Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy ve Egilson, and today we're going to pick up where we left off in the story of Luis Alvarez. As we talked about in the previous episode, this was a scientist who made huge contributions in a very wide variety of fields, from nuclear physics to paleontology. He was granted twenty two patents, which feels like a lot to me, especially when you consider how vastly different these were in terms of what they covered. One was for a golf training machine that he developed for President Eisenhower. One was for a color TV system. He also developed a stabilization system for lenses and binoculars and cameras, and that innovation went on to be used in zoom lenses and shoulder held video cameras when those came along. He also presented a variable power lens to Polaroid, which came to market in six although he had shown it to them about twenty years before. So he invented a lot of different stuff. In addition to all of his scientific accomplishments, he was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. And his accomplishments were so many and so far reaching that even with two episodes, there are highlights and elements and side trips that we could talk about around him and his work that we kind of have to leave out, otherwise it would become an entire podcast series called How Louis Alvarez Works, would be like nine episodes long. Where we left off in the previous episode, he had been creating new radar systems that were used during World War Two, which helps save the lives of Allied pilots and other crew and allowed Allied planes to detect and destroy German U boats. In this episode, we're going to look at his other major portion of his work during World War Two, as well as some of his more diverse contributions to science, which somehow wound up falling into the realm of sort of scientific mystery solving. Yeah. Uh, Luise actually left m I T in ninetee and he became part of the Manhattan Project. First, he spent a little while in Chicago, where scientists were working on creating the chain reactions that are necessary uh in a nuclear bomb. And from there he went to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and he became part of the steering committee for the laboratory there. The team at Los Alamos was working on bombs that used both uranium and plutonium as their fuel. While Luise participated in missions involving both of these types of weapons, most of his scientific work in New Mexico was on the plutonium bombs. The main part of his work had to do with gating their detonators, so he was the one who developed the detonators that were used in plutonium bombs. He flew aboard the B twenty nine bomber that dropped the bomb in the world's first atomic bomb test. The only visual documentation we have of the explosion from the air is a pair of sketches that he made, since nobody had thought to send a camera up aboard the plane. There are plenty of pictures at ground level, but none from the air. He kind of relied on that mechanical sketching knowledge that he had gotten in his high school time to to do some sketchwork based on what he saw aboard the plane. In preparation for the bombs to actually be used. During World War Two, he along with other scientists, moved to the island of Tennyan, where they lived in tents and prepared the bombs and the bombers for their eventual missions. He was aboard the Enola Gay when it dropped the bomb known as Little Boy on Hiroshima. On the flight itself, he didn't wear a parachute. He decided that if the plane were to be shut down, he didn't want to be captured. While he was returning home from having witnessed this bombing, he wrote this letter to his son Walt, who was four years old at the time. What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning are tempered with the hope that this terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent further wars. Alfred Noble thought that his invention of high explosives would have that effect by making wars too terrible, but unfortunately it had just the opposite reaction. Our new destructive force is so many times worse that it may realize Nobel's dream. That's quite a letter to write, Yeah, especially to your tiny child, your four year old, having just witnessed the destruction of a city one weapon. Uh Luis flew on the Nagasaki mission as well, this time aboard another B twenty nine aircraft, the Great Artiste rather than the one that was deploying the bomb. Just before the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Great Artists dropped canisters containing telemetry devices like the ones like the one Luis had created for the bomb, along with a letter written by him and to other physicists. The letter was addressed to Japanese physicists Ryokichi Sagani, who had worked with Louise at Berkeley before the war. Luis had remembered their connection and he hoped that by writing to him he could get information about Americans nuclear capabilities to the Japanese in a way that could put an end to the war. Here's that letter. We are sending this as a personal message to urge that you use your influence as a reputable nuclear physicist to convince the Japanese General Staff of the terrible consequences which will be suffered by your people if you continue in this war. You have known for several years that an atomic bomb could be built if a nation were willing to pay the enormous cost of preparing the necessary material. Now that you have seen that we have constructed the production plants, there can be no doubt in your mind that all the output of these factories, working twenty four hours a day will be exploded on your homeland within the space of three weeks. We have proof fired one bomb in the American desert, exploded one on Hiroshima, and fired the third this morning. We implore you to confirm these facts to your leaders and to do your utmost to stop the destruction and waste of life which can only result in the total annihilation of all your cities if continued. As scientists, we deplore the use to which a beautiful discovery has been put, but we can assure you that unless Japan surrenders at once, this reign of atomic bombs will increase manyfold. In fury to my friend Sagane, with best regards from Louis w Albarez. Luise and Sagani actually met four years after the war was over, at which point Louise added his signature to a copy of the letter that Sagany had. Yeah, that this letter did actually get to the Japanese government. It didn't get to Saganay until after the war was over. Um, but it it did, It did get to its intended recipients. Just digesting that whole thing, Yeah, Well, and the like many of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, Luis was really horrified at the level of destruction and death that the atomic bombs had the power to