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