Luis Alvarez was a physicist whose broad interests connected him to some of the 20th century's most influential moments, including the bombing of Hiroshima and the assassination of JFK. His diverse work led to the nickname "the wild idea man of physics."
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy P. Wilson and I'm Polly Fry. Now, some people just do so much stuff that they cannot be contained in one podcast episode. It's happening today. Yeah, this is a fertile ground of information. I know. It's so. I feel like sometimes we talk about scientists whose achievements are particular to one field, maybe not like the exact same narrow field of study, but at least in the same basic neighborhood of science. The person that we're going to talk about today and in our next episode is Luis W. Alvarez. And he was a physicist who's broad interests wound up connecting him to some of the twentieth centuries most history making moments, including the bombing of Hiroshima and the assassination and of John F. Kennedy. His work was just so diverse and groundbreaking that he was nicknamed the wild idea Man of physics, and rightly so. Uh As if that all wasn't enough, he and his son also did groundbreaking work into the history of the world. They came up with what's now accepted as the most sort of popular theory on what happened to the dinosaurs. So we're already all over the map. We're really all over the map. Yeah, because of the breadth of his accomplishments. We're going to talk about him in two episodes, and so in this one we're going to talk about his early life and his education, which scattered as it was, became really formative in how he wound up approaching the world of science. We're also going to talk about some of his more theoretical work in physics, so that would be a really dense place to end the episode, so so that we don't leave on that note of here is some physics that many people will have trouble understanding. We're also going to talk about some of his groundbreaking work on radar during World War Two, which is much easier to talk about in a practical way. In the second part of the episode, we will continue to talk about the World War two story with his work in the nuclear weapons program before we get into this unexpected role that he grew into. It is sort of a scientific mystery solver. Again, all over the map. I It's like if it's one of those biographies that if you just read it out of context, without knowing who this person was or even the particular world events, you would be like, this is the wildest fiction ever? Does this author have no direction? Well, and we are in the very lucky position that he wrote an autobiography which you can get in read and he was a character. So I recommend that if you find these two episodes interesting, there is so so, so much more because even with two episodes, there are various side trips and other ancillary things that we're going to just skip completely over because there is too much. So let's start at the beginning. Yeah. He was born in San Francisco on June thirteenth, nineteen eleven. His parents were Walter C. And Harriet Smythe Alvarez. Most people during his life called him by the nickname Louis, and that just feels a little film of familiar to me when you see him, when you when you see his name in in academic writing, he's he's called Louise, but his friends called him Louis, And just because that nickname feels a little familiar, we're going to stick with Louise today. Uh. And his grandfather on his father's side was born in Spain. I mean he lost his parents at quite a young age, and he moved to Cuba as a teenager, and from there he moved to the US and became a doctor. And his mother's family was actually from Ireland, which is kind of a fun combination. Yeah, so he had a Spanish and Irish heritage. Louise's father was Walter Alvarez, who was a noted physician who did medical research in the morning and worked in family practice in the afternoons. Walter became a research physiologist at the Mayo Clinic and worked as a clinician there after the Great Depression, and after he retired, he wrote a syndicated newspaper column and became known as America's family doctor. And one piece of advice that Walter gave to his son, in Louise's own words, were, my father advised me to sit every few months in my reading chair for an entire evening, closed my eyes and try to think of new problems to solve. I took his advice very seriously and have been glad ever since that I did. This was definitely great advice. It is when Louise was very young and living in California, he had to stay in bed for about a year because of a suspected heart condition. During this time, his mother taught him at home, and that went on until he got to about second grade. Luise was interested in science and electronics from a very early age. He would go to the lab with his father and he liked to use the tools in his father's shop to make sir katry. When he was eleven, he and his father made a radio together from a kid, which doesn't sound like a big deal today, but radio's were not uh everywhere the way they are now. They weren't zy to assemble. This is a couple of years ahead of radio is becoming ubiquitous, so they were still kind of a new technology in the household at that point. When he got to high school, Luise went to Polytechnic High School rather than going into a college prep program, even though his plan was to go to college, and this was because of his love of electronics and mechanics. He could focus a lot of his study at this high school on those more practical skills, and he was one of the few students enrolled there who was pursuing a more academic program rather than a straight up technical one. Luise was actually still in high school when his father got the job offer at the Mayo Clinic and the family moved to Rochester, Minnesota, from California, where they had been living in February. The big change in their lifestyle. Yes, so a winter moved from h warm and delightful to the more northern parts of the States which get very, very cold, is a pretty huge gearship. It went from sonny and beautiful to cold and snowy very immediately, and he enrolled in Rochester High School, which did not have the same technical focus as Polytechnic High had. So Luis got an apprenticeship in the Mayo Clinics instrument shop, and his father, who noticed his love of what he was doing, got one of the Mayo