To his admirers, Luis W. Alvarez was the most accomplished, inventive, and versatile experimental physicist of his generation. During World War II, he achieved major breakthroughs in radar, played a key role in the Manhattan Project, and served as a scientific observer at the bombing of Hiroshima. In the decades that followed, he helped revolutionize particle physics with the hydrogen bubble chamber, developed an innovative method to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Chephren, and shot melons at a rifle range to test his controversial theory about the Kennedy assassination. In 1968 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. At the very end of his life, he collaborated with his son on a project to demonstrate that an asteroid impact was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Alvarez was also a combative and ambitious figure—widely feared by his students and associates—who testified as a government witness at the security hearing that destroyed the public career of his friend and colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer. Author Alec Nevala-Lee shares ideas, lessons, and anecdotes from Alvarez’s life.
Nevala-Lee’s book Collisions: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs (W.W. Norton) is available for purchase.
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