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reported to him. On that may have hung the priority for the mete-
orite impact discovery—otherwise we might be discussing the Smit
theory rather than the Alvarez theory. Serendipity thus can also
work in reverse: A scientist may be unlucky and miss having the
chance to make a critical observation.
Two years later, after a lengthy bout with mononucleosis, Smit
was bowled over to read in the
New Scientist
that scientists at
Berkeley had discovered high iridium concentrations in the Gubbio
boundary clay.
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5
Smit sent his Caravaca samples to Jan Hertogen in
Belgium, who had the equipment to analyze them for iridium. At
28,000 ppt, iridium in the Caravaca K-T boundary clay turned out
to be five times higher than at Gubbio! This prompted the head of
the Neutron Activation Department at the interuniversity labora-
tory in Delft to go back over the archived data from the earlier
analysis—the unreported iridium peak came in at 26,000 ppt.
Smit and Walter Alvarez met at the Copenhagen K-T confer-
ence in September 1979 and, finding themselves alone in giving
credence to the meteorite impact theory, soon became fast friends,
and they have remained so. At first, Smit preferred the supernova
explanation for the K-T mass extinction, but subsequent discus-
sions with an astronomer colleague soon convinced him that the
iridium levels were too high. In December 1979, he received a
preprint of the paper that the Alvarez team had submitted to
Science.
One month later, he and Hertogen submitted a paper to
Nature
based on their Caravaca findings, noting that "the impact
of a large meteorite may have provided the iridium" and caused
the K-T mass extinction.
1
6
The paper appeared in May 1980, one
month before the original Alvarez paper. Thus Smit got into print
first, which would have allowed a less scrupulous person to claim
priority. He knew, however, that the chronology of events required
that he give credit for the discovery to the Alvarezes, which he did.
But it was a near thing. And Smit had not only supernovae, but
meteorites, on his mind. But in science, as an excellent practitioner
like Smit knows full well, there is no second prize.
THREE
PRINCES
OF
SERENDIB
The Alvarez team did not proceed according to the stereotype of
the scientific method: They did not hypothesize that the dinosaurs
were killed by the effects of a meteorite impact, reason out that iri-
dium would provide the evidence, and then set out to test their the-
ory by measuring iridium levels in the K-T boundary clay. Rather,
