A new biography, 'Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs' by Alec Nevala-Lee, chronicles the life and contributions of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez. The book highlights his work across physics, archaeology, and paleontology, from atomic bomb development to explaining dinosaur extinction. Reviewed in The New York Review of Books, it portrays Alvarez as a restless innovator who applied scientific methods to major historical mysteries.
Luis Alvarez, born in San Francisco in 1911, emerged as one of the twentieth century's most versatile scientists. He earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for developing methods to detect subatomic particles. Beyond particle physics, Alvarez contributed to wartime technologies, including the radar system that allowed pilots to land in poor visibility and the detonator mechanism for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
During World War II, Alvarez worked at Los Alamos and Tinian, where he observed the preparation of the bombs Little Boy and Fat Man. Aboard The Great Artiste, he witnessed the Hiroshima explosion on August 6, 1945, describing the shockwave as making the plane 'crinkle' like sheet metal. He believed the bombs saved lives by averting a costly invasion of Japan, estimating they ended a conflict that had already killed 90,000 in Tokyo in one night.
Alvarez's curiosity extended to other fields. In the 1960s, he used cosmic rays to scan Egypt's Chephren pyramid for hidden chambers, concluding in 1967 that it was solid, dismissing claims of metaphysical interference as 'pyramidiots.' With his son Walter, a geologist, he analyzed a clay layer from Italy containing 300 times more iridium than surrounding limestone, linking it in 1980 to an asteroid impact that caused dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago by blocking sunlight and starving ecosystems.
The theory faced skepticism from paleontologists, whom Alvarez once called 'stamp collectors' in a 1988 New York Times interview, paraphrasing Lord Rutherford. Diagnosed with esophageal cancer shortly before, he died at age 77 in 1988. Nevala-Lee's biography, the first on Alvarez, notes a colleague's view: he generated a hundred ideas daily, with one or two potentially Nobel-worthy. Alvarez's father encouraged him to 'think crazy,' a habit that defined his career from University of Chicago studies to Berkeley's Radiation Lab.
