# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/luis-walter-alvarez
# Generated: 2026-08-31T14:44:38.803Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/luis-walter-alvarez"
name: "Luis Walter Alvarez"
slug: "luis-walter-alvarez"
description: "The physicist who helped detonate the first atomic bombs, then spent peacetime inventing the radar landing system that guided the Berlin airlift, photographing millions of particle collisions in liquid hydrogen, and arguing that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs."
tagline: "American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor (1911–1988)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/LWA_Picture_Final.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "United States"
  isoCode: "US"
category:
  name: "Scientists"
  slug: "scientists"
profileType:
  name: "Scientist"
  slug: "scientist"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1911-06-13"
deathDate: "1988-09-01"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           64.76
  momentum:             17.41338112305854
  historical:           24.411084
  currentAttention:     16.47636115378051
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "RISING"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  null
  category: 179
tags:
  - name: "Scientists"
    slug: "scientists"
  - name: "Scientist"
    slug: "scientist"
  - name: "Physics"
    slug: "physics"
  - name: "Astronomy"
    slug: "astronomy"
  - name: "United States"
    slug: "united-states"
  - name: "Americas"
    slug: "americas"
  - name: "20th Century"
    slug: "20th-century"
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    title: "لوئیس والتر آلوارز"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Luis Alvares"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Luis Walter Álvarez"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Luis Walter Alvarez"
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    title: "Luis Walter Alvarez"
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    title: "Luis Walter Alvarez"
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    title: "Luis Walter Alvarez"
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    title: "Luis Alvarez"
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    title: "Luis Walter Alvarez"
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    title: "Wikiquote"
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    title: "Wikiquote"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Luis Walter Alvarez earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1936 and joined Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, where he observed K-electron capture, produced tritium, and measured the neutron's magnetic moment with Felix Bloch. During World War II he moved to MIT's Radiation Laboratory, developing radar systems including Ground Controlled Approach—the technology that later proved critical to the Berlin airlift—and worked briefly for Enrico Fermi on reactors before joining the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, designing explosive lenses and detonators, then witnessing both the Trinity test and Hiroshima bombing from B-29s. His postwar design of the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber let his team photograph millions of particle interactions and discover entire families of resonance states, work that won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. He later x-rayed the Egyptian pyramids hunting for hidden chambers and, with his geologist son Walter, proposed the Alvarez hypothesis: that an asteroid impact ended the age of dinosaurs.