Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–72
a party, and they might not come to all of them, but they would drop in on some. I think
occasionally Barclay and Linda Kamb came. Other people from around the campus came, but
mostly on a drop-in basis. I don’t think the Bachers tended to come to those parties. Though the
Bachers had been certainly close to the Lauritsens when Bob was here as an NRC [National
Research Council] Fellow before the war. In those days, it seemed to me that Caltech was run—
and remember I was looking at this from the bottom of the totem pole at that time, so it may be
an inaccurate impression—by a small group of people who’d been together for a long time.
People like Bacher, DuBridge, and Charlie Lauritsen, and probably some of the people over in
geology and geophysics tended to get together and decide how things were going to go. I
remember very few faculty meetings in those days, either of a general sort or in the divisions. I
don’t think we had faculty meetings in physics, math, and astronomy probably until about the
time of the Vietnam War, but I’m getting ahead of myself by just a few years.
So, getting back to my early years here, I spent most of my time doing experiments with
the new tandem accelerator—spectroscopy of the light nuclei. I was getting a lot done. We were
publishing a lot of papers. I was working with very good students—some of them mine, some of
them borrowed from Charlie [Charles A.] Barnes [professor of physics, emeritus] and from
Ralph Kavanagh [professor of physics, emeritus, d. 2010]. I think I’m going to go back and talk
about the people. Willy, of course, was the great man. Willy had been moving out of nuclear
physics into nuclear astrophysics, a field that he and Hoyle and the Burbidges had started back in
the early 1950s with a very famous paper. [Geoffrey] Burbidge, [Margaret] Burbidge, Fowler,
and [Fred] Hoyle. [“Synthesis of the Elements in Stars,” Rev. Mod. Phys. 29:547 (1957)—ed.]
(.The idea being that if you understood the nuclear physics and you had stellar models you could
learn a great deal about how the elements had come into being. I think a lot of this had started
with Urey at Chicago.
ASPATURIAN: Harold Urey?
TOMBRELLO: Yes. And some of the people who had worked with him in Chicago were now in
the Caltech geology division: [Gerald J.] Wasserburg [MacArthur Professor of Geology and
Geophysics, emeritus] had been part of that group; also Sam Epstein [Leonhard Professor of
Geochemistry, emeritus, d. 2001]. We’d gotten a lot of people out of the mass spectrometry
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