COLLISIONS

A close look at a renowned experimental physicist with a dizzying career and a difficult personality.

Unlike some physicists of his day, Luis Alvarez never became a household name—perhaps, ironically, because his achievements were so numerous. A Nobel Prize winner, Alvarez isn’t known for any one thing: not for inventing the radar system that allowed planes to land in bad weather, not for designing precision detonators that exploded the plutonium bomb, not for creating the hydrogen bubble chamber that tracked the trails of elusive subatomic particles. If Alvarez is remembered for one thing, it’s not even physics: He and his son, Walter, were the first to show that the dinosaurs were likely doomed by an asteroid strike. All of which gives biographer Nevala-Lee endless material to weave into a story of intellectual restlessness. We see Alvarez—a “scientific Indiana Jones”—harnessing cosmic rays to search for secret chambers in the Chephren pyramid at Giza; signing his name in crayon on the atomic bomb; and combing moon dust for evidence of mysterious particles. For all of Alvarez’s adventures, Nevala-Lee’s narration seems at times too even-keeled, opting for staid detail over emotional resonance. Alvarez comes across as a maverick foiled at times by his own ego, as when he brags to strangers about classified war work. Through other characters, we glimpse something darker, a man who humiliated his colleagues, harangued his inferiors, bullied anyone who dared to disagree with him. Still, said a mentee, “people tolerated Luie Alvarez because it was so exciting to do physics with him.” Readers will likely feel the same. One wild experiment after the next, Nevala-Lee skillfully uses Alvarez’s story to provide a sweeping look at 20th-century physics, with its complicated ties to politics and culture, from the Manhattan Project to the Kennedy assassination. Indeed, by combining his bubble chamber with computer technology, Alvarez helped usher in today’s “big science,” which leaves little room for singular heroes of the sort Alvarez sought to be.

A thoroughly researched biography of an audacious scientist—and a new window into the history of high-energy physics.