Luis W. Alvarez, Pt. 1

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:25):
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

(00:46):
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

(01:06):
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

(01:27):
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

(01:47):
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

(02:10):
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

(02:34):
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

(02:56):
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

(03:18):
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

(03:39):
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

(04:01):
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

(04:22):
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.

(04:45):
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

(05:07):
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,

(05:29):
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

(05:50):
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

(06:12):
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

(06:34):
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

(06:55):
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

(07:16):
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

(07:39):
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

(08:02):
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

(08:24):
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

(08:46):
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

(09:06):
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

(09:28):
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,

(09:51):
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

(10:12):
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

(10:33):
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

(10:56):
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

(11:18):
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.

(11:41):
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

(12:02):
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,

(12:23):
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

(12:45):
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

(13:06):
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

(13:29):
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

(13:50):
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.

(14:13):
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

(14:37):
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,

(15:00):
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

(15:23):
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

(15:44):
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

(16:06):
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

(16:29):
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,

(16:51):
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.

(17:14):
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

(17:37):
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

(18:00):
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

(18:22):
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,

(18:42):
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

(19:03):
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,

(19:26):
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

(19:49):
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,

(20:12):
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

(20:34):
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

(20:56):
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

(21:20):
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

(21:42):
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

(22:04):
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

(22:29):
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

(22:53):
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

(23:16):
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

(23:38):
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

(23:58):
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

(24:19):
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,

(24:39):
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
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(25:01):
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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

(25:22):
a whole lot more at our website, which is how
stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands
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