cause. But since World War Two ended so quickly after the second one was dropped, he really had no doubt that the United States had done the right thing. Um. He really felt like the bombing of Nagasaki, which that's a question that comes up, like we had already bombed Hiroshima, that we also need to bomb as other city. He really felt like that was necessary to bring an end to the war. Everybody knew that it took a whole lot of uranium to make one bomb, and it took a whole lot of time to make that uranium. And if we could his point of view was that if we had only brought bombed Hiroshima, people would have been like, well, it's gonna be a while. They would have thought it was a one off there, it's gonna be a while before they can make another one. So he really felt like that that second event was necessary to end the war. And he also felt sure that if something had gone wrong and they had not perfected the bombs, or if the bombs had not been dropped, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been destroyed anyway through more conventional warfare techniques and incendiary bombs, and a departure from pretty much the overwhelming majority of other Manhattan Project scientists, he also thought that the United States should continue its nuclear weapons program and develop a hydrogen bomb. On a note about his personal life, Louise and Geraldine divorced not long after World War Two. He remarried in nineteen fifty eight to Janet Landis, who had worked with him in the lab at Berkeley, and they had two children together, named Donald and Helen. Louise returned to Berkeley after the war was over, and at that point he turned his focus to high energy atomic research. Like some of the stuff that we talked about in the previous episode, this kind of esoteric work, but it involves bubbles, so so a little lighter in toe into what we've been talking about. Yeah, we're going to talk about in a little bit more detailed because it's also what he won his Nobel Prize for um. So there had already been electron accelerators in use for some years before he went back to Berkeley, but he wanted to create a proton accelerator, and he did so. He completed a forty ft proton accelerator in ninety seven. In nineteen fifty three, Louise met University of Michigan physicist Donald Glasser, who had just invented the bubble chamber that we alluded to a minute ago. So, unlike particle accelerators, which produced the particles that scientists want to study, the bubble chamber detected the particles that had been produced. So in a bubble chamber, particles passed through a fluid and they leave this trail of bubbles behind in their wake. Luise realized that this invention could be used to detect particles from uh Sinco cyclotron, which is a circular particle accelerator that had just been built at Berkeley. Luise made some improvements to the bubble chamber, including using liquid hydrogen as the fluid and developing more sensitive recording and transmission. He then worked on making the chamber even bigger so it could record the trails of more particles. The first chamber was a one inch glass tube, and about five years later he was actually using one that measured seventy two inches. So thinking big so when a particle passed through the high drogen, which was about degrees below zero celsius, it would heat the hydrogen to the boiling point and leave this little trail of bubbles in its wake. Photographs would record what this trail looked like, and then Luis and his students developed lots of tools for scanning and measuring all of these photos um The bubble chamber could produce more than a million photographs in one year, and they needed to look at and analyze and record all of these photographs to see the trails that it was picking up a little tiny bubble trails. Using the bubble chamber, he discovered a tremendous number of elementary particles. He also discovered extremely short lived particles known as residents states. Luise won the Nobel Prize for this work in ninety eight, and in the ceremony his methods were created were credited with making practically all of the other discoveries about particle physics possible. Side note, there a whole lot of Nobel Prizes come out of University of California at Berkeley. Yeah, that lab is clearly um enabling a lot of scientific exploration. Yeah, there are there are other labs that uh, that have more, but there's still a whole lot they're coming from Berkeley. Uh. And after this Louise Louise's career started to put his physics knowledge into practical use to solve mystery. You know. For the first mystery it was are there any hidden chambers in the pyramid of King Kaffrine in Giza? Great mystery? To try it solve, he went to Egypt five as part of an Egyptian American expedition, and they used cosmic rays to try to look for areas of lower density within the pyramid, which they theorized could be hidden chambers. Unfortunately, the solution to this mystery was not very satisfying because the answer was no. Yeah, you always hope it's like her Aldo's vault, right. His next mystery was whether the official account of the Kennedy assassination was right. It started after Life magazine published enlargements of frames frames from the famous Azruter film, which is the infamous footage that actually caught the assassination as it happened. Luise was captivated by these images and he spent Thanksgiving weekend going over them in detail, using the same skills he had used to look at bubble trails from the bubble chamber. So he was so accustomed to really like looking at fine level, tiny details that he just transferred that scientific approach to looking at grainy photographs. Yeah, and what he caught. The anomaly that he caught in these pictures were streaks in sunlight or streaks of sunlight that were on the body of the limousine. And these streaks were longer in some places than in others. He eventually concluded that this was because Abraham's Apruter had involuntarily moved his hand like he had a very steady hand that tracked the limousine really well. Um. His theory was that he he moved involuntarily when he heard gunshots, right as many people will do. You jump a little bit when they're startling noise. CBS, which asked for Luise's findings, did a recreation to try to confirm what Louise had found, and their consensus was that it was possible to connect when these streaks occurred to when the shots were actually fired. So Louise's point of view is that these streaks on the film were a more accurate indication of how many shots were fired and when they were fired than the more obvious movements that people had been associating with the shots. So there was like a moment when the president grabbed at his throat and they were like, that was one shot, and then there's the moment when his head snaps back there