Collisions A physicist's journey from Hiroshima to the death of the dinosaurs

This biography of physicist Luis Alvarez underscores the Nobel laureate's restless, persistent intellect and his affinity for inconvenient hypotheses on controversial topics. A precocious youth with an aptitude for gymnastics and an appetite for risk, Alvarez fell in love with the optical spectrometer and other intriguing machines in the experimental physics lab at the University of Chicago. His passion--and his tendency to see gaps in others' logic--made him a sought-after collaborator. As part of the Manhattan Project, he devised "quickie" experiments but struggled to adapt his working style and made major mistakes. The post-war years saw his biggest successes, including pioneering work in particle physics, but Alvarez found himself drawn to more sensationalistic topics, including the extinction of the dinosaurs and the physics of the bullets that killed JFK. Nevala-Lee follows his celebrated biography of Buckminster Fuller (Inventor of the Future, 2022) with a nuanced portrait of a driven, probing scientific soul. And if Alvarez had some blind spots, Nevala-Lee reminds us that there remains a place for unbridled scientific creativity in today's world.

In this illuminating account, biographer Nevala-Lee (Inventor of the Future) traces the wide-ranging career of physicist Luis Walter Alvarez, who died in 1988 at age 77. After getting his PhD at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, Alvarez took a job with the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley, where he met J. Robert Oppenheimer. Upon America's entry into WWII, Oppenheimer invited Alvarez to participate in the Manhattan Project, where he helped devise detonators for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, but the pair's relationship chilled after Oppenheimer came out against Alvarez's goal of creating a hydrogen bomb. After the war, Alvarez returned to Berkeley and watched with jealousy as his colleagues collected Nobel Prizes, motivating him to develop a "bubble chamber" machine that recorded the movements of subatomic particles. The invention led to the discovery of numerous new particles and nabbed him the Nobel Prize in 1968. Nevala-Lee provides approachable breakdowns of Alvarez's pioneering physics and a stimulating overview of his more eclectic latter-day pursuits, including using his background on particle collisions to debunk the theory of a second JFK shooter and to popularize the idea that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid. It's a solid overview of an accomplished life. Photos. Agent: David Halpern, David Halpern Literary. (June)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.