The Nobel Tradition at Berkeley
Luis W. Alvarez
Physics, 1968
By Russell Schoch
1984
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. It 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., and 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 the
nuclear 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.
[Return to Luis Alvarez page]
