Luis Walter Alvarez

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Image:Luis Alvarez ID badge.png

Alvarez's ID badge photo from Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Luis W. Alvarez (Cuba June 13, 1911 – September 1, 1988) of San Francisco, California, USA, was a famed American Nobel Prize-winning physicist of Cuban descent, who spent nearly all of his long professional career on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley.

He was the son of famed physician Walter C. Alvarez and grandson of Luis F. Alvarez, who worked as a doctor in Hawaii and developed a method for the better diagnosis of macular leprosy. His aunt, Mabel Alvarez, was a California artist who specialized in oil painting. His son, Walter Alvarez, is a noted Professor of Geology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alvarez attended the University of Chicago, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1932, his master's degree in 1934, and his PhD in 1936.

During World War II, Alvarez was a key participant in the Manhattan Project including Project Alberta on the dropping of the bomb, and in war projects in general. He flew as a scientific observer of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on The Great Artiste.

Alvarez and his student Lawrence Johnston designed the exploding-bridgewire detonators for the spherical implosives used on the Trinity and Nagasaki bombs [1].

In addition to weaponry-related projects, he also did important work relating to radar and navigation technologies. In particular, he received the 1945 Collier Trophy, the highest government honor in aviation, for developing the Ground Controlled Approach system (GCA), which pilots can use to land a plane in low visibility conditions. After the war he went on to invent the synchrotron.

Later in his career, Alvarez won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the discovery of a large number of resonance states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chamber and data analysis". This research was significant because it allowed scientists to record and study the short lived particles created in particle accelerators.

In 1980, he and his son, Walter, presented the asteroid-impact theory as an explanation for the presence of an unusual abundance of iridium associated with the geological event referred to as the K-T extinction boundary. Ten years after this initial proposal, evidence of a huge impact crater called Chicxulub off the coast of Mexico strongly confirmed their theory. Since that time, the concept of impact by an extraterrestrial body has become the most widely accepted explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Alvarez also proposed a jet-recoil theory for the Kennedy assassination to explain why John F. Kennedy's head jerked backwards if Lee Harvey Oswald, shooting from behind the president, was the assassin.

In 1978, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.