clinics and machinists to tutor him on the weekends as well. So he was really able to maintain his mechanical interests and keep up with that study even though his school wasn't focused on mechanics. Here's a story from his high school days which I think really sums up his character and his attitude of what scientists are all about. And this is in his own words. In Rochester, a friend and I used to climb the buildings under construction, usually by sneaking past the guards in the middle of the night. We climbed the three foot clinic tower when it is only a skeleton of steel beams. We explored the powerhouse and scaled the inside of its two ft rick smokestack. I mentioned these escapades not to brag about being a scoff law, but only because I'm convinced that a controlled disrespect for society is essential to a scientist. All the good experimental physicists I have known have had an intense curiosity that no keep out signed could mute. I know he's a troublemaker. Yeah, it's a little charming. You know, everybody loves a little bit of a like smart rogue. But of course, don't time. You had to follow the rules. Oh. When Louise started college at the University of Chicago, he had planned a major in chemistry, which is what he studied until his junior year, but it turned out he didn't really like chemistry. He liked the lectures, but he described the labs as quote repulsive. In his junior year, he took a class called Advanced Experimental Physics Light, which he described later as love at first site. He had made bees in all of his chemistry classes, and he came to hate the idea of being a b chemist when he felt like he could be a great a physicist. So he changed his major to physics and made up for the lost time by taking twelve physics classes in five quarters which makes my head spin a little bit to think about, uh, and pouring over textbooks to make up for the physics lectures that he wasn't able to attend in his earlier years because he was in chemistry. That's a lot of hard science crammed into a very short period of time, it is, and I like changing your major because it was during his junior year. It was not prior to his junior years. During his junior year that he actually completely changed tracks. Had to make up for a lot of lost time. He graduated from the University of Chicago in nineteen thirty two, and he went on to get his Masters and PhD from there as well, and he got the PhD in nineteen thirty six. He wrote pretty candidly about how this edge cation didn't on paper prime him for what was to come. When you look at all of his achievements that go on for pages and pages and pages. It seems like he must have had just an exceptional education. The word he used for it was atrocious. He had very little, very little theoretical physics work compared to the other physicists who were educated at the same time. And his PhD thesis, for example, was on the diffraction of light, and this was not particularly groundbreaking or notable um and it also just came from an experiment he had actually been working on earlier in his graduate work. Then it was not a clear indicator of the greatness that was on the horizon. Well, and it's interesting because it seems like he worked so hard to cram so much of the physics study track in, but yeah, he felt it was fundamentally pretty worthless. Yeah. Well, and because that continued on through his his graduate program. He also talks about how his graduate advisor was the per ficked advisor for them because he just never checked on him and had no idea what he was ever working on. He just sort of made his own educational path, doing whatever he wanted as long as it was hardcore study of physics. Love it. Uh. He did get married. He married Geraldine Smithwick just after he took his oral exams for his pH d, and the plan had been for the two of them to go abroad for a year for Louise to continue his study. His Spanish grandfather was going to pay their way, but just as their wedding date was approaching, his grandfather wrote again saying that in fact he should not come. At this point, it was ninety six and the Spanish Civil War had started, so for them to travel there was really not the smartest place, right It seemed like no longer a wise plan. Fortunately, physicist Ernest Lawrence offered Louise the opportunity to come to Berkeley to work with the cyclotron, which is a type of particle accelerator in the radiation lab at the University of California at Berkeley. So the wedding went on his plan end, and Louise and Geraldine later had two children. They were Walter, who will talk about later in this episode in jean Um. They also sadly had another daughter who died at birth. Louis spent almost all of his career from that point in California, so the move to Berkeley kind of really settled him in one place, although there were was sometime during the forties, when World War Two brought him to radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago and then the Los Alamos Laboratory of the Manhattan District. He's kind of touring all of the labs of high science. Yeah, during World War two, for sure. UM. A lot of his earlier career had to do with areas of physics that are interesting to other physicists. They are kind of hard to apply to everyday life in real world terms that non physicists they're likely to understand. And please understand. I say this as a person who loves science. I'm not ragging on the world of theoretical physics at all. But we are not going to go into giant detail about these achievements, uh, because they are really dense in terms of their their physics knowledge. Um. I I felt very self conscious about that fact, and then I mentioned them to the boyfriend, who in fact has a master's degree in engineering, and he was like, no, that is hard. Well. It also reminds me of Stephen Hawking's famous quote about when he was writing A Brief History of Time and how people told him for every formula you include in your book, half of your audience disappears. Yeah. I think there's just Uh, physics is a little bit it's challenging to grasp and it's it's exciting work, but it's not always easy to um to suss out if you're not really educated in that realm. Yeah. He gave this address to Berkeley students in nine that has a quote in it that I think applies to what we're about to talk about, and he said, people often say to me, I don't see how you can work in physics. It's so complicated and