saying that's the second shot. Um. But the conclusion based on this looking at the images was that no, there were actually two shots and one of them missed. Uh. That are tracked when the streaks in the sunlight are a different length. Interesting, it's actually uh. Has led to it to a lot of debunking of conspiracy theorists, which was the motivation of some of this work. Yeah, there were some MythBuster esque sorts of experiments to try to figure out exactly why the presidents had recoiled the way it did if he was really only hit from one direction, and Louise imagined the scenario as involving a melon being shot, since it was painful for him to try to imagine this happening to a man, and in fact the president, who was quite popular on someone that he personally admired. He and a friend named Sharon nicknamed Buck Buckingham then replicated the experiment with actual melons reinforced with glass fiber tape that they shot at a firing range, And what they found in that test was basically that their melon, when shot, move the way John F. Kennedy's head did when shot once in one from one direction. So even though his head sort of recoils right, which had led some people to think that there were but there was a shot from behind. Uh that their conclusion was no, that that was that was just physics. That's actually a normal movement. Yes. He went on to do all kinds of physical analysis on the film to try to pinpoint exactly how fast the car was traveling and where it was exactly at any given point in time, which is one of those things where today sounds just like an easy task because today we have much more sophisticated recording and measuring techniques than we did at that point. Um. But that that was also a lot of like looking at how people were clapping and how fast the car was going, and where they seemed to be in relation to other things, to really give a moment by moment account of exactly where the car was and where other people were, and where the shooter was. All of that I could see where someone with a physics mind who likes to analyze things and kind of parted out into mathematical equations would really get into doing that. Yeah, it's kind of even though it's a very different field, it's sort of the same methodology to breaking it down. And later on Louis served on the committee of the Committee on Ballistic Acoustics, which did an eighteen month study into the sound of gun shots during the assassination and whether there was more than one gunman or a shot fired from the Grassy Knoll uh. Their conclusion, from a report released in nineteen eight two was no. There was no shot from the Grassy Knoll, and the acoustic data that had been used to support the idea of a second gunman came in an entire minute after the president had been shot. The final mystery that Louis put his scientific minds to work trying to solve was what happened to the dinosaurs. And this is work that he did with his son Walter also known as Walt, who was a geologist at the University of California at Berkeley. So here's your theory. Sixty five million years ago, a giant asteroid slammed into the Earth, causing enormous earthquakes and tsunamis and clogging the atmosphere with dust, catastrophically affecting life on the planet and wiping out the dinosaurs in the aftermath, along with s of all species that were alive at the time. Yep. So here's how they arrived at this At the time cuckoo hypothesis. Uh that it was not well received when they started making it known that that was what they thought happened. In nineteen seventy seven, Walter had been studying soil layers in Italy because he was a geologist. He found this layer of clay between two layers of limestone, and that layer of clay marked the end of the Cretaceous Period and a worldwide mass extinction. That's what was there in the geologic record. Under the layer of clay were lots of fossils of lots of different species of microscopic marine animals, and on top of that layer, there was only one species of fossils, and there were no microscopic marine animal fossils in this layer of clay itself. Walter brought these samples back to his father, who sent them to a couple of nuclear chemists at Berkeley to have a look, and they found that the clay was about six hundred times richer in iridium than the limestone around it, and this raised some eyebrows. Iridium is very rare on Earth, but it's really common and extraterrestrial objects. Uh So, further research found that this iridium layer existed on other sites all around the world, all in the same layer of the geologic record um and all of the clay samples also contained lots and lots of soot, So it became quickly apparent that the soil layer full of iridium seems to exist all over the world. Louise started pouring over astronomy research to figure out exactly what had brought this iridium to Earth. He came up with all kinds of cookie ideas involving supernovas, a piece of Jupiter. Uh you know, he was basically brainstorming what could have done it, But then he concluded that an asteroid or a comment was the most logical, so something huge that would have also vaporized on impact. Then he started comparing how much volcanic rock was released from the Krakatoa volcanic explosion in He compared that to the irridium layer to try to figure out how big the asteroid would have had to be to make that much stuff, and eventually he concluded that it would have had to have been at least ten kilometers across. The father's son Alvarez team, along with nuclear chemists Franka Sorrow and Helen Michelle, published a paper in Science in night theorizing that a massive asteroid impact had created this iridium layer and led to the extinction of the Cretaceous period. At the time, this idea was extremely controversial. The prevailing belief at that point was that volcanoes had wiped out the dinosaurs, and nobody really liked this idea that that it had really been an asteroid. Then in the Chicks a lob crater was discovered off the Yucatam Peninsula, which is a giant impact site that was both the right age and the right size to have caused the irridium layer on impact. At that point it became a lot more respected as a theory, and then in a panel of forty one experts published a paper concluding that, yes, following an exhaustive review of all that data, the asteroid that struck the earth off the Yucataman Peninsula was indeed what wiped out the dinosaurs, not just a bunch of volcanic explosions, although there probably would have been some volcanic explosions following this impact. Yeah, and we would be remiss if we left out the point that the prevailing theory today is that birds are in fact descended from dinosaurs. So wiped out the dinosaurs and air quotes kind of an oversimplification, Yeah, the dinosaurs as we think of them. Yeah, that was really Louis alvarez