Luis Walter Alvarez

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Portrait of Luis Alvarez

Luis W. Alvarez (June 13, 1911 – September 1, 1988) of San Francisco, California, USA, was a famed physicist of Spanish descent, who worked at the University of California, Berkeley.

He is 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 was Califiornia artist and oil painter Mabel Alvarez. His sister is Bernice Alvarez Brownson and his son is Walter Alvarez, the 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.

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". Specifically, his research made it possible to record and study the short lived particles created in particle accelerators.

Alvarez's ID badge photo from Los Alamos.

During World War II, Alvarez was a key participant in the Manhattan Project and in war projects in general. Alvarez and his student Lawrence Johnston designed the exploding-bridgewire detonators for the spherical implosives used on the Trinity and Nagasaki bombs [1].

He additionally did important work relating to radar and aviation, and designed a system by which airplanes could land safely in low visibility conditions, useful both to bombers and commercial aviation. After the war he went on to invent the synchrotron. He flew as a scientific observer at the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

In 1980, with his son Walter Alvarez, a geologist, Luis proposed the asteroid-impact theory to explain the iridium anomaly of the K-T extinction boundary, the observed increased abundance of iridium in strata of that time. Ten years later, highly convincing evidence was presented showing that a huge impact crater called Chicxulub was, in fact, the "smoking gun" of the K-T boundary. This impact by an extraterrestrial body is now widely accepted as causing the extinction that killed 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.

He received the Collier Trophy for developing the Ground Controlled Approach system (GCA) for use in bad weather landings. The Collier Trophy is the highest honor in aviation. The award was presented to Alvarez by President Harry Truman.