Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–81
were made up of these fractionally charged things. Could they appear in the real world? Of
course, there were a lot of experiments—not here, but in other places—looking for them, with
the idea that if they’re there, maybe you can see them. There was the experiment with the decay
of the neutral K particles [kaons], which showed that the universe is not time-reversal invariant.
The CPT [charge-parity-time] symmetry theorem may hold, but CP and T separately are broken
in those cases. That was the Fitch-Cronin experiment. I remember Val Fitch coming and talking
about that then.
All sorts of very interesting things were happening at that period. Everybody came to
Caltech. I guess they still do, but it seemed to me that there was a lot more discretionary money,
partly because of the size of the Kellogg grant. It was one of the big grants on campus. Willy
could just get people to come here. It was partly to see Willy and to talk to Feynman and Gell-
Mann. But partly it was just that we had money to bring them here, and at an attractive time of
year. I tried to continue that when I was running Kellogg, but it got harder and harder to find the
money to do it. That’s why first the Fairchild money, which brought visitors in, and later the
Gordon and Betty Moore funds that were used to bring in distinguished people to stay for months
or even a year, was and is extremely important. It’s one of the things that made Caltech
extraordinarily exciting. One of the things we’re going to get to when I talk about being division
chair is how I looked for grants so that people would have discretionary money, lots of
discretionary money, so that you’d have interesting visitors, because that is so important—not
just for the people working in the field but for the students. Because I can remember meeting
these kinds of people when I was a student and a postdoc, and I felt that was a huge piece of my
education. It was your connection to the history of physics, and the history of how knowledge
had progressed. It had progressed in such a short period of time. You got a time scale. It wasn’t
like looking back to Newton. It was looking at somebody who was sitting in an office. You
could talk to them and you knew they had done this groundbreaking work over the last couple of
decades.
ASPATURIAN: Living history.
TOMBRELLO: Caltech still gets a lot of visitors like that. The more money we can find for things
like that, the more you can keep this feeling of being connected to the whole world of science.
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