Luis Alvarez gets only a bit part in Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer. In January 1939, the news arrives in Berkeley that two German scientists have split the uranium atom. Oppenheimer, who hasn’t yet heard, sees an excited Alvarez dashing out of a barber shop mid-haircut, newspaper in hand. He catches up with him at the physics department, where they’re joined by E.O. Lawrence, the director of Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory. As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer doesn’t believe the story. ‘It’s not possible,’ he says: the massive uranium atom is too stable; splitting it into two other largish nuclei would go against all previous findings about nuclear interactions. He heads over to a blackboard to sketch out the mathematics. Alvarez reacts differently: ‘I’m going to try to reproduce it,’ he says, and leaves the room. A short time passes; Oppenheimer’s scepticism is well supported by theory but, Lawrence tells him, there’s ‘just one problem … Alvarez did it.’ They go next door to look at the experimental evidence that Alvarez has just produced. Oppenheimer is persuaded, and immediately understands what it means. He tells the younger physicist that splitting the uranium nucleus can cause a neutron chain reaction and the release of an enormous amount of energy: ‘A bomb, Alvarez, a bomb.’
The Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb, transmuted pure theory into mass slaughter, and it changed everything for the scientists who did the work. For Oppenheimer, as its scientific director, it brought first power, then fame, then banishment. For Alvarez, the bomb was a launchpad to a brilliant life as an experimental physicist and counsellor to the Cold War state. Oppenheimer did little physics after Los Alamos. He wrote limpid essays on the nature of science, directed the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and, after the withdrawal of his security clearance in 1954, emerged as a tragic hero of the American left. Alvarez went on to very great scientific things, and in 1968 was finally awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, which Oppenheimer never won.
Alvarez enjoyed doing lots of different things and, for much of his life, worked in institutional environments that gave him free range. Towards the end of his career, his curiosity turned to things outside physics. He inserted himself into the controversy over whether there had been a ‘second gunman’ in the Kennedy assassination (there hadn’t), suggested an explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs (it was caused by the impact of an enormous asteroid), and used radiation-detection techniques in an effort to establish whether there were as yet undiscovered chambers in the Egyptian pyramids (there weren’t). Alec Nevala-Lee is an American writer of science fiction, detective thrillers and biographies, whose previous work includes a life of Buckminster Fuller. He likes to write about creative risk-takers. Alvarez is a natural subject for him.
Oppenheimer and Alvarez both came from privilege: Oppenheimer’s father was a wealthy New York merchant; Alvarez’s was a prosperous Californian physician and author. Alvarez, who shared his name with his paternal grandfather, was a tall, blue-eyed blond – as one historian recently put it, ‘a white man with a Hispanic name’. He took his doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago in 1936, then went to Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, where he was based for the rest of his academic career.
Lawrence built cyclotrons, complex instruments that used electric and magnetic fields to accelerate charged particles to enormous energies and then smash them into target materials. Cyclotrons were used to make radioactive isotopes for medical purposes but, more significant, they were the principal means of discovering new subatomic particles. At that time it was scarcely considered that there would be military uses for this sort of equipment. Alvarez’s first notable achievement at Berkeley was the experimental confirmation of the theoretically predicted phenomenon of K-capture: an electron in the orbit closest to the nucleus combines with a proton to produce a neutron, so transmuting one element into another.
Experimental nuclear physics was, even then, very expensive. But the war profoundly changed the financial and political environment of American science. It’s been said that ‘radar won the war; the atomic bomb ended it.’ In 1940 Alvarez was sent off to the MIT Radiation Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts to help develop the British invention of the cavity magnetron into usable ground and aircraft-based radar systems. This was his first involvement with large, multi-skilled teams working towards military ends, and with the vast resources made available for this sort of research and development. At its peak, the Rad Lab absorbed close to $4 million per month and employed 4000 people – small beer compared to the more charismatic Manhattan Project, though it employed twice as many academic physicists.
Alvarez was a brilliant and prolific inventor. The Rad Lab made him a kind of minister without portfolio, tasked with doing pretty much whatever he thought was needed. His versatility became a personal brand – the Special Systems Division was known as ‘Luie’s Gadgets’. A suite of ‘war-winning’ radar inventions is owed to Alvarez and his colleagues: the ground-controlled approach radar that helped land planes in poor visibility; the ground-based microwave early warning system; the Eagle high-altitude bombing system; and the Vixen radar technique used so effectively against U-boats.
The call to Los Alamos came late in the game, and the approach was made directly by Oppenheimer, who put Alvarez to work on problems with detonation of the plutonium bomb – the sort tested at Alamogordo and then dropped on Nagasaki. To effectively detonate a subcritical mass of plutonium, it had to be compressed to criticality by perfectly spherical waves produced by more than thirty simultaneously firing explosive lenses. The technical problems of achieving this simultaneity were enormous; if the firing times varied even by as little as a few nanoseconds, the result would be a ‘fizzle’ rather than a full-blooded blast. But Alvarez solved the problem.
Oppenheimer next tasked him with developing gauges that would accurately measure the force of the blasts. When the Trinity Test took place, Alvarez was in a B-29, but Oppenheimer had insisted that he keep 25 miles away from Ground Zero because of weather and safety concerns, meaning that the measuring instruments he had devised couldn’t be deployed. Alvarez did as he was told, and may have been the first person to describe the appearance of the ‘mushroom cloud’. But he had desperately wanted to be there for the big moment, and even forty years later could still recall his rage: ‘I was absolutely furious, angry with [Oppenheimer] as I have never been angry with anyone before or since.’
