Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
1
THE ALVAREZ DISCOVERY
Chance favors only the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
THE
FATHER
In a picture taken at the MIT Radiation Laboratory during World
War II, his hat at a jaunty angle and a cigarette dangling from his
lips, a cocky smile on his face and a coil of wire strung around his
neck, Luis Alvarez appears not as the stereotypical dull, intro-
verted scientist but more like a cross between Indiana Jones and
Humphrey Bogart (Figure 1). He was a man who lived life to the
fullest and continued seeking new challenges long after most
would have begun to rest on their laurels.
Luis's father, Walter Alvarez, after whom Luis named his son,
was a well-known San Francisco physician who encouraged Luis's
early interest in science. In 1922, when only 11, Luis surprised fam-
ily friends by demonstrating the first crystal set any of them had
seen. His talent for constructing apparatus of various sorts would
last a lifetime. After his father moved to the Mayo Clinic in Minne-
sota, Luis spent his summers during high school helping out in the
clinic machine shop, where he became a self-described "good pupil."
He began his undergraduate years at the University of Chicago first
as a chemistry major and then switched to physics, which became
his constant and lifelong love. To call a person a physicist was to
Luis Alvarez the highest praise. Physicists were a breed apart, clev-
erly applying their superior minds to the most interesting and
important problems. He logically enough titled his autobiography
Adventures of a Physicist.
2
Luis launched his scientific career by moving to the University
of California at Berkeley, where in 1936 he went to work with
