Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be much smarter than I am, to be able to hold in mind like Tolstoy the complicated cross-weavings of War and Peace. Or to be able to build one of those imaginary mathematical structures so abstruse that only a few people in the world know enough mathematics to see them. Specialists of the most rarified kind are what such people are, but occasionally their intelligence is broad as well as deep, and they wander among disciplines making lasting contributions. In the twentieth century, perhaps no physicist, and maybe no scientist, ranged more widely or with more effect than Luis Alvarez, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for using new methods to find subatomic particles that no one had ever seen before.
In addition to the work for which he was given the Nobel Prize, Alvarez invented the radar system that enabled pilots to land by themselves at night or when fog or bad weather had obscured an airfield; before that they had to rely on a voice on a radio to tell them where the ground was. He designed the mechanism that detonated the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. He devised a means of collecting radioactive gas from the sky over Germany when the government wanted to determine whether the Nazis had developed the ability to make an atomic bomb (they hadn’t). He invented a fountain pen with a camera, for spies, and a device that used strobe lights to help golfers improve their swings; an acquaintance arranged for him to demonstrate the device to President Eisenhower, who bought one for the White House gym. After a discussion of the Kennedy assassination with some younger physicists, he demonstrated by a close assessment of the Zapruder film and his own study of gunshots that President Kennedy had been shot from behind and not from in front by a gunman on the grassy knoll (American Journal of Physics, September 1976). Tracking cosmic rays traveling through one of the pyramids, as if on an X-ray, he searched for concealed chambers, the first time anyone had used cosmic particles in a practical way. Considering a piece of rock the size of a cigarette pack, he arrived at the explanation of how the dinosaurs disappeared.
Alvarez’s father had told him to “think crazy” in the afternoons, and once a week Alvarez would sit for two hours in his living room and close his eyes and think of problems to solve.
A colleague said of him that he might have a hundred ideas in a day, of which “fifty were probably useless, another twenty-five too difficult to do, and among the remaining twenty-five one or two would be worth a Nobel Prize.” The colleague’s remarks appear in Collisions, Alec Nevala-Lee’s new biography, the first of Alvarez. Nevala-Lee writes, “Alvarez had so many ideas that his associates learned to ignore whatever he said until he repeated it three times.”
Alvarez had a Latin-sounding name from Spanish ancestors, but he looked Nordic, with thin blond hair and blue eyes. His intelligence was restless, but his habits were fixed. He would buy six of the same sportscoat at a time. He wore brown shoes, blue pants, and short-sleeve shirts so regularly that they were practically a uniform. For breakfast, he typically had an egg and an English muffin and for lunch a hamburger and a beer. He liked classical music and ragtime and could play piano by ear and said that he could pick out anything in the key of F. Each night he watched the television news, hoping to find problems to solve, and made notes on napkins.
He was high-strung and ambitious, and believed that the power a person possessed was indicated by the degree to which one could get others to do what one wanted them to do, or, conversely, to resist doing what others wanted one to do. By such a measure “I have been powerful for some five decades,” he wrote in his autobiography, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (1987). He did not hesitate to rebuke people for mistakes in their findings, especially if they didn’t admit them. Nevala-Lee mentions an astrophysicist who said, “Luie was considered brilliant, creative and terrifying.”
Alvarez was born in San Francisco in 1911. His father, Walter, was a doctor. His mother, Harriet, was the child of missionaries in China; she came to the US as a teenager and met Walter in high school. Walter worked at the Mayo Clinic, and Alvarez went to high school in Minnesota and then to the University of Chicago, where he first studied chemistry. The lectures consisted of “beautiful theory,” he wrote, but the labs were “repulsive.” Nevala-Lee writes that Alvarez hated how the chemicals smelled and was hardly ever able to produce the substances that the experiments called for. On one of his exams he guessed the answer of a consequential question and was appalled to be right. “I imagined with horror a lifetime in chemistry always guessing,” he wrote. He ended up with a degree in physics.
