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 (19982008) as chair of Caltechs Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, and (9) graduate students and miscellaneous topics.

In this extensive interview, Thomas Tombrello discusses: his early life and family; his education at Rice Institute; his years in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) W. K. Kellogg Radiation Laboratory; his research in nuclear physics and materials science; his mentoring work with Caltech undergraduate and graduate students, including his innovative undergraduate course Physics 11 and his perspectives on student life at Caltech; his relationship with Steven E. Koonin, who went from being an advisee to his provost; his ten years as division chair of CalTech's Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy; the design and construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope project; five decades of Caltech presidents and provosts; his several decades of consulting work on national security and climate change; issues at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories; research in China; his years as Caltechs technology assessment officer, and the emergence of entrepreneurism at Caltech in the 1990s. The interview also includes anecdotes and recollections of notable Caltech faculty such as Robert Bacher, Harold Brown, Lee DuBridge, Richard Feynman, William A. Fowler, Murray Gell-Mann, Barclay Kamb, Charles Lauritsen, Thomas Lauritsen, Robert Leighton, Clair Patterson, Robert P. Sharp, and Fritz Zwicky.