
Luis Walter Alvarez (13 June 1911-1 September 1988) was an American experimental physicist and a member of the Manhattan Project.
Biography[]
Luis Walter Alvarez was born in San Francisco, California, the son of a Spanish physician and his American wife. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a protege of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and he worked at the radiation laboratory. Alvarez measured the magnetic moment of the neutron at Berkeley, and he went on to join the MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1940, contributing to a number of World War II radar projects. He also worked on nuclear reactors for Enrico Fermi at Chicago and for Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project, where he worked on the design of explosive lenses, the development of exploding bridgewire-detonators, and the Trinity test; he observed the bombing of Hiroshima from the B-29 The Great Artiste in August 1945. After the war, Alvarez designed a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, resulting in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968. He also helped search for unknown chambers in Ancient Egyptian pyramids by utilizing x-rays, and he proposed that an asteroid impact wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. He died in Berkeley in 1988.