last big scientific announcement slash achievement um was this theory of what happened at the end of the Cretaceous period. He died of cancer on September one, when he was seventy seven years old. It's quite a life's a huge Yeah. So he wrote a memoir called Alvarez Surprisingly Um, which just it's written in this just very candid off the cuff voice, like he's just chatting with Yeah, he's just chatting. He's talking about all these things that he did and just all these scientific problems that he decided to put his mind to try solve. Um. I think he had not talked a whole lot publicly about his work during World War Two with the Manhattan Project until the book came out. He talked about that really candidly also, UM, which I think, considering how how much of classroom study is devoted to UH, the impact of the bombs being dropped in the end of the war and whether that was the right decision to make, it is interesting to get a viewpoint from one of the scientists who worked on the project. He was ultimately in favor of the decisions that were made, because a lot of the opinions that you hear about are the opposite when it comes to the Manhattan Project scientists. Yeah, that they really had. He's really an outlier in the UH and the sort of aftermath of that in terms of most of the scientists who worked on the man and project such a life. Yeah, I love that his work is all over the map. I love it too, even though it meant that some of some of it is difficult to think about. But yeah, I'm gonna stick with the dinosaur part. That's my favorite. I like the dinosaur part. I like the I like the bubble chamber part, though, even though the discoveries that came from the bubble chamber are you know, of the sort that are interesting in the realm of physics and hard to apply to everyday life in a way that's relatable to people. I love the idea that they're little particles and they're making little bubbles, and then we're taking pictures of them. I like how in your head physics became really cute. It's so good. I could just tell what you're talking about it. It's my little bubble physics is magic. There you go. Hey, that's a listener mail on the docket I do. This is from Kevin. Kevin says, I was really intrigued by the segment where you introduced Benjamin Bannaker, as it reminded me of my own family's history. Are family would have been counted in that small group of free blacks in Maryland that you mentioned in the podcast. I'm sorry that I'm sending this so late, but I get a little behind on listening to the podcast sometimes, Kevin, that is fine. Everyone who is behind on listening to the podcast, that is fine. I am also behind on listening to all of my podcasts. Kevin goes on to say, my ancestor, Robert Pearl, was born either in sixteen eighty five or sixteen eighty six in Maryland. He was the son of a female slave, and as a slave he was called Lato Robin. His father is unknown, but it's theorized that his father was his owner, Richard Marsham. Interestingly, Robert had been married to Catherine Brent, daughter of Princess Mary Kamakland of the Piscataways. That Catherine died prior to the alleged fathering. He later married an Calbert, daughter of Maryland's first governor and granddaughter and niece of the first and second Lord's Baltimore, respectively, and mother in law to Marsham's daughter from his first Mary. On Richard Marson's death in seventeen thirteen, He's stipulated in his will that Robin slash Robert be emancipated along with Robert's wife and son, but not until he reached age thirty five. Seven years later, Robert was unique as a slave in several regards. He was a skilled carpenter, not an unskilled laborer. He probably could read and write, as evidenced by inventories which show among his belongings writing paper and ink. After his emancipation, Robert was quite successful, and he went on to acquire numerous farms, livestock, and slates. Court records show that he frequently was able to successfully sue to recover debts, including from whites, despite his race. In seventeen forty four, he moved out west to what soon would become Frederick County, Maryland. There he leased a two hundred acre dwelling plantation in Carrollton. During most of his tenure there it was managed by Charles Carroll of Annapolis, but during the last few years it had passed down to his son, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, of whom I assume you are familiar. The is an interesting letter written by Charles Carroll of Carrollton complaining about Robert's son, Robert Son's assuming Robert's lease after his passing, a pretty cool familial mentioned by a signer. By the time of his death, he had sold off all his land that he had previously purchased only keeping the least land where he lived, but he had acquired significant wealth. One account estimates that the value of his state his estate would have placed him in the top five to ten percent for the colony in that time period. He owned at the time of his death working slaves, which were passed along to his children. None were manumated. To my modern mind, it has always been difficult to understand how a former slave could own slaves, but I do not presume to understand the environment of the time. And then he goes on to say that he loved our mention of Jonathan Colton's On Your Mooon in the in the Pluto podcast because that was the song that he and his wife chose to use for their way. Thank you so much, Kevin. Yes, that's a cooler letter, Such a cool letter. I love. Number one. I love when people's personal stories intersect with stuff that we talked about in the podcast in one way or another. I love when people have this end up knowledge of their family history. Also, you know, not everyone has the opportunity to have such an end depth knowledge of their family history, but when people are able to share stuff about their personal ties to what goes way way way back. It's really cool. Um. And in addition, h I appreciate that that Kevin shared this story with us in spite of his conflicted feelings about that part of the family history. So thank you so much, Kevin. It is it's uh, you know, it is great to contextualize what we've talked about with you know, a very real world connection to it that's modern and that we understand and can identify with. Fabulous Kevin, you rock. Thank you very much. If you would like to write to us about this or some other subject, we're at History Podcast at Discovery dot calm. