Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello

Interview in nine sessions (December 26–December 31, 2010) with Thomas A. Tombrello, the Robert H. Goddard Professor of Physics, Caltech. Each session is organized around a central topic or theme: (1) early years through college, (2) fifty-year career overview, (3) undergraduate students, (4) Kellogg Radiation Laboratory years, (5) work with Schlumberger research laboratory, (6) Caltech people and personalities, (7) work with national weapons laboratories, (8) ten-year tenure (1998–2008) as chair of Caltech’s Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, and (9) graduate students and miscellaneous topics. Tombrello opens with his family history, youth, early life, and education, primarily in Texas and Alabama, and his undergraduate (BA 1958) and graduate (PhD 1961) years at Rice Institute. He talks at length about his years in Caltech’s Kellogg Radiation Laboratory, including his research into nuclear physics, materials science, and applied physics, and about the science, culture, people, personalities, politics, and economics of Kellogg and the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA) over fifty years. There is extensive discussion of his mentoring work with Caltech undergraduate and graduate students, including his innovative undergraduate course Physics 11 and his perspectives on student life at Caltech. Of particular note is the discussion of his relationship with S. E. Koonin, who went from being Tombrello’s undergraduate advisee to his provost. Tombrello provides a wide-ranging, in-depth look at his ten years as division chair of PMA, covering research, recruitment, fundraising, collegial relationships within and beyond the division and with JPL, and the evolution of PMA under his oversight. He talks about his involvement in the design and construction of the Cahill Center for Astrophysics (dedicated in 2009) and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project. He describes his interactions with five decades of Caltech presidents and provosts, institute trustees, and various donors. Tombrello recaps his two years as research director at Schlumberger research and his several decades of consulting work on weapons, national security, energy, and climate change issues at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. He talks about his foray into earthquake prediction research, his research collaborations in China, his years as Caltech’s technology assessment officer, and the emergence of entrepreneurism at Caltech in the 1990s. Anecdotes and recollections of such notable Caltech figures as R. Bacher, J. Benton, H. Brown, L. DuBridge, R. Feynman, W. A. Fowler, M. Gell-Mann, B. Kamb A. Lange, C. Lauritsen, T. Lauritsen, R. Leighton, C. Patterson, R. Sharp, and F. Zwicky are also part of this oral histor

Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in an eighteenth-century Swiss canton: the case of Dr Laurent Garcin

Symposium: S048 - Putting Chinese natural knowledge to work in the long eighteenth centuryThis paper takes as a case study the experience of the eighteenth-century Swiss physician, Laurent Garcin (1683-1752), with Chinese medical and pharmacological knowledge. A Neuchâtel bourgeois of Huguenot origin, who studied in Leiden with Hermann Boerhaave, Garcin spent nine years (1720-1729) in South and Southeast Asia as a surgeon in the service of the Dutch East India Company. Upon his return to Neuchâtel in 1739 he became primus inter pares in the small local community of physician-botanists, introducing them to the artificial sexual system of classification. He practiced medicine, incorporating treatments acquired during his travels. taught botany, collected rare plants for major botanical gardens, and contributed to the Journal Helvetique on a range of topics; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, where two of his papers were read in translation and published in the Philosophical Transactions; one of these concerned the mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana), leading Linnaeus to name the genus Garcinia after Garcin. He was likewise consulted as an expert on the East Indies, exotic flora, and medicines, and contributed to important publications on these topics. During his time with the Dutch East India Company Garcin encountered Chinese medical practitioners whose work he evaluated favourably as being on a par with that of the Brahmin physicians, whom he particularly esteemed. Yet Garcin never went to China, basing his entire experience of Chinese medical practice on what he witnessed in the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia (the ‘East Indies’). This case demonstrates that there were myriad routes to Europeans developing an understanding of Chinese natural knowledge; the Chinese diaspora also afforded a valuable opportunity for comparisons of its knowledge and practice with other non-European bodies of medical and natural (e.g. pharmacological) knowledge.postprin

Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies

Taking as its premise that the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this book explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis, with contributions from artists, curators, theorists and activists. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez & Valérie Portefaix (MAP Office), Terike Haapoja & Laura Gustafsson, Laura Hall, Ilana Halperin, Donna Haraway & Martha Kenney, Ho Tzu Nyen, Bruno Latour, Jeffrey Malecki, Mary Mattingly, Mixrice (Cho Jieun & Yang Chulmo), Natasha Myers, Jean-Luc Nancy & John Paul Ricco, Vincent Normand, Richard Pell & Emily Kutil, Tomás Saraceno, Sasha Engelmann & Bronislaw Szerszynski, Ada Smailbegovic, Karolina Sobecka, Zoe Todd, Richard Streitmatter-Tran & Vi Le, Anna-Sophie Springer, Sylvère Lotringer, Peter Sloterdijk, Etienne Turpin, Pinar Yoldas, and Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer & Marina Zurkow