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ects that came later in his career showed his willingness to step out-
side physics if a problem piqued his curiosity or appeared suffi-
ciently important. One was his use of cosmic rays, in X-ray-like
fashion, to determine whether, as Luis suspected but most Egyptol-
ogists doubted, the Second Pyramid of Chephren contained undis-
covered burial chambers. Luis was never reluctant to fly in the face
of conventional wisdom in a field outside his own and to conduct
an experiment to see who was right. In this case, however, as he
readily admitted, he was proven wrong. When people who knew of
his work would say, "I hear you did not find a chamber," Luis would
reply, "No, we found there wasn't any chamber."
4
To seek but not to
find a chamber is to find an absence of evidence. To determine that
there was no chamber was to find evidence of absence. This is a dis-
tinction with a difference, the importance of which would turn up
years later in the dinosaur extinction controversy.
His greatest public notice came from his investigation into the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, particularly from his meticulous
and inventive analysis of the Zapruder film. One frame showed
JFK's head moving sharply backward as the third and fatal bullet
struck, providing evidence to assassination buffs that a second gun-
man had fired from the front. Surely, common sense tells us, a head
snapped backward by the impact of a bullet identifies the shot as
having come from the front. Since by then Oswald was located
behind the presidential limousine, this could only mean that a sec-
ond gunman fired and therefore that there had been a conspiracy.
But here common sense leads us astray: Luis showed that the laws
of physics, when all (including the most gruesome) factors are
taken into account, are entirely consistent with a shot from the rear
causing the backward snap of JFK's head. Luis conducted experi-
ments to prove the point but admitted that they failed to convince
the buffs; years later, he would have a similar difficulty in convinc-
ing paleontologists that a random catastrophe had extinguished
their dinosaurs.
The most dramatic moment of an unusually exciting early
career came aboard the
Great Artiste,
the plane that accompanied
the
Enola Gay
on its fateful mission over Hiroshima in August
1945. Weeks earlier Alvarez had been high above the New Mexico
desert observing the Trinity atomic bomb test. He was thus one of
only a handful to witness both of the first two atomic explosions.
As the
Great Artiste
returned to its base on Tinian, Hiroshima
destroyed in its wake, Luis wrote a letter for his son Walter, then
4 years old, to read when he was older.