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash history class stuff and on Twitter at miss in history. Are Tumbler is a ms in history dot tumbler dot com, and we are putting things away on Pinterest. If you would like to learn more about one of the areas that Luis Alvarez put his thought into. We are not going to make you try to spell chip Salobe in our search bar, but you could if you wanted to and found you can find a great article about what if that asteroid had missed the Earth. You can also put in the words nuclear bomb and you will find how nuclear bombs work. You can learn about all 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. Audible dot com is the leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment. 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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 ve Egilson, and today we're going to pick up where we left off in the story of Luis Alvarez. As we talked about in the previous episode, this was a scientist who made huge contributions in a very wide variety of fields, from nuclear physics to paleontology. He was granted twenty two patents, which feels like a lot to me, especially when you consider how vastly different these were in terms of what they covered. One was for a golf training machine that he developed for President Eisenhower. One was for a color TV system. He also developed a stabilization system for lenses and binoculars and cameras, and that innovation went on to be used in zoom lenses and shoulder held video cameras when those came along. He also presented a variable power lens to Polaroid, which came to market in six although he had shown it to them about twenty years before. So he invented a lot of different stuff. In addition to all of his scientific accomplishments, he was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. And his accomplishments were so many and so far reaching that even with two episodes, there are highlights and elements and side trips that we could talk about around him and his work that we kind of have to leave out, otherwise it would become an entire podcast series called How Louis Alvarez Works, would be like nine episodes long. Where we left off in the previous episode, he had been creating new radar systems that were used during World War Two, which helps save the lives of Allied pilots and other crew and allowed Allied planes to detect and destroy German U boats. In this episode, we're going to look at his other major portion of his work during World War Two, as well as some of his more diverse contributions to science, which somehow wound up falling into the realm of sort of scientific mystery solving. Yeah. Uh, Luise actually left m I T in ninetee and he became part of the Manhattan Project. First, he spent a little while in Chicago, where scientists were working on creating the chain reactions that are necessary uh in a nuclear bomb. And from there he went to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and he became part of the steering committee for the laboratory there. The team at Los Alamos was working on bombs that used both uranium and plutonium as their fuel. While Luise participated in missions involving both of these types of weapons, most of his scientific work in New Mexico was on the plutonium bombs. The main part of his work had to do with gating their detonators, so he was the one who developed the detonators that were used in plutonium bombs. He flew aboard the B twenty nine bomber that dropped the bomb in the world's first atomic bomb test. The only visual documentation we have of the explosion from the air is a pair of sketches that he made, since nobody had thought to send a camera up aboard the plane. There are plenty of pictures at ground level, but none from the air. He kind of relied on that mechanical sketching knowledge that he had gotten in his high school time to to do some sketchwork based on what he saw aboard the plane. In preparation for the bombs to actually be used. During World War Two, he along with other scientists, moved to the island of Tennyan, where they lived in tents and prepared the bombs and the bombers for their eventual missions. He was aboard the Enola Gay when it dropped the bomb known as Little Boy on Hiroshima. On the flight itself, he didn't wear a parachute. He decided that if the plane were to be shut down, he didn't want to be captured. While he was returning home from having witnessed this bombing, he wrote this letter to his son Walt, who was four years old at the time. What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning are tempered with the hope that this terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent further wars. Alfred Noble thought that his invention of high explosives would have that effect by making wars too terrible, but unfortunately it had just the opposite reaction. Our new destructive force is so many times worse that it may realize Nobel's dream. That's quite a letter to write, Yeah, especially to your tiny child, your four year old, having just witnessed the destruction of a city one weapon. Uh Luis flew on the Nagasaki mission as well, this time aboard another B twenty nine aircraft, the Great Artiste rather than the one that was deploying the bomb. Just before the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Great Artists dropped canisters containing telemetry devices like the ones like the one Luis had created for the bomb, along with a letter written by him and to other physicists. The letter was addressed to Japanese physicists Ryokichi Sagani, who had worked with Louise at Berkeley before the war. Luis had remembered their connection and he hoped that by writing to him he could get information about Americans nuclear capabilities to the Japanese in a way that could put an end to the war. Here's that letter. We are sending this as a personal message to urge that you use your influence as a reputable nuclear physicist to convince the Japanese General Staff of the terrible consequences which will be suffered by your people if you continue in this war. You have known for several years that an atomic bomb could be built if a nation were willing to pay the enormous cost of preparing the necessary material. Now that you have seen that we have constructed the production plants, there can be no doubt in your mind that all the output of these factories, working twenty four hours a day will be exploded on your homeland within the space of three weeks. We have proof fired one bomb in the American desert, exploded one on Hiroshima, and fired the third this morning. We implore you to confirm these facts to your leaders and to do your utmost to stop the destruction and waste of life which can only result in the total annihilation of all your cities if continued. As scientists, we deplore the use to which a beautiful discovery has been put, but we can assure you that unless Japan surrenders at once, this reign of atomic bombs will increase manyfold. In fury to my friend Sagane, with best regards from Louis w Albarez. Luise and Sagani actually met four years after the war was over, at which point Louise added his signature to a copy of the