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LUIS W. ALVAREZ
1911-1988
BY RICHARD L. GARWIN
auks W. ALVAREZ was outstanding as scientist and engineer. It is
a challenge to his friends and biographers to do justice to the
breadth and depth of Luis's accomplishments. His bare-bones
biography does provide a hint:
Physicist, born in San Francisco June 13,1911, son of Walter
C. and Harriet Smyth Alvarez, marriect (1936) Geraldine Smith-
wick, with whom he had two children, Walter and Jean. In 1958
married Janet L. Landis two children, Donald and Helen.
Luis~ Alvarez earned a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in physics from the
University of Chicago in 1932, 1934, and 1936, respectively.
Beginning in 1936, his entire career was spent at the University
of California, Berkeley, es professor ofphysics from 1945 to 197S,
and professor emeritus from 1978. He was associate director of
the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory from 1949 to 1959 and from
1975 to 1978. He did radar research and development at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1940 to 1943,
and then worked at Los Alamos in 1944 and 1945.
Luis Alvarez was a consultant over the years to numerous
agencies of the United States government and was a member of
the President's Science Advisory Committee in 1973. He was a
Pronounced in the Spanish fashion as "Lou-ease," but almost everyone
called him "Lou-ee," for his nickname, Luie.
7
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
long-nine member of the IBM Science Advisory Committee ant!
a director of the Hewlett-Packard Company.
His talents diet not go unrecognized. He was a fellow of the
American Physical Society (and president of the APS in 1969), a
member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National
Academy of Engineering, of the American Philosophical Society
and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of Phi Beta
Kappa and Sigma Xi. He was also an associate member of the
Institut D'Egypt.
He received the Collier Trophy (aviation) in 1946, the Mecial
for Merit in 194S, the John Scott Medal in 1953, the Einstein
Medal in 1961, the National Mecial of Science in 1964, the
Michelson Award in 1965, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 196S, the
Dudley Wright Prize (Interdisciplinary Science) in 1981. He was
named California Scientist of the Year in 1960 and named to the
National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1978.
Luis Alvarez presented a fascinating view of his life and
involvements in his autobiography,2 and the flavor of his scien-
tific activities is available in a recent book subtitled Selected Works
of Luis W. Alvarez, with Commentary By his Students and Colleagues.3
Luis's father was a physician in San Francisco, where he worked
each morning on research in physiology, and as a private prac-
tinoner in the afternoons to support his family. Although Luis
showed no interest in the biological aspects of his father's work,
by the time he was ten he could use all of the small tools in his
father's shop and wire up electrical circuits.
In 1925 Walter Alvarez left his vex y successful practice as an
internist in San Francisco to join the staff of the Mayo Clinic in
Rochester, Minnesota, as a research physiologist, resuming his
2Alvarez, Adventures of a Physicist, by Luis W. Alvarez, Basic Books, Inc., New
York (1987~. All unattributed quotations in this tribute are from this book.
3Discovering Alvarez, edited by W. Peter Trower, the University of Chicago
Press, Chicago and London (1987~. This volume contains a complete list of
Alvarez publications and patents through 1986, to which should be added U.S.
Patent 4,911,541, Inertial Pendulum Stabilizer with Stephen F. Sporer issued on
March 27, 1990.
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LUIS W. ALVAREZ
9
career there as a clinician a few years later during the Depres-
sion. On his retirement, he had a third career as a syndicated
newspaper medical columnist, gaining fame as "America's Fam-
ily Doctor."
During two high school summers, Luis added to his experi-
mental skills as an apprentice in the instrument shop of the Mayo
Clinic. Enrolling in the University of Chicago in chemistry, he
discoverecI instead a real talent and passion in physics, begin-
ning with a fascination for optics in which his native talent was
nourished by Albert Michelson's optical technicians. Studying
optics, workingwith Michelson's own instruments, taking twelve
physics courses in five quarters, Alvarez soon read in the physics
library every word Michelson had published. Thus he began his
long and tremendously facile acquaintanceship with the litera-
ture, exercising an excellent memory for the substance, presen-
tation, and even the location of articles he had react many years
before.
In 1934 Luis began his long involvementwith aviation, soloing
"withjust three hours of dual instruction. " He flew for fiftyyears,
logging more than a thousand hours as a pilot before deciding
at the age of seventy-three that it was time to put away that
demanding ant] delightful avocation.