As a graduate student at Chicago Alvarez met Geraldine Smithwick, a senior, and a few days after he got his doctorate they were married. His Spanish grandfather offered to pay for a year studying in Europe, but as Alvarez and Smithwick were planning the trip he withdrew the offer, saying that the Spanish Civil War might spread and make traveling dangerous. Alvarez had to find a job. Most physicists of the period taught or made their livings “prospecting for oil with seismic techniques in Texas,” Nevala-Lee writes.
Alvarez hoped to teach but had no luck finding a job. His older sister, Gladys, worked part-time as a secretary for Ernest Lawrence, the head of the Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley. As a last resort Alvarez asked Gladys if there might be a place for him at the lab, and in a few days he got a telegram from her that began, “Lawrence says come on out.”
In graduate school Alvarez had studied properties of light. To work at the Radiation Lab he needed to know nuclear physics, which was nascent then. As a matter of opinion it began either in 1896 with the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel or, more popularly, in 1911 with the discovery by Lord Rutherford of the existence of the atom’s nucleus.
In 1919 Lord Rutherford aimed an alpha particle at a nitrogen molecule, and the collision separated a proton from the nitrogen’s nucleus. Having thrown off the proton, the nitrogen, which has eight protons, became oxygen, which has seven protons. Rutherford’s experiment changed nuclear physics from what Alvarez called “an observational science like astronomy” to one in which, Nevala-Lee writes, scientists could “explore the atom, instead of watching it passively.”
Alvarez learned nuclear physics by reading. From the library he brought home editions of Nature, the Proceedings of the Royal Society, and the Philosophical Magazine, a British scientific journal. “Every night for more than a year I scoured the bound volumes,” he wrote.
Anyone who worked at the Radiation Lab had to know how to make repairs to the cyclotron, the particle accelerator that Lawrence had built in 1929. The repairman always got oil on him (so far as I can tell, no women repaired the cyclotron). The oil penetrated his clothes, his skin, and his hair and clung to him. At cocktail parties Alvarez would meet people, and from the way he smelled they would say, “You must work at the Radiation Laboratory.” A colleague told him that the most important papers in journals could be found by examining the edge of a volume for oil stains, indicating that many others had read it.
So as not to be viewed as a dilettante, Alvarez spent eighty hours a week at the Radiation Lab, which was an exceptionally hazardous workplace. It was built from wood and saturated with oil, making it especially susceptible to fire. There was so much errant power in the air that Alvarez could touch a lightbulb to any metal surface and the lightbulb would glow, “my body acting as an antenna,” he wrote. The scientists built Geiger counters to measure the radiation around them, but the readings seemed too constant to be reliable. They figured they weren’t good at building Geiger counters, then discovered that the readings were accurate and there was radiation around them all the time. One day Alvarez wanted to show a friend the beam of particles directed at a target inside the cyclotron, and they peered into the chamber. Alvarez expected to see a blue beam, but there wasn’t any beam and the target was red, meaning that he and his friend had looked into the chamber when it was radioactive. Nevala-Lee writes that by the time the two of them pulled back they had been “exposed to the highest dose of fast neutrons in history.” Neutron radiation can cause a number of cancers, including liver cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and esophageal cancer.
In 1940 Alvarez left the Radiation Lab for MIT, then he went to the University of Chicago to work with Enrico Fermi, and in 1944 Robert Oppenheimer brought him to Los Alamos to work on the atomic bomb. Toward the end of July 1945 Alvarez left for Tinian, the island in the western Pacific where the two atomic bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man, were being kept in Quonset huts. Driving each day from his tent to the huts Alvarez passed a cemetery “with hundreds of crosses and Stars of David marking the graves of the Americans who died taking Tinian from the Japanese,” he wrote. He thought about how many more graves would be dug if the invasion of the Japanese home islands, planned for the fall, took place. Weapons and machines and various other objects for the invasion were being gathered on islands in the Pacific, including Tinian. Among the inventory were “caskets waiting to be filled with the bodies of American servicemen.”