letter that Sagany had. Yeah, that this letter did actually get to the Japanese government. It didn't get to Saganay until after the war was over. Um, but it it did, It did get to its intended recipients. Just digesting that whole thing, Yeah, Well, and the like many of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, Luis was really horrified at the level of destruction and death that the atomic bombs had the power to cause. But since World War Two ended so quickly after the second one was dropped, he really had no doubt that the United States had done the right thing. Um. He really felt like the bombing of Nagasaki, which that's a question that comes up, like we had already bombed Hiroshima, that we also need to bomb as other city. He really felt like that was necessary to bring an end to the war. Everybody knew that it took a whole lot of uranium to make one bomb, and it took a whole lot of time to make that uranium. And if we could his point of view was that if we had only brought bombed Hiroshima, people would have been like, well, it's gonna be a while. They would have thought it was a one off there, it's gonna be a while before they can make another one. So he really felt like that that second event was necessary to end the war. And he also felt sure that if something had gone wrong and they had not perfected the bombs, or if the bombs had not been dropped, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been destroyed anyway through more conventional warfare techniques and incendiary bombs, and a departure from pretty much the overwhelming majority of other Manhattan Project scientists, he also thought that the United States should continue its nuclear weapons program and develop a hydrogen bomb. On a note about his personal life, Louise and Geraldine divorced not long after World War Two. He remarried in nineteen fifty eight to Janet Landis, who had worked with him in the lab at Berkeley, and they had two children together, named Donald and Helen. Louise returned to Berkeley after the war was over, and at that point he turned his focus to high energy atomic research. Like some of the stuff that we talked about in the previous episode, this kind of esoteric work, but it involves bubbles, so so a little lighter in toe into what we've been talking about. Yeah, we're going to talk about in a little bit more detailed because it's also what he won his Nobel Prize for um. So there had already been electron accelerators in use for some years before he went back to Berkeley, but he wanted to create a proton accelerator, and he did so. He completed a forty ft proton accelerator in ninety seven. In nineteen fifty three, Louise met University of Michigan physicist Donald Glasser, who had just invented the bubble chamber that we alluded to a minute ago. So, unlike particle accelerators, which produced the particles that scientists want to study, the bubble chamber detected the particles that had been produced. So in a bubble chamber, particles passed through a fluid and they leave this trail of bubbles behind in their wake. Luise realized that this invention could be used to detect particles from uh Sinco cyclotron, which is a circular particle accelerator that had just been built at Berkeley. Luise made some improvements to the bubble chamber, including using liquid hydrogen as the fluid and developing more sensitive recording and transmission. He then worked on making the chamber even bigger so it could record the trails of more particles. The first chamber was a one inch glass tube, and about five years later he was actually using one that measured seventy two inches. So thinking big so when a particle passed through the high drogen, which was about degrees below zero celsius, it would heat the hydrogen to the boiling point and leave this little trail of bubbles in its wake. Photographs would record what this trail looked like, and then Luis and his students developed lots of tools for scanning and measuring all of these photos um The bubble chamber could produce more than a million photographs in one year, and they needed to look at and analyze and record all of these photographs to see the trails that it was picking up a little tiny bubble trails. Using the bubble chamber, he discovered a tremendous number of elementary particles. He also discovered extremely short lived particles known as residents states. Luise won the Nobel Prize for this work in ninety eight, and in the ceremony his methods were created were credited with making practically all of the other discoveries about particle physics possible. Side note, there a whole lot of Nobel Prizes come out of University of California at Berkeley. Yeah, that lab is clearly um enabling a lot of scientific exploration. Yeah, there are there are other labs that uh, that have more, but there's still a whole lot they're coming from Berkeley. Uh. And after this Louise Louise's career started to put his physics knowledge into practical use to solve mystery. You know. For the first mystery it was are there any hidden chambers in the pyramid of King Kaffrine in Giza? Great mystery? To try it solve, he went to Egypt five as part of an Egyptian American expedition, and they used cosmic rays to try to look for areas of lower density within the pyramid, which they theorized could be hidden chambers. Unfortunately, the solution to this mystery was not very satisfying because the answer was no. Yeah, you always hope it's like her Aldo's vault, right. His next mystery was whether the official account of the Kennedy assassination was right. It started after Life magazine published enlargements of frames frames from the famous Azruter film, which is the infamous footage that actually caught the assassination as it happened. Luise was captivated by these images and he spent Thanksgiving weekend going over them in detail, using the same skills he had used to look at bubble trails from the bubble chamber. So he was so accustomed to really like looking at fine level, tiny details that he just transferred that scientific approach to looking at grainy photographs. Yeah, and what he caught. The anomaly that he caught in these pictures were streaks in sunlight or streaks of sunlight that were on the body of the limousine. And these streaks were longer in some places than in others. He eventually concluded that this was because Abraham's Apruter had involuntarily moved his hand like he had a very steady hand that tracked the limousine really well. Um. His theory was that he he moved involuntarily when he heard gunshots, right as many people will do. You jump a little bit when they're startling noise. CBS, which asked for Luise's findings, did a recreation to try to confirm what Louise had found, and their consensus was that it was possible to connect when these streaks occurred to when