difficult. But actually physics is the simplest of all the sciences. It only seems difficult because physicists talk to each other in a language that most people don't understand the language of mathematics. So for the next few points, we are going to be talking in a language that only physicists understand. Uh, and as simplest terms as possible. Because it really like these were notable achievements and we would be leaving important stuff out if we did not mention them. Yeah. One of the things that we're going to touch on, Louise Co discovered the East West effect in cosmic rays, and that's the fact that different numbers of cosmic rays reached the Earth's atmosphere depending on which direction they're coming from, so to sort of submate it into a long story, short scenario. This provided evidence that cosmic rays include positively charged particles. There was very little known about cosmic rays at the time, and most scientists had actually theorized the opposite. Yeah, he proved lots of people wrong. In NY seven, he gave the first practical demonstration of K capture, which is a phenomenon in which adams decay by absorbing an electron from the lowest electron layer, which is called the K layer. They absorbed that electron into the nucleus. This was a phenomenon that had been theorized before but not proven, and he published a report showing everything about In along with Felix Block, he created a method for producing beams of slow neutrons, which allowed them to measure how powerfully magnetic neutrons were, which is very cool. Along with his student Jake Wines, he developed a mercury vapor lamp that used the artificial mercury isotope mercury. The U S Bureau of Standards adopted the wavelength of life that comes from this lamp as an official standard of length and as a side note which may explain some things about him. He also used mercury lamps while working on his doctoral thesis, and his lamps would just sort of blow mercury everywhere on a regular basis. Um. He joked this ought to have made him mad as a hatter, and also that perhaps it explained some things may about him in fact that as a hatter. So yeah, those are the highlights of some of the more esoteric physics work that he has worked on. Thanks to World War Two, Louise left California for Cambridge on November eleventh of nineteen forty to work on the development of radar technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and there he played a role in the development of a microwave early Warning system or m EW, which allowed the detection of aircraft when it was too overcast to see them, and the Eagle high altitude bombing system, which allowed bombs to be dropped on targets the crew on the plane couldn't see. But he left m I T where those projects were being developed before either of them had come to fruition, they weren't completely finished when he exited. He did make some major contributions to radar technology while at m I T, which had a meaningful impact on the Allies during the war. One was the Vixen radar system, which was named because it let American pilots out fox the German U boats. So for a while, Allied airplanes had been able to use their radar to detect German U boats um so that then they could attack the U boats while they were surfaced. Because unlike today's nuclear submarines that can stay underwater for a really long time, submarines at the time had to come to the surface on a really periodic basis. It didn't take long for the Germans to figure out what was up and put radar detectors into the submarines, which would warn them of the incoming plane a long time before the plane could actually detect the submarines. They were getting serious advanced warning of the incoming threat, and aboard the U boats, the crew would decide whether to dive or stay where they were based on the way the strength of the radar signal changed. But if the plane had a Vixen system installed, the signal red as though the plane was flying away rather than getting closer. And this innovation, of course made it possible for Allied planes to destroy U boats from the air. Again, it made the sneaky in a whole new way. This had to do with with math. That uh, I like their reverence and slight fear with which you say the word math. Math was never my strong subject in school. I tried really hard to come up with a great analogy to explain exactly what this math was um And if you have one, you may write to it and and help us out with that. Because that I had a hard time quantfine that with something that made sense. So we're just gonna say magic. We're not really gonna say magic. It was in fact science and math. His other big contribution to wartime radar was not nearly as easy to fix as the Vixen system was. During World War Two, returning aircraft, especially in the UK, really frequently faced horribly treacherous landing auditions because of the weather, and a lot of times the situation was worse because the airplane was damaged or had injured crew on board. So unlike in the civilian world where flights get canceled because of the weather. You can't really do that during a war, and there often was not a different place to land that had any better weather conditions going on, So they really needed to find a way to to help plans land safely. Radar was being used to track enemy planes, uh Luis thought it should be easy enough to use that same technology to track friendly planes and therefore be able to guide them in safely for landing. So instead of using it to track and evaid, they were going to track and guide. Yeah, and this is something that happens all the time now, Like that is not a thing that we even blink at. But this did not exist at that point, and it turned out to be a way more complex project, acquiring a lot more trial and error than the Vixen system had been. They started out just by talking a blindfolded pilot. It through walking around on the floor of the hangar to to sort of get a feel for how this interaction would go between giving somebody instructions verbally and having them change what they were doing. And I think we've all done that as part of like a game or like a party activity, and we're doing that in middle school. Yeah, we had to write directions. So tricky, Yeah, it is tricky. We had to write directions of how to get to the cafeteria from the classroom to give to a blindfolded person, and then we all got horribly lost in school. So um. They