, you’ll have all the wonderful things of Never<br />
Never Land, but maybe there’s no way out. You’ve got to watch out for that.” And I said, “I’m<br />
just going to throw your name out into the world.” I put him up for bids. Maybe two weeks go<br />
by. I consult for Applied Minds. There’s a guy there named Danny Hillis, who invented<br />
http://resolver.caltech.edu/<strong>Caltech</strong>OH:OH_<strong>Tombrello</strong>_T