In 1936 Ernest O. Lawrence invited Alvarez to join the Berke-
ley Radiation Laboratory. Luis's older sister, Gladys, worked for
Lawrence in Berkeley as a secretary, and on a visit to Chicago,
Lawrence (then thirty-two) invites! Luis to tour the Chicago
Exposition with him, the beginning of a close and productive
friendship.
At Berkeley Luis spent almost a year "reading everything that
had been written on the subject" of nuclear physics. He also soon
knew the contents "of every drawer and cabinet in the Racliation
Laboratory," resurrecting the first small cyclotrons from oblivi-
on. Key to his evolution as a scientist was Ernest Lawrence's
journal club, meeting every Monday night at 7:30 a tradition
that continued for clecades in Luis's home. Also influential was
the "Bethe Bible," three articles published by Hans Bethe in
Reviews of Modern Physics in 1936 en cl 1937. Luis's highly devel-
oped competitive spirit was stimulated by these 468 pages "If
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
he (Bethel said a phenomenon would never be observable, I
wanted to prove him wrong, which would make both of us happy.
In several significant instances over the next four years, ~ (licI."
Luis's discoveries in physics are treated at length in his
autobiography and in Discovering Alvarez, cited earlier. The
discovery of the K-capture process, of He3, the extraordinary
development of the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, and the
work on the comet-impact origin of the extinction of species are
evidence of a person of extraordinary experimental talent. But
Luis was much more, in driving himself to fins} the most impor-
tant application of his capabilities.
Luis recounts his father's injunction "to sit every few months
in my reading chair for an entire evening, close my eyes, anti try
to think of new problems to solve. I took his advice very seriously
and have been glad ever since that I did."4
Those who lack perfection in educational opportunity might
take heart in his further words, "By almost any standard, my
training at Chicago had been atrocious.... From another point
of view, though, my training had been extraordinarily gooci. I
couIcI build anything out of metal or glass, and I had the
enormous self-confidence to be expected of a Robinson Crusoe
who had spent three years on a desert island. I had browsed the
library so thoroughly that I knew where to find the books I
needed to learn almost anything I wanted to know. " An c! Alvarez
characteristically would disappear for days into the library at
Berkeley, emerging with ideas, plans for experiments, explana-
tions for puzzling results.
Time after time, Luis showed that dogged but imaginative
persistence that forced him not to stop with the first idea because
there might be a better one. RepeatecIly he would leap to a
conclusion and then strive to find evidence that would refute it.
Alvarez was perpetually surprised to find indivicluals who do not
challenge their own results, and who do not immediately accept
even the strongest contrary evidence.
4This tribute draws upon my review of "Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist,"
published in Physics Today, pp. 8~84 (December 1987~.
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LUIS W. ALVAREZ
11
During World War II, Alvarez played a key role at the MIT
Radiation Laboratory, working on radar and other systems.
There he invented Vixen, which permitted radar-equipped
aircraft once again to destroy surfaced German submarines.
After an early success, radar had become ineffective in this role
because the submarine's radar warning receiver indicated the
increasing signal as the aircraft approached on its attack run.
Alvarez thought of reducing the radar power output inversely as
the cube of the range to the submarine. As the aircraft ap-
proached, the submarine would detect decreasing radar signal
and have no fear of impending attack, while the aircraft would
receive a continuously increasing radar reflection (returned
signal energy goes as the inverse fourth power of range) .
From the MIT Rad Lab, Luis and his group invented, perfect-
ed, and fielded Ground-Controlled Approach (GCA) to allow
aircraft and pilots to land at night and in poor visibility. Also at
MIT, Luis contributed greatly to the MEW (Microwave Early
Warning System) and the Eagle blind bombing system, although
he left MIT before MEW or Eagle were complete. Like GCA,
these important systems used the Alvarez invention of the first
microwave linear arrays that were "electrically scannable," the
phased array.
After his sixweeks in England to transplant GCA, Luis left MIT
where he was head of Special Systems (also known as Luie's
Gadgets) to work with Enrico Fermi at the Metallurgical Labora-
tory at the University of Chicago.