went from that to using tests with a small radar device and a set of optical devices that would let the people on the ground figure out the angle of the airplane's approach and use that to give direction. A test pilot named Bruce Griffin practice getting closer and closer to the ground without using any visual cues, while his radio man, who was in the plane with him, acted as a backup just in case. When he finally got all the way to touch down with no visual input, acting only by instructions from the ground, everyone celebrated and they're like, all right, we're ready to be for the next big thing. But that not go so well. When they tried that same experiment using an actual anti aircraft radar, it failed completely. The radar system kept locking onto the actual airplane and the airplane's mirror image under the runway surface. Not a good plan for that. Everyone was really enormously disappointed by this failure. UM scientist and investor Alfred Loomis invited Louise to dinner at the Ritz Carlton and Boston and basically gave him this ultimatum that he could not go home until they figured out how to fix this problem. Together, they worked out a narrow beam radar that was too small to have the mirror image problem, and they combined that with with an antenna configuration that they thought would actually work, and along with an engineering team at m I T. Louise made a prototype of the ground controlled approach system. He called this work one of the happiest times of his life life and the result was so promising that the Royal Air Force actually asked for more of them, since the same tools could be useful for US forces. Of course, the U. S. Air Force and Navy got development under way as well. Yeah, this new UH system worked a whole lot better, and once it was ready for use in the whole thing was so highly classified and valuable enough to the war effort that the Royal Navy transported it across the Atlantic Ocean during this very meandering route that took three weeks to do, with d Day actually happening while they were in the middle of the voyage. They were trying to evade enemy submarines through this long and circuitous route just to get the technology to the other side of the ocean. And after that first unit was in place and the technicians were being trained on how to use it, factories scaled up production so they could be able to make more of them and get them installed at all the air fields that needed them. Louise also spent about six weeks in England helping to get the gc A going. Although the war was in its later years by the time the ground controlled approach was really in full swing. It went on to have further military applications after the war was over, and it's credited with saving the lives of many many pilots and crew who needed to land during bad weather or for some other reason involving load of visibility. Louise found up receiving multiple awards and honors for this particular accomplishment. And as a side note, one of the radar specialists who also worked on the g c A was Arthur C. Clark, whose book Glide Path actually drew from the experience and included a character that was modeled after Louis Alvarez. On another side, note Louise also had a love of aviation himself. He owned assessm A three ten and he logged more than a thousand hours as a pilot between the thirties and the eighties. And that's sort of the pause point for part one of Louis Alvarez. Uh, there is a gree feel more to go, so much more so. I think you have a touch of listener mail I do. This is from Amanda. Amanda says, Hi, Tracy and Holly. I just listened to the ice Cream episode and heard the discussion about George Washington. He was absolutely my favorite president and I just had the opportunity to visit Mount Vernon. I wanted to bring a slight correction to what you said. George Washington's dentures were not wooden. They're actually made of metal and teeth of humans, animals and ivory. They weren't all that attractive and probably still hurt a lot, but definitely not wouldn't. We saw the actual dentures, and I can attest that they aren't pretty like today's teeth or dentures are, but I guess they served a purpose. I can still understand why he might have eaten a hundred thousand dollars worth of ice cream to soothe his sore mouth, though it looked like they would hurt. Thanks for the podcast. I've thoroughly enjoyed listening to it. Thank you, Amanda. Yeah, I'm picturing those dentures in my head. It's a little live Parker. It sounds kind of motric conception to me. Yeah, we've gotten a couple of letters about George Washington and his teeth, and I think in the episode we say that it's wooden teeth mythology, but then we went on to talk about how his teeth really bad without actually saying what his teeth were made of. So so, yeah, we know they weren't woulden, but we didn't really know exactly what they were and soil this letter, I did not know animal teeth or in the mix. No, uh are a lot of metal. Yeah that sounds fun at all. I think I had heard before that there was metal involved, and I knew that there were human teeth, but I had not ever heard about the animal teeth. Yeah, like I said, in my head, it becomes a little clipbooker, right, So thank you very much, Amanda or writing that to us and telling us more about George Washington's fake Teeth. Yeah. If you would like to write to us about this episode or anything else we've discussed, you can we write History podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash history class stuff and on Twitter at missed in History. Are tumbler is at mist in history dot tumbler dot com, and we are pinning things away on Pinterest. If you'd like to learn a little bit more about what Louis Alvarez spent some of his career researching, you can come to our website and type the word radar in search bar. You will find an article how Radar Works. You can do that and a whole lot more at our website, which is how stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has stuff works dot com. Netflix streams TV shows and movies directly to your home, saving you time, money, and hassle. As a Netflix member, you can instantly watch TV episodes and movies streaming directly to your PC, Mac, or right to your TV with your Xbox three sixty, P S three E or Nintendo Wee console, plus Apple devices, Kindle and Nook. Get a free thirty day trial membership. Go to www dot Netflix dot com and sign up now.