Fat Man’s plutonium core, a small sphere, was stored on a shelf in a metal box that was warm from the decay of the alpha particles. A soldier stood beside it. Alvarez and the others would hold the sphere in their hands and feel its warmth. A reader of Alvarez’s memoir might wince at his saying “I continue to read nonsense about the dangers of handling plutonium. It can certainly be handled without the frequently mentioned lead-lined gloves.”
Little Boy was dropped first. On August 5 the soldiers and scientists wrote messages to the Japanese emperor on it, but Alvarez wrote only his own name. The bomb was loaded aboard a B-29 that the pilot named Enola Gay, after his mother, then everyone went to see a movie, and then there was a briefing where they learned that Little Boy would be dropped on Hiroshima.
The Enola Gay took off on August 6. To record the force of the explosion Alvarez followed eleven miles behind, aboard a plane named The Great Artiste in homage to the accuracy of its bombardier. Little Boy took forty-five seconds to descend to the altitude at which it detonated. Then a flash of white light passed through Alvarez’s plane, and in another moment a shockwave struck it. Nevala-Lee writes that the experience resembled “sitting on a trash can that was smacked by a baseball bat—the whole plane seemed to crinkle, making a cracking sound like a snap of sheet metal.”
Between Alvarez and the pilot was a passage like a tunnel that Alvarez crawled through to look out the front of the plane. “The cloud seemed to be rising out of a wooded area devoid of population,” he wrote. Alvarez assumed that the bombardier had missed Hiroshima and dropped the bomb on a forest, squandering all the money and science that had gone into making it, but the aircraft commander told him that the aiming had been precise and that Hiroshima had been destroyed.
Returning to Los Alamos, Alvarez met scientists who were deeply pained at having built bombs that killed so many people. He thought that such an attitude failed to grasp the realities of war. At Tinian he had watched processions of bombers leave for Japanese cities. On a single night they had killed 90,000 people in Tokyo. He believed that had the atomic bombs not been dropped more people would have died than the more than 200,000 who were killed by Little Boy and Fat Man. He thought the bombs were so fearsome that they would end war for all time. In any case, he found himself unable to talk to people who were plagued by moral considerations and avoided them.
Alvarez and Geraldine had two children. Because of the need for secrecy while working on the atomic bomb, he wasn’t able to talk to her about what he was doing, which wore on their marriage. “Gerry and I forgot how to share our lives,” he wrote. They were divorced in 1957. Alvarez then married Janet Landis, who was a day shy of being twenty years younger than him, and they had two more children.
In 1962, having seen the pyramids for the first time, Alvarez became interested in the interiors of the ones belonging to the line of Sneferu, Cheops, and Chephren. Sneferu’s pyramid, built in about 2600 BC, had two chambers; Cheops’s, the “Great Pyramid,” had three; but Chephren’s appeared not to have any. Archaeologists believed that Sneferu’s and Cheops’sv pyramids were built during periods of innovation, which had lapsed by Chephren’s time. Alvarez thought that such an attitude “was contrary to everything I knew of human nature. If Chephren’s grandfather built two chambers and his father three, it seemed most likely to me that Chephren would have ordered four.”
With equipment he designed, Alvarez and his team tracked the progress of cosmic rays passing through Chephren’s pyramid. They began monitoring the pyramid on June 4, 1967. The following day the Six Day War broke out, and they had to leave. After the war they returned. Alvarez soon went back to Berkeley and two months later got a message saying that the team had found an EGG, meaning an East Grand Gallery. He believed that he was on the verge of the most important discovery in archaeology. “I can’t express the exhilaration I felt,” he wrote. “My work in physics might soon be forgotten, but I would go down in history as a great archaeologist!”
