MEMORIAL TRIBUTE FOR LUIS W. ALVAREZ
May 1, 1991
MEMORIAL TRIBUTE FOR LUIS W. ALVAREZ
Richard L. Garwin
(Published in Memorial Tributes, National Academy of
Engineering, Volume 5, National Academy Press,
Washington, DC, 1992)
Luis W. Alvarez was an outstanding scientist and engineer.
It is a challenge to his friends and biographers to do
justice to the breadth and depth of Luis'(1)
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, married (1936)
Geraldine Smithwick, with whom he had two children, Walter
and Jean. In 1958 married Janet L. Landis-- two children,
Donald and Helen.
Luis Alvarez earned the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Physics
from the University of Chicago in 1932, 1934, and 1936.
Beginning in 1936, his entire career was spent at the
University of California at Berkeley as Professor of Physics
1945-1978, and Professor Emeritus from 1978. He was
Associate Director of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory
1949-59 and 1975-78. During the Second World War, he did
radar research and development at MIT 1940-1943 and then
worked at Los Alamos 1944-1945.
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 long-time member of the IBM Science Advisory Committee and
a Director of the Hewlett-Packard Company.
His talents did 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 of
the National Academy of Engineering, of the American
Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, of Phi Beta Kappa and of Sigma Xi. He was also an
Associate Member of the Institut D'Egypte.
He received the Collier Trophy (Aviation) in 1946, the Medal
for Merit in 1948, the John Scott Medal in 1953, the
Einstein Medal in 1961, the National Medal of Science in
1964, the Michelson Award in 1965, the Nobel Prize in
Physics in 1968, 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 W. Alvarez died in his Berkeley home August 31, 1988.
Luis Alvarez presented a fascinating view of his life and
involvements in his autobiography,(2) and the flavor of his
scientific activities is available in a recent book
subtitled, "Selected Works of Luis W. Alvarez, with
commentary by his students and colleagues."(3) Luis' father,
Walter C. Alvarez, was a physician in San Francisco, where
he worked each morning on research in physiology, and as a
private practitioner in the afternoons to support his
family. Although he showed no interest in the biological
aspects of his father's work, by the time Luis was ten he
could use all of the small tools in his father's shop, and
wire up electrical circuits.
In 1925, Walter C. Alvarez left his very 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 career there as a clinician a few
years later during the Depression. On his retirement, he
had a third career as a syndicated newspaper medical
columnist, gaining fame as "America's Family Doctor."
During two high school summers, Luis added to his
experimental skills as an apprentice in the instrument shop
of the Mayo Clinic. Enrolling in the University of Chicago
in chemistry, he discovered instead a real talent and
passion in physics, beginning with a fascination for optics,
in which his native talent was nourished by Albert
Michelson's optical technicians. Studying optics, working
with Michelson's own instruments, taking 12 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
literature, exercising an excellent memory for the
substance, presentation, and even the location of articles
he had read many years before.
In 1934, Luis began his long involvement with aviation,
soloing "with just three hours of dual instruction." He
flew for 50 years, logging more than a thousand hours as a
pilot before deciding at the age of 73 that it was time to
put away that demanding and delightful avocation.
In 1936, Ernest Lawrence invited Alvarez to join the
Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. Luis' older sister, Gladys,
worked for E.O. Lawrence in Berkeley as a secretary, and on
a visit to Chicago, Lawrence (then 32) invited Luis Alvarez
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 Radiation Laboratory," and resurrected the first
small cyclotrons from oblivion. 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
decades in Luis' home. Also influential was the "Bethe
Bible," three articles published by Hans Bethe in Reviews of
Modern Physics in 1936 and 1937. Luis' highly developed
competitive spirit was stimulated by these 468 pages-- "If
he (Bethe) 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, I did."
Luis' discoveries in Physics are treated at length in his
autobiography and in Discovering Alvarez, cited earlier.
The discovery of the K-capture process, of He(3), 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 find the most important 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, and 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, "By almost any standard, my training at Chicago
had been atrocious... From another point of view, though,
my training had been extraordinarily good. I could 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." And
Alvarez characteristically would disappear for days into the
library at Berkeley, emerging with ideas, plans for
experiments, explanations 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. Repeatedly he would
leap to a conclusion and then strive to find evidence which
would refute it. Alvarez was perpetually surprised to find
individuals who do not challenge their own results, and who
can reject even the strongest contrary evidence.
During WW 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
increase of 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 approached, 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).
At the MIT Rad Lab, Luie and his group invented, perfected,
and fielded Ground-Controlled Approach (GCA) to allow
ordinary aircraft and pilots to land at night and in poor
visibility.
At MIT also, Luis also 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 six weeks in England to transplant GCA, Luie left MIT
where he was head of Special Systems (also known as Luie's
Gadgets) to work on the first nuclear reactor with Enrico
Fermi at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of
Chicago.
Luie soon moved to Los Alamos. Among his major
contributions is the invention and development of
capacitor-discharge bridgewire detonators for simultaneous
initiation of the multiple high-explosive "lenses" in the
implosion system of the plutonium bomb. With a detonation
wave speed in high explosive of some 8 km/s, 10 nanoseconds
(one "shake," as it was called at Los Alamos) timing
uncertainty would cause about 0.1 mm asymmetry in the shock
wave; 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
capacitor charged to 15-kV rather than with the typical
6-volt battery. The necessary improvement in timing
accuracy was accompanied by improvement in safety because of
the elimination of the more sensitive primer explosive.
Returning to Berkeley after World War II, Luis designed the
first proton linear accelerator and headed the team that
brought it into operation. He also provided 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 potential.
After WW 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 would 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
management roles. His intellectual curiosity and talent for
experiment led him to conceive and to execute the "x-raying"
of the pyramid of Khephren, by the use of cosmic-ray muons,
establishing 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 which 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 last few years been sold
(by a company of which Jan is president) as a stabilizing
zoom lens for shoulder-held video cameras, despite working
systems 20 years earlier. The same lag is found with the
variable-power lens he invented and demonstrated to Polaroid
more than 20 years ago, first appearing on the consumer
goods market (in the Polaroid Spectrum camera) in 1986.
The life of an inventor (even one in the Inventor's Hall of
Fame, winner of the Collier Trophy in Aviation, etc.) may be
a lot of fun, but it is not always profitable; Alvarez
realized the first profit from any of his 40-some
inventions just a few years ago.
Luis Alvarez was very much aware of himself and carried into
his physics the constructive competitive spirit he had
learned early in athletics. He was quick to judge, but also
very much open to reason and to his own challenge of the
validity of his judgment. "The most," "the best," "the
first" were important to Luis, in others as 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 candidates win
them as well," and he could point to successes in that
field.
Luis enjoyed the broad spectrum of intelligent laymen at the
summer encampment of the Bohemian Club, and gave
illuminating, enjoyable, and well-prepared talks there.
Luis' 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 Friedman how the
United States broke the Japanese diplomatic codes before
World 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 deep inventions in the field of
optics may yet have the major impact that they deserve.
----------------
1 Pronounced in the Spanish fashion as "Lou-eese," but
almost everyone called him "Lou-ee," for his nickname,
Luie.
2 Alvarez, Adventures of a Physicist, by Luis W. Alvarez,
Basic Books, Inc., New York (1987). All unattributed
quotations in this Tribute are from this book.
3 Discovering Alvarez, edited by W. Peter Trower, the
University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London (1987).
This volume contains a 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.
4 This Tribute draws upon my review of "Alvarez:
Adventures of a Physicist," published in Physics Today,
pp. 83-84 (December 1987).
RLG:jtmlQ121LWA:050191.LWA
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