the shots were actually fired. So Louise's point of view is that these streaks on the film were a more accurate indication of how many shots were fired and when they were fired than the more obvious movements that people had been associating with the shots. So there was like a moment when the president grabbed at his throat and they were like, that was one shot, and then there's the moment when his head snaps back there saying that's the second shot. Um. But the conclusion based on this looking at the images was that no, there were actually two shots and one of them missed. Uh. That are tracked when the streaks in the sunlight are a different length. Interesting, it's actually uh. Has led to it to a lot of debunking of conspiracy theorists, which was the motivation of some of this work. Yeah, there were some MythBuster esque sorts of experiments to try to figure out exactly why the presidents had recoiled the way it did if he was really only hit from one direction, and Louise imagined the scenario as involving a melon being shot, since it was painful for him to try to imagine this happening to a man, and in fact the president, who was quite popular on someone that he personally admired. He and a friend named Sharon nicknamed Buck Buckingham then replicated the experiment with actual melons reinforced with glass fiber tape that they shot at a firing range, And what they found in that test was basically that their melon, when shot, move the way John F. Kennedy's head did when shot once in one from one direction. So even though his head sort of recoils right, which had led some people to think that there were but there was a shot from behind. Uh that their conclusion was no, that that was that was just physics. That's actually a normal movement. Yes. He went on to do all kinds of physical analysis on the film to try to pinpoint exactly how fast the car was traveling and where it was exactly at any given point in time, which is one of those things where today sounds just like an easy task because today we have much more sophisticated recording and measuring techniques than we did at that point. Um. But that that was also a lot of like looking at how people were clapping and how fast the car was going, and where they seemed to be in relation to other things, to really give a moment by moment account of exactly where the car was and where other people were, and where the shooter was. All of that I could see where someone with a physics mind who likes to analyze things and kind of parted out into mathematical equations would really get into doing that. Yeah, it's kind of even though it's a very different field, it's sort of the same methodology to breaking it down. And later on Louis served on the committee of the Committee on Ballistic Acoustics, which did an eighteen month study into the sound of gun shots during the assassination and whether there was more than one gunman or a shot fired from the Grassy Knoll uh. Their conclusion, from a report released in nineteen eight two was no. There was no shot from the Grassy Knoll, and the acoustic data that had been used to support the idea of a second gunman came in an entire minute after the president had been shot. The final mystery that Louis put his scientific minds to work trying to solve was what happened to the dinosaurs. And this is work that he did with his son Walter also known as Walt, who was a geologist at the University of California at Berkeley. So here's your theory. Sixty five million years ago, a giant asteroid slammed into the Earth, causing enormous earthquakes and tsunamis and clogging the atmosphere with dust, catastrophically affecting life on the planet and wiping out the dinosaurs in the aftermath, along with s of all species that were alive at the time. Yep. So here's how they arrived at this At the time cuckoo hypothesis. Uh that it was not well received when they started making it known that that was what they thought happened. In nineteen seventy seven, Walter had been studying soil layers in Italy because he was a geologist. He found this layer of clay between two layers of limestone, and that layer of clay marked the end of the Cretaceous Period and a worldwide mass extinction. That's what was there in the geologic record. Under the layer of clay were lots of fossils of lots of different species of microscopic marine animals, and on top of that layer, there was only one species of fossils, and there were no microscopic marine animal fossils in this layer of clay itself. Walter brought these samples back to his father, who sent them to a couple of nuclear chemists at Berkeley to have a look, and they found that the clay was about six hundred times richer in iridium than the limestone around it, and this raised some eyebrows. Iridium is very rare on Earth, but it's really common and extraterrestrial objects. Uh So, further research found that this iridium layer existed on other sites all around the world, all in the same layer of the geologic record um and all of the clay samples also contained lots and lots of soot, So it became quickly apparent that the soil layer full of iridium seems to exist all over the world. Louise started pouring over astronomy research to figure out exactly what had brought this iridium to Earth. He came up with all kinds of cookie ideas involving supernovas, a piece of Jupiter. Uh you know, he was basically brainstorming what could have done it, But then he concluded that an asteroid or a comment was the most logical, so something huge that would have also vaporized on impact. Then he started comparing how much volcanic rock was released from the Krakatoa volcanic explosion in He compared that to the irridium layer to try to figure out how big the asteroid would have had to be to make that much stuff, and eventually he concluded that it would have had to have been at least ten kilometers across. The father's son Alvarez team, along with nuclear chemists Franka Sorrow and Helen Michelle, published a paper in Science in night theorizing that a massive asteroid impact had created this iridium layer and led to the extinction of the Cretaceous period. At the time, this idea was extremely controversial. The prevailing belief at that point was that volcanoes had wiped out the dinosaurs, and nobody really liked this idea that that it had really been an asteroid. Then in the Chicks a lob crater was discovered off the Yucatam Peninsula, which is a giant impact site that was both the right age and the right size to have caused the irridium layer on impact. At that point it became a lot more respected as a theory, and then in a panel of forty one experts published a paper concluding that, yes, following an exhaustive review of all that data, the asteroid that struck the earth off the Yucataman Peninsula was indeed what wiped out