Luis Walter
Alvarez was born in San Francisco on June 13, 1911, the son of
Walter C. Alvarez, the famous physician who, when he retired
from the Mayo Clinic, began a second career as a medical
columnist, appearing in newspapers throughout the United States.
Remembering his
childhood, Luis Alvarez recalls: "I had the good fortune as a
boy to be exposed to the electrical and mechanical apparatus in
my dad's laboratory. He realized I would probably go into
experimental science of some sort, so he apprenticed me for two
summers to a scientific instrument-maker's machine shop."
Alvarez attended
the University of Chicago, planning to be a chemist. I took him
two and a half years of college and seven straight B's in
chemistry courses to switch fields. He earned the B.A., M.A.,
Ph.D., all in physics, at Chicago. His sister was a part-time
secretary to Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley, and, because of that
connection, Lawrence looked up young Alvarez on one of his
visits to Chicago. Lawrence offered Alvarez a job as a research
assistant (with a salary of $1,000 a year) in 1936. Alvarez took
the post and thus joined the small and hardy band of physicists
led by Lawrence in the old Radiation Laboratory.
Alvarez was busy
--- and productive --- in his first years at Berkeley,
designing, among other things, an instrument that was developed
by the Bureau of Standards and for 15 years served as the
universal standard of length. Just before World War II, Alvarez
and a colleague discovered the radioactivity of tritium, best
known as a source of thermonuclear energy.
During the war,
he became a group leader in developing the atomic bomb. In 1945,
he had the extraordinary experience and responsibility of flying
in a B-29 that followed the plane that dropped the atomic bomb
on Hiroshima to observe and measure the blast. Alvarez also was
responsible for major developments in radar during the war; his
invention of the Ground Controlled Approach System --- to bring
in aircraft in bad weather --- won him aviation's highest award,
the Collier Trophy, presented to him by President Truman.
After the war, he
came back to Berkeley to work on new and powerful accelerators.
He designed and developed the prototype proton linear
accelerator, and he developed the hydrogen bubble chamber for
detecting particles which were the product of accelerator
collisions. That chamber, plus sophisticated data-analyzing
equipment, made it possible to discover a large number of
nuclear particles --- a brilliant piece of research which won
Alvarez the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1968.
Ten years later,
in recognition of his more than 30 patented inventions, Alvarez
was induced into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, joining
such figures as Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney, and the Wright
Brothers.
During his busy
career, Alvarez has found time for government service as a
member of President Nixon's Scientific Advisory Committee.
Earlier, after John F. Kennedy's assassination, Alvarez analyzed
the film of the shooting to determine the number and direction
of the shots. In recent years, Alvarez has been engaged in a
host of projects, including the proposal of a theory that an
asteroid, which left the element iridium behind in the earth's
sediments, was responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs along
with half the world's plant and animal life some 65 million
years ago.
__________
Schoch,
Russell, "Luis W. Alvarez: Physics, 1968." The Nobel
Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley
Development Office: UC Press.
1984, p. 26.