The Indiana Jones of Physics Had a Jam-Packed Life
COLLISIONS: A Physicist's Journey From Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs, by Alec Nevala-Lee
The physicist Luis Alvarez is one of those 20th-century figures whose life was so eventful that it should be catnip for a biographer.
Consider even a partial list of his activities: working on explosive detonators for the Manhattan Project; flying in a B-29 observation plane to witness the bombing of Hiroshima; testifying as a government witness in the hearings to revoke the security clearance of his former colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer (who had invited Alvarez to Los Alamos); searching via X-rays for hidden chambers in an Egyptian pyramid; and arguing, in a paper with his geologist son, that an asteroid had wiped out the dinosaurs. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Alvarez pored over the Zapruder film and conducted experiments involving firing bullets at melons to conclude that the president was killed by a lone gunman. In 1968, his work on bubble chambers and elementary particles won him a Nobel Prize.
'Charismatic, physically agile and daring, Alvarez was one of the last representatives of an era that could still see physics as a heroic enterprise,' Alec Nevala-Lee writes in 'Collisions,' his new book about the man. It's a tantalizing characterization. Just don't get too excited. 'Alvarez has been described as a scientific Indiana Jones, but his reputation as a maverick was built on a foundation of patience and discipline.'
The assessment is entirely fair, though it's only as the biography progressed that I realized how the word of caution also serves as a warning sign. Nevala-Lee, a novelist and the author of a biography of Buckminster Fuller, is eminently qualified to get to know such a lively and complicated subject. Yet in seeking to deflate the myth of the audacious Alvarez, he has overcorrected, jettisoning drama and tension in favor of diligent explanation. The result is a thorough, dutiful parsing of Alvarez's work in the laboratory and a strangely pallid portrait of the man himself.
Alvarez was born in 1911 in San Francisco, and enjoyed a privileged upbringing. His father, Walter, was a physician who also wrote popular books like 'How to Live With Your Ulcer' and 'Live at Peace With Your Nerves.' Luis's maternal grandparents had been missionaries in China; his paternal grandfather had emigrated to the United States from Spain.
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