Luis Walter Alvarez

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.