the dinosaurs, not just a bunch of volcanic explosions, although there probably would have been some volcanic explosions following this impact. Yeah, and we would be remiss if we left out the point that the prevailing theory today is that birds are in fact descended from dinosaurs. So wiped out the dinosaurs and air quotes kind of an oversimplification, Yeah, the dinosaurs as we think of them. Yeah, that was really Louis alvarez last big scientific announcement slash achievement um was this theory of what happened at the end of the Cretaceous period. He died of cancer on September one, when he was seventy seven years old. It's quite a life's a huge Yeah. So he wrote a memoir called Alvarez Surprisingly Um, which just it's written in this just very candid off the cuff voice, like he's just chatting with Yeah, he's just chatting. He's talking about all these things that he did and just all these scientific problems that he decided to put his mind to try solve. Um. I think he had not talked a whole lot publicly about his work during World War Two with the Manhattan Project until the book came out. He talked about that really candidly also, UM, which I think, considering how how much of classroom study is devoted to UH, the impact of the bombs being dropped in the end of the war and whether that was the right decision to make, it is interesting to get a viewpoint from one of the scientists who worked on the project. He was ultimately in favor of the decisions that were made, because a lot of the opinions that you hear about are the opposite when it comes to the Manhattan Project scientists. Yeah, that they really had. He's really an outlier in the UH and the sort of aftermath of that in terms of most of the scientists who worked on the man and project such a life. Yeah, I love that his work is all over the map. I love it too, even though it meant that some of some of it is difficult to think about. But yeah, I'm gonna stick with the dinosaur part. That's my favorite. I like the dinosaur part. I like the I like the bubble chamber part, though, even though the discoveries that came from the bubble chamber are you know, of the sort that are interesting in the realm of physics and hard to apply to everyday life in a way that's relatable to people. I love the idea that they're little particles and they're making little bubbles, and then we're taking pictures of them. I like how in your head physics became really cute. It's so good. I could just tell what you're talking about it. It's my little bubble physics is magic. There you go. Hey, that's a listener mail on the docket I do. This is from Kevin. Kevin says, I was really intrigued by the segment where you introduced Benjamin Bannaker, as it reminded me of my own family's history. Are family would have been counted in that small group of free blacks in Maryland that you mentioned in the podcast. I'm sorry that I'm sending this so late, but I get a little behind on listening to the podcast sometimes, Kevin, that is fine. Everyone who is behind on listening to the podcast, that is fine. I am also behind on listening to all of my podcasts. Kevin goes on to say, my ancestor, Robert Pearl, was born either in sixteen eighty five or sixteen eighty six in Maryland. He was the son of a female slave, and as a slave he was called Lato Robin. His father is unknown, but it's theorized that his father was his owner, Richard Marsham. Interestingly, Robert had been married to Catherine Brent, daughter of Princess Mary Kamakland of the Piscataways. That Catherine died prior to the alleged fathering. He later married an Calbert, daughter of Maryland's first governor and granddaughter and niece of the first and second Lord's Baltimore, respectively, and mother in law to Marsham's daughter from his first Mary. On Richard Marson's death in seventeen thirteen, He's stipulated in his will that Robin slash Robert be emancipated along with Robert's wife and son, but not until he reached age thirty five. Seven years later, Robert was unique as a slave in several regards. He was a skilled carpenter, not an unskilled laborer. He probably could read and write, as evidenced by inventories which show among his belongings writing paper and ink. After his emancipation, Robert was quite successful, and he went on to acquire numerous farms, livestock, and slates. Court records show that he frequently was able to successfully sue to recover debts, including from whites, despite his race. In seventeen forty four, he moved out west to what soon would become Frederick County, Maryland. There he leased a two hundred acre dwelling plantation in Carrollton. During most of his tenure there it was managed by Charles Carroll of Annapolis, but during the last few years it had passed down to his son, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, of whom I assume you are familiar. The is an interesting letter written by Charles Carroll of Carrollton complaining about Robert's son, Robert Son's assuming Robert's lease after his passing, a pretty cool familial mentioned by a signer. By the time of his death, he had sold off all his land that he had previously purchased only keeping the least land where he lived, but he had acquired significant wealth. One account estimates that the value of his state his estate would have placed him in the top five to ten percent for the colony in that time period. He owned at the time of his death working slaves, which were passed along to his children. None were manumated. To my modern mind, it has always been difficult to understand how a former slave could own slaves, but I do not presume to understand the environment of the time. And then he goes on to say that he loved our mention of Jonathan Colton's On Your Mooon in the in the Pluto podcast because that was the song that he and his wife chose to use for their way. Thank you so much, Kevin. Yes, that's a cooler letter, Such a cool letter. I love. Number one. I love when people's personal stories intersect with stuff that we talked about in the podcast in one way or another. I love when people have this end up knowledge of their family history. Also, you know, not everyone has the opportunity to have such an end depth knowledge of their family history, but when people are able to share stuff about their personal ties to what goes way way way back. It's really cool. Um. And in addition, h I appreciate that that Kevin shared this story with us in spite of his conflicted feelings about that part of the family history. So thank you so much, Kevin. It is it's uh, you know, it is great to contextualize what we've talked about with you know, a very real world connection to it that's modern and that we understand and can identify with. Fabulous Kevin, you rock. Thank you very much. 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