Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–85
ASPATURIAN: It wasn’t Greenstein?
TOMBRELLO: Jesse Greenstein [d. 2002]. Jesse basically had Palomar, and ran, in a visionary
way, astronomy [1948-1972]. Bob Bacher had started both high-energy physics and radio
astronomy. Radio astronomy, of course, was centered at Owens Valley [Radio Observatory]. It
wasn’t exactly a power in its own right. I don’t know if Jesse ran it or not, but it was connected
in some way. I mentioned how differently appointments were handled before we established the
staffing committee in 1986. Before then, groups would propose people and put them through,
usually by horse trading with the other groups. Back in the early sixties, this was not hard,
because there were plenty of openings. People were retiring, they were dying. PMA was
building up programs, because there was a lot more funding. The place could grow. But it was
not entirely collegial. [Laughter] Definitely there were old feuds, because Willy or Charlie had
just pushed something through, or Jesse DuMond had pushed something through. There were
hurt feelings and anger about it. You know, we were definitely divided up in many, many ways.
It was not unpleasant, but it was clear that these groups were separate. That’s the reason the
unintended consequence of the staffing committee turned out to be enormously important,
because it would almost have been impossible to start a new group here in the face of this
polarization.
I mentioned Matt Sands. Let’s talk about him. I mentioned Kellogg’s old amplifiers that
were sitting in the racks from the war—well, Matt had designed all that stuff. He had written the
book on fast electronics or what was fast electronics during the war. And all this stuff got built.
Matt had written textbooks on it and was one of our high-energy physicists. When I got here in
the early sixties, he had a plan. And that was to build a big Southern California high-energy
physics accelerator. I think it was going to be 200 GeV. Too big for Caltech. It would probably
take getting USC and UCLA involved to make it work—and maybe other places. I think UC
San Diego. Bacher decided the project was too big for Caltech, and Matt left [1963] to go to
SLAC [Stanford Linear Accelerator Center]. Well, he became a professor at UC Santa Cruz, but
clearly working at SLAC. Caltech decided not to grow in that direction. They were running the
old synchrotron. Bacher had gotten the model magnet for the Bevatron—a proton machine—at
Berkeley, and Bob Walker had come from Cornell and made it into an electron machine. He had
been, I think, a grad student at Los Alamos. A lot of them knew one another from Los Alamos
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