Luis W. Alvarez, Pt. 2

The second part of the Luis Alvarez episode covers his time as part of the Manhattan Project designing detonators for atomic bombs. Beyond his controversial work, Alvarez also contributed to particle physics, mystery solving and paleontology.

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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 ve Egilson, and today we're going to pick
up where we left off in the story of Luis Alvarez.

(00:21):
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

(00:41):
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

(01:02):
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

(01:27):
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

(01:51):
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,

(02:14):
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

(02:36):
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

(02:58):
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.

(03:21):
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

(03:41):
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,

(04:02):
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

(04:22):
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,

(04:49):
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

(05:10):
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

(05:31):
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

(05:53):
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

(06:15):
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

(06:39):
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.

(07:00):
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.

(07:23):
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

(07:44):
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

(08:06):
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.

(08:31):
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

(08:53):
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

(09:14):
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

(09:35):
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

(09:55):
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

(10:18):
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

(10:41):
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

(11:04):
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

(11:27):
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

(11:50):
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,

(12:11):
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?

(12:35):
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

(12:55):
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

(13:18):
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

(13:41):
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.

(14:02):
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

(14:23):
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

(14:44):
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,

(15:05):
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

(15:29):
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

(15:52):
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

(16:17):
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

(16:38):
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

(16:59):
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

(17:21):
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

(17:42):
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

(18:06):
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

(18:26):
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

(18:50):
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

(19:14):
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,

(19:34):
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

(19:58):
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

(20:20):
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

(20:43):
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.

(21:07):
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

(21:27):
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

(21:49):
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

(22:11):
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

(22:32):
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

(22:54):
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,

(23:19):
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,

(23:42):
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

(24:05):
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

(24:25):
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,

(24:48):
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.

(25:12):
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

(25:35):
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,

(25:57):
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

(26:20):
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

(26:42):
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

(27:05):
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

(27:25):
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

(27:47):
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

(28:10):
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

(28:33):
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

(28:53):
you very much. If you would like to write to
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(29:17):
thought into. We are not going to make you try
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(29:43):
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