Luie soon moved to Los Alamos. Among his major contribu-
tions was the invention and development of capacitor-discharge
bridgewire detonators for simultaneous initiation of the multi-
ple high-explosive "lenses" in the implosion system of the pluto-
nium bomb. With a detonation wave speed in high explosive of
some ~ km/s, 10 nanoseconds (one "shake" as itwas called at Los
Alamos) timing uncertainty would cause about 0.1 mm asymme-
tryin the shockwave; normal blasting caps demonstrated 10,000-
times greater timing variation. Typical of Alvarez, the first trial of
his invention involved firing a normal "bridgewire" with a 1 5-kV
capacitor rather than the typical Molt battery. The necessary
improvement in timing accuracy was accompanied by improve-
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
ment in safety because of the elimination of the more sensitive
· .
primer exp oslve.
Returning to Berkeley after WorIci War II, Luis designed the
first proton linear accelerator and heacled the team that brought
it into operation. He also provicled the first published proposal
for charge-exchange accelerators, doubling the energy available
in electrostatic acceleration and (no small matter) allowing the
ion source and the target region both to be at laboratory poten-
tial.
After World War II, Alvarez was swept up in an E. O. Lawrence
passion to build a large deuteron accelerator for the production
of plutonium for nuclear weapons; for once Alvarez did not
himself look at the data, which wouIcl have convinced him that
there was plenty of uranium for the reactor production route.
Recognizing that he had drifted far from experimental physics,
he recast himself as research assistant to two of his own research
assistants. This discipline and redirection obviously bore fruit-
in the Alvarez work on particle physics with hydrogen bubble
chambers for which he won the 1968 Nobel Prize, and in his
commitment to technical work and avoidance of formal man-
agement roles. His intellectual curiosity and talent for experi-
ment led him to conceive and to execute the "x-raying" of the
pyramid of Khephren by the use of cosmic-ray muons, establish-
ing that this pyramid had no hidden chamber.
In Alvarez's long and broad history, it is striking to observe
how some of his best and most practical ideas were only very
much later brought to fruition by his own efforts, despite his
early patents that would have been available to profit-minded
industry at relatively low cost. The stabilized optical system for
binoculars or cameras that Luie invented in 1963 while his wife,
Jan, lay ill with malaria in Kenya has only in the late 19SOs been
sold (by a company of which Ian is president) as a stabilizing
zoom lens for shoulcler-helcI video cameras, despite working
systems twenty years earlier. The same lag is found with the
variable-power lens he invented and demonstrated to Polaroid
in the 1960s. Itfirst appeared on the consumer goods market (in
the Polaroid Spectrum camera) in l9X6.
.~ .~
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LUIS W. ALVAREZ
13
The life of an inventor (even one in the Inventor's Hall of
Fame and winner of the Collier Trophy in Aviation) may be a lot
of fun, but it is not always profitable; Alvarez realized the first
profit from any of his forty-some inventions just a few years
before his death.
Luis Alvarez was very much aware of himself and carried into
his physics the constructive competitive spirit he hac! learned
early in athletics. He was quick tojudge, but also very much open
to reason and to his own challenge of the validity of his judg-
ment. "The most," "the best," "the first" were important to Luis,
in others es well as in himself, and throughout his life he rejoiced
in being associated with the very best in physics, in industry, and
in government. He wrote "Heroes have been important to my
development as a scientist.... In aviation my two principal
heroes are jimmy Doolittle and Chuck Yeager." Luis wrote,
frankly and perceptively, 'valuing honors myself, I've worked
hard to see to it that my favorite canclidates win them as well, " and
he could point to successes in that fielcI.
Luis enjoyed the broad spectrum of intelligent laymen at the
summer encampment ofthe Bohemian Club and gave illuminating,
enjoyable, and well-prepared talks there. Luis's love of the unique
shows itself in his description of his work in 1957 with a panel
involved with the "Supersecret National Security Agency.... We
were the first outside panel with access to NSA secrets.... I
especially enjoyed learning in great detail from William Fried-
man how the United States broke the Japanese diplomatic codes
before Woric} War II."
Luis W. Alvarez was a consummate engineer and technologist
who contributed greatly to the evolution of productive and
effective civil and military aviation. His knowledge of technology
was essential to his outstanding achievements in physics, and his
clever and creep inventions in the field of optics may yet have the
major impact that they deserve.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
radiation laboratory
