Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–80
TOMBRELLO: No. I don’t remember him as an undergrad, so we may have just missed each
other. [Thorne received his BS in 1962—ed.] He had been John Wheeler’s graduate student at
Princeton. Willy brought him back for absolutely the wrong reason, but it was absolutely a case
of perfect serendipity. Maarten Schmidt [Moseley Professor of Astronomy] had discovered the
quasi-stellar objects.
ASPATURIAN: The quasars.
TOMBRELLO: They saw these things at what turned out to be huge redshifts. At first we didn’t
know if they were at local or at cosmological distances. Willy thought they were supermassive
stars.
ASPATURIAN: Really. I didn’t know that.
TOMBRELLO: They weren’t, of course—although if you start thinking about it, there was
probably a period somewhere in the history of the universe where there were stars of hundreds of
solar masses. They did have unusual properties. But Willy decided that you had to understand
relativity if you wanted to get at these objects and understand how they generated all that energy.
So he figured, OK, he knew this very bright, versatile student: “Get him back to work on that.”
Of course, Thorne had his own game plan. And very quickly they realized this was not likely to
be the mechanism that powered quasars. In fact, I remember being at a party, where someone—I
think it may have been Donald Lynden-Bell, but I’m not sure—was explaining that we’re really
talking about a completely different mechanism for the quasi-stellar objects, which probably
turned out to be correct. But in any case, Maarten never won the Nobel Prize for discovering the
redshifts of quasars. I nominated him personally for it several times. But he did win the Kavli
Prize [2008], so finally there’s justice in the world. Fred Kavli gave him the prize he should
have won from Stockholm. It was a nice prize, and I’m very happy about that one. The original
discovery happened probably about the time I left for Yale and came back—that period.
A number of things happened in that year. Gell-Mann had moved on from the Eightfold
Way [a taxonomy of the elementary particles—ed.], and he and a former PhD student here,
George Zweig, had separately come up with the idea of quarks—well, aces in the case of
George. That was the big new thing—that protons and neutrons and all these other particles
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