Biographical Sketches

1911-1988

American Physicist and Engineer

Luis W. Alvarez was perhaps the best-known Hispanic scientist of the twentieth century, excelling in experimental physics and engineering. In the 1940s he worked on the Manhattan Project designing the detonating device for the first atomic bomb. In 1968 he won the Nobel Prize in physics for work that included the discovery of resonance particles—subatomic particles that have very short lifetimes and that occur primarily in high energy nuclear collisions, and the design of an experimental bubble chamber to measure these particles. In the late 1970s he theorized that the dinosaurs became extinct as a result of a meteor crashing into Earth 65 million years ago.

Alvarez was born June 13, 1911, in San Francisco. His father was a physician who enjoyed research, and his mother taught school. As a child Luis often traveled to work with his father, and...