Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–82
ASPATURIAN: You seem to have become aware quite early of the need to keep a secure flow of
funding going. How about your colleagues? Were they as aware of this, or was there sort of an
ivory-tower attitude among some of them?
TOMBRELLO: I think there was definitely an ivory-tower attitude.
ASPATURIAN: And how did that play out?
TOMBRELLO: It played out badly for me in some ways. I felt we needed more money to support
the infrastructure. Now we’re jumping ahead to 1973, maybe just a little bit before that—maybe
starting in 1969, with the moon landing. By now, I’m the PI on the Kellogg grant, and we’re
getting into analyzing lunar samples. We’re also looking at radiation damage, because the
reactor people wanted people who were doing things that were connected with radiation damage,
and there were small amounts of money to do that. There was money from China Lake Naval
Weapons Center to do some analysis on surfaces. These were projects for which people would
pay to use the facilities here. The students could get involved with them, and the money could
help pay some of the lab technicians and accelerator operating costs. But the work wasn’t
nuclear physics, and it wasn’t published usually in Phys. Rev. [Physical Review Letters]. It was
published other places. A lot of it was interesting science. But it was different. To be honest, I
think my Kellogg colleagues would have settled for a smaller program—just done a lot less and
had fewer visitors, fewer students, fewer postdocs. But Kellogg was so unusual. The other
groups in physics didn’t seem to have the money at that time to bring in visitors that way. For
instance, the visitors in astrophysics who came through were mostly funded by Kellogg, not
astronomy. Because, you see, since Caltech had always supported Palomar, Palomar didn’t get
much in outside funding. They were supported, and still are, largely by the general budget. It
was not an entitlement program; it was kind of a payoff on an endowment for Palomar that had
gotten rolled into the general budget, which at one point in the past I looked at fairly carefully to
see who had come out on top in that one. But there wasn’t money to bring in very many visitors.
Kellogg was just unique. Willy had done a fantastic job.
ASPATURIAN: It sounds like it had a remarkable culture.
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