Luis Walter Alvarez liked to ask tough questions. As an experimental scientist, Dr. Alvarez used his innate curiosity to answer some of science’s most fundamental queries and change the way people understood the world.
Alvarez’s interest in science was a family legacy. Alvarez, born June 13, 1911, in San Francisco to Dr. Walter C. Alvarez, a second-generation Cuban American physician and researcher, Harriet Skidmore Smythe. The elder Alvarez realized his son’s penchant for science after the family’s move to Rochester, Mn., where he worked at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Alvarez quickly hired a clinic machinist to tutor the budding scientist.
Young Luis Alvarez followed his scientific pursuits to the University of Chicago where he honed a love for physics. He immersed himself in his studies, receiving masters and doctorate degrees in Physics just four years after receiving his bachelors.
Alvarez and his wife, Geraldine, left Chicago in 1936 when Edward Lawrence, a Nobel laureate in science, invited him to be a researcher and professor at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California Berkeley.
While at Berkeley, Alvarez studied optics and cosmic rays. He co-discovered the “East-West effect,” which explains why cosmic rays reaching the earth’s atmosphere vary depending on their direction. During this time, Alvarez also developed a beam of slow moving neutrons and discovered the radioactivity of Tritium, a source of thermonuclear energy. His experiments were the first to prove the K-electron capture phenomenon, a process where radioactive elements decay.
During World War II, Alvarez left Berkeley to conduct scientific research for the government. His government research led to the creation of Ground Control Alert, an aircraft radar system that helps planes land in poor weather conditions. His work earned him the 1945 Collier Award from the National Aeronautical Association. While at M.I.T., he developed the microwave early warning system (an alert system) and the Eagle high altitude bombing system, which detects targets on the ground by radar.
Alvarez also conducted research on nuclear weapons for the Manhattan Project. He and his colleagues created detonators for the plutonium bomb, while also serving as a scientific observer at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At the war’s end, Alvarez returned to Berkeley to continue studying cosmic rays and particle theory. His next invention in 1947 was the synchrotron, a proton linear accelerator that synchronizes magnetic and electric fields and the traveling particle beam. Turning his attention to particle composition, Alvarez decided to improve his colleague Donald Glaser’s bubble chamber, a device that studies subatomic particles, and discovered a number of resonance states (subatomic particles whose life spans are so short it makes them undetectable). His work earned him the 1968 Nobel Prize for his contribution to elementary particle physics.
However, Alvarez’s desire for discovery was not limited to physics. He was an investigator with the Warren Commission, a panel commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
He also sat on President Richard Nixon’s Scientific Advisory Committee. He was part of a crew of researchers who used mum rays to examine the density of the pyramid of King Kefren in Giza for hidden chambers.
Alvarez was also a prolific inventor who held patents for dozens of inventions. The most widely used is the image stabilizer for handheld cameras that he created while caring for his second wife, Janet Nadis, in Nairobi. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1978.
Alvarez’s many travels would lead to his last major collaboration and discovery. He and his son, Walter, found a band of sedimentary rock with high levels of iridium in 1980. After testing its age, they formulated a theory that an asteroid had struck the earth, creating a layer of dust in the atmosphere that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Although he passed away from cancer in 1988, Alvarez’s many roles—as an archeologist, geologist, aviator, investigator, physicist and inventor—will remain etched in scientific history.