Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–62
generation. They’re not used to the TV talking back to them and trying to engage them,
particularly in large classes. You’ve got to somehow figure out if the message is getting through,
and if it’s not getting through to all of them, can you, on the spot, change the message a little bit
and try something different? It’s an adaptive process. It’s got to be. It’s got to be that the
professor really is looking for that handle by which you turn the kid. There isn’t any one answer,
because people learn things very different ways. I remember Richard Feynman saying, “I could
never figure out what all these other guys were doing, therefore I did it my own way.” And, you
know—to paraphrase Frost—that made all the difference with Dick.
ASPATURIAN: “And that has made all the difference.” Yes, I know the poem [The Road Not
Taken].
TOMBRELLO: Dick made a conscious effort to look at problems from a different vantage point.
It was deliberate.
ASPATURIAN: That’s a hard thing to do.
TOMBRELLO: It’s almost impossible. And it takes somebody as smart as Feynman. I’m thinking
how to measure how smart Feynman was, because it wasn’t any standard sort of smart. It was
this way of viewing the world obliquely, and he tried to get there deliberately. I think he worked
really hard at that and succeeded in marvelous ways. The other person who was equally creative
and from a different vantage point, was Fritz Zwicky [Caltech astronomer, d. 1974]. You’ve
been here long enough that you’ve at least heard Zwicky’s story. Zwicky was unique.
ASPATURIAN: You knew him personally?
TOMBRELLO: Yes. I was never close friends with either one of them. I probably knew Feynman
better than Zwicky, but I knew them both. Now the question is, do we have people who are as
outrageous and as interesting as those people? Of course we have one that is notorious, and
that’s Christof Koch [Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of
computation and neural systems]. Christof is a genius. He looks at things differently. He’s
taken on a problem that’s infinitely harder—
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