Back in Egypt Alvarez saw that the pattern of the rays seemed too large to be plausible. “A chamber that big would certainly cause the pyramid to collapse,” he wrote. The mistake was in the computer program. Remarkably, rather than being downcast, Alvarez felt that he had had two of the most exciting days of his life. “The disappointment of learning that a discovery is false hardly subtracts at all from the elation you feel while you believe it to be real,” he declared. He and his team eventually decided that the pyramid was solid. “‘I hear you didn’t find a chamber,’ people frequently say to me,” he wrote. “‘It wasn’t that we didn’t find a chamber,’ I reply. ‘We found that there wasn’t any chamber.’” When people suggested that a metaphysical presence in the pyramids was responsible for the misleading results, Alvarez called those people pyramidiots.
Alvarez believed that he would most likely be remembered for work with his son Walter “in a field about which I knew absolutely nothing until I was sixty-six years old.” Walter, a geologist, had chiseled a small rock from a wall in Italy. The rock was divided into three layers, like a sandwich, Nevala-Lee writes. The lower layer was white limestone, the middle was a half-inch of clay, and the upper layer was red limestone. The clay had been deposited on the ocean floor 65 million years earlier, around the time when the dinosaurs disappeared. In the lower layer were fossils of tiny creatures that lived in the ocean. In the layer above the clay there were none.
Alvarez discovered that the clay had three hundred times more iridium, a silvery white metal, than either layer of limestone had. Iridium mostly comes from space, from cosmic debris or cosmic rays. Alvarez thought that perhaps the iridium had come from a supernova, the explosion of a giant star. If that’s how it arrived, Alvarez and the researchers working with him would find plutonium in the clay, and they did. A second test, though, didn’t find any. They decided that a radioactive particle from a nearby lab had come in through the window and spiked their sample.
Alvarez thought that perhaps the solar system had passed through a cloud of molecular hydrogen, “killing the animals by anoxia,” he wrote—but that would have taken longer than the geological record suggested. For six weeks Alvarez came up with explanations and dismissed them. A colleague suggested that a collision with a huge asteroid could have left the iridium, but neither he nor Alvarez could think of a “believable killing scenario.” An asteroid six miles across smashing into the ocean would cause a devastating tidal wave but not one so big that it would drown dinosaurs in Mongolia and Montana. Alvarez decided finally that a gigantic piece of “solar system debris hit the earth” and threw dust up into the stratosphere that for several years made the sky pitch-black. The plants died without light and most of the animals starved.
Alvarez published “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction” in the June 6, 1980, issue of Science. A protégé of Alvarez’s thought that the assertion “had all the characteristics of a nut theory.” Dinosaur experts rejected it almost universally. They tended to believe that dinosaurs had disappeared slowly, perhaps from changes in the climate that unfolded over thousands of years.
In 1984 a poll of paleontologists, geophysicists, and geologists found that only a fifth of them believed in Alvarez’s conclusion. Nevertheless it was difficult to refute, and a year later a cover story in Time magazine said that Alvarez’s theory was endorsed by “all but a few diehards.”
Alvarez would get so upset with people who disputed his theory that his face would turn red. In 1988 The New York Times published “The Debate Over Dinosaur Extinctions Takes an Unusually Rancorous Turn.” Alvarez told the writer, “I don’t like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they’re really not very good scientists. They’re more like stamp collectors.” Nevala-Lee writes that Alvarez “was paraphrasing a quotation attributed to his hero Lord Rutherford: ‘All science is either physics or stamp collecting.’”
Alvarez was seventy-six when he called paleontologists stamp collectors. A few months earlier he had lost his balance while walking on Telegraph Avenue and had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. A few weeks after surgery, he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He told the Times, “I can say these things about some of our opponents because this is my last hurrah, and I have to tell the truth.” He died at seventy-seven. From a plane a friend scattered his ashes over the Pacific.
Six weeks after Alvarez died, his son Walter was at a conference in Utah when a presenter suggested two minutes of silence to honor him. Walter stood and said, “My father would have been mortified. He’d much rather have a good fight in his memory.”
English (US) · 