Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–83
TOMBRELLO: It had a remarkable culture, and Willy always had interesting people here. Some
of them were in nuclear physics, like Aage Bohr, Aage Winther, and Ben Mottelson. There was
always this very strong connection to the Niels Bohr Institute. Not everyone—you know, we
didn’t get Herman Feshbach from MIT. There were definite pathways that worked, and some
definite pathways that somehow did not get explored, but at the same time we were always doing
something that was interesting. I can’t take the credit for it. Willy got it started, or Charlie made
sure Willy got it started. I never exactly knew how that worked. Willy was a true visionary. If
there was a failure mode to the Willy paradigm, it was that Willy was the inspiration, the
visionary, and one did better in Kellogg if one became one of Willy’s, ah,—
ASPATURIAN: Circle?
TOMBRELLO: Minions. I remember being given a hard time for years by Gell-Mann because—
and this decision had been made before my time—he was always reminding us, “You know, we
kept Kavanagh and we sent Val [Valentine] Telegdi away.” Telegdi was a really great physicist.
He ended up in Chicago and then other places. I said, “Look, I might have made a different
choice, Murray. But I wasn’t here. I never had that choice. Choices got made.” But Willy had
a vision, and he wanted people to help him carry out the vision, and I think there were probably
other models on campus like that. I believe Linus Pauling was very much the same way. Then
when Linus moved on in the early sixties, first going to that Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions at Santa Barbara and then to Stanford, he left Caltech with a whole bunch of people
who were in sort of postdoc jobs. Nobody knew what to do with them, and nobody knew what
obligation they had to them. So this wasn’t just Willy’s model, it was a model that probably
would not have been foreign to a German professor, and it was definitely true here. That was
one of the reasons why, though I worked on Willy-type stuff, and I think I did pretty well at it, I
also worked on other things that had nothing to do with that.
ASPATURIAN: You were not one of his acolytes, in other words?
TOMBRELLO: Only at times. I did experiments. I had some of my students working on some of
his projects. He thought enough of me that he would send these awfully bright students, like
Tom Weaver and Steve Koonin, down to work for me. They both came out of it, I think, pretty
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