Volume 2, Issue 15 October 2005
Berkeley's Scientific Legacy
Luis Alvarez, adventurer physicist
Luis W. Alvarez was an adventurer physicist. The two terms may seem an odd combination until one considers Alvarez's career. A member of the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, Alvarez developed the proton linear accelerator, patented three types of radar still used today, designed an instrument that for 15 years served as the universal standard of length, co-discovered the hydrogen isotope tritium, searched for hidden chambers in an Egyptian pyramid, analyzed the Zapruder film documenting John F. Kennedy's assassination, and won the 1968 Nobel Prize in physics. And that's just the short list.
Luis W. Alvarez served on President Richard Nixon's Scientific Advisory Committee. (courtesy Berkeley Lab)
Alvarez was born June 13, 1911, in San Francisco. His father was Walter C. Alvarez, a famous physician/medical columnist.
"I had the good fortune as a boy to be exposed to the electrical and mechanical apparatus in my dad's laboratory," Alvarez once said. "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."
His father's encouragement paid off. After switching from chemistry to physics, Alvarez earned his PhD at the University of Chicago. At the time, his sister was the secretary of famed UC Berkeley physicist Ernest O. Lawrence. The two met and in 1936 Lawrence offered Alvarez a research assistant job at the groundbreaking Radiation Laboratory that would eventually become Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Just before World War II began, Alvarez co-discovered tritium, a source of thermonuclear energy. During the war, he invented aviation and radar technology and was a member of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. Indeed, Alvarez flew in the plane trailing the aircraft that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The physicist was onboard to observe the effects of the blast.
Luis Alvarez with his bubble chamber. (courtesy Berkeley Lab)
After the war ended, Alvarez returned to the University and designed a proton linear accelerator that was the basis of today's systems for creating high-energy radiation. Then, in 1953, he attended a meeting of the American Physical Society where his eventual Rad Lab colleague (and 1960 Nobel Laureate) Donald Glaser presented his bubble chamber, a device to study subatomic particles. Alvarez improved upon Glaser's instrument and used it to discover a large number of resonance states, subatomic particles that can't be directly detected because they live for so short a time. Glaser's use of his hydrogen bubble chamber and data analysis equipment enabled the researchers to deduce the existence of the resonance states. In 1968, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics."
Over the following years, Alvarez would embark on a variety of projects. He analyzed the film of JFK's assassination to determine the number of shots fired. With a team of LBL researchers, he used cosmic rays to probe the Egyptian pyramid of Cephren for hidden chambers. In 1980, he and his son Walter Alvarez, a UC Berkeley geologist, first posited the now widely-accepted theory that a giant asteroid crashed into the Earth 65 million years ago, spewing smoke in the atmosphere that blocked the sun, eventually leading to the death of the dinosaurs.
Luis Alvarez's autobiography, Adventures Of A Physicist, was published in 1987. He died the following year.