Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

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