Alvarez always wanted to be where the action was. Associates remarked on his ‘cowboy spirit’, his appetite for both scientific and personal risk. Oppenheimer agreed that Alvarez should be dispatched to Tinian Island in the Marianas, where the uranium bomb was being made ready for Hiroshima; he was charged with installing the gauges that would measure its explosive energy. Determined to be aboard Great Artiste, the observation B-29 that would accompany the Enola Gay as it dropped the bomb, Alvarez shrewdly decided not to lobby Oppenheimer, instead going straight to the military director of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, who gave his approval: Oppenheimer was called the Father of the Bomb, but Alvarez was the scientist in the delivery room. At the moment the bomb was released over Hiroshima, Alvarez was fully occupied watching the oscilloscope screen that recorded data from the gauges slung under parachutes. Minutes later, he ‘looked in vain for the city that had been our target’, seeing no man-made structures on the ground. He worried that the Enola Gay bombardier had missed, but the crew on the observation plane reassured him that Hiroshima had been annihilated: ‘It was a beautiful job of bombing.’
After the war, Oppenheimer said that the scientists had ‘known sin’, but Alvarez had no qualms. On the plane back from Hiroshima, he wrote a letter to his son, explaining why it was the right thing to do: many more lives would have been lost if the war went on; the horror of the destruction would guarantee perpetual world peace. The bomb, he said, was ‘one of the most life-saving decisions in the history of mankind’. Alvarez was far from alone in thinking that, but on his return to Los Alamos, he was irritated by the handwringing of colleagues: ‘Many of my friends felt responsible for killing Japanese civilians, and it upset them terribly. I could muster very little sympathy for their point of view.’
Even before Hiroshima, Alvarez was thinking about what he might do when he re-entered academic life. Two things were clear: that the future of physics lay in investigating fundamental atomic particles, and that this work involved the construction of ever more powerful particle accelerators. He was made a full professor at the University of California, though most of his salary was paid by the Atomic Energy Commission. The lab at Berkeley had been profoundly changed by the wartime mobilisation of physics; it’s hard now to recover the prewar sense that atomic physics was as pure as pure science could be. But, after 1939, the physicists understood very well the explosive implications of atom-splitting, and, once the Manhattan Project had proved them right, the politicians and generals were easily persuaded – or persuaded themselves – that advances in nuclear physics would be central to the fight against communism. Lawrence was skilled in the political arts, and he ensured that the commitment of enormous government resources to nuclear physics was made permanent. As his protégé, Alvarez followed suit; torrents of government money were directed to the Berkeley lab. ‘We ran it,’ he bragged, ‘with a big barrel of greenbacks.’
Lawrence and Alvarez wanted atomic physics to grow big – financially, instrumentally, organisationally. Theory came cheap; experimental equipment was expensive. The instruments used to find out new things about atomic structure have been some of the most costly scientific kit ever constructed. Most commentary on postwar physics dwells on the knowledge that was produced, but the equipment that was built to obtain that knowledge played an enormous role in the lives of scientists and in defining what it was they wanted. It was their military and political allies who made possible the colossally expensive instrumentation that transformed atomic physics into the biggest bit of Big Science.
The primary scientific task was to discover new subatomic particles. Cosmic rays had enormous energies and they came free, streaming down from the sky, but accelerators could manipulate particle beams and make collisions more controllable. There were physicists who hoped for ‘some easy way’ to generate high-energy beams, but Alvarez thought ‘the best thing to do was use brute force.’ Lawrence’s cyclotrons accelerated charged particles in a spiral path; the larger the radius of the spiral, the higher the energy of the particles. Alvarez wanted to build a linear accelerator – a ‘linac’ – which could generate much greater energies. (When the particle beam travels in a straight line, it doesn’t lose energy through curving.) The linearity made it a simpler matter to boost the energy of the beam at intervals along its path, and the instrument could be made as long as you liked and had the real estate to accommodate it – Alvarez’s first design for a linac in the Berkeley hills was two thousand feet long. Radio frequency oscillators were used as the boosters: the military had mountains of surplus radar sets to do the job, six hundred of which General Groves secured for Alvarez.
Alvarez liked to regard what he was doing in the immediate postwar years as ‘fundamental physical research’, but much changed with the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949. Atomic physics had scaled up, and now the building of atomic weapons would have to scale up even more. At Los Alamos, Edward Teller had already pressed for a ‘super’ – a hydrogen bomb that would be enormously more destructive than the uranium and plutonium weapons used on Japan – but the Soviets’ progress gave new urgency to the development of an American hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer was the chief opponent of a crash programme to build such a thing, but Alvarez was dying to get back to weapons-related work. Having spent ‘four years doing “basic research” … it appeared that a crisis had arrived and perhaps I should get back into the field of atomic energy.’ The Lawrence-Alvarez lab lobbied for the construction of the benignly named Materials Testing Accelerator, whose ultimate justification was to produce quantities of fissionable material for bombs. (There was a belief that the US was running out of stuff that could be dug up from the ground.) That project turned out to be a technical failure and a tactical waste of resources, since prospectors, newly incentivised, soon discovered lots of new uranium deposits. ‘Capitalism ended the uranium shortage,’ Alvarez wrote.
He remained determined to build an enduring alliance with the generals and the war-planners. The nuclear arms race provided an ideal political environment for the rush to build more powerful particle accelerators, and Alvarez was the sort of Cold War patriot who knew where the money was and how to get it. He had little tolerance for colleagues who were squeamish about weapons research, saying that ‘anyone who now takes the time to work on mesons’ – a class of subatomic particles at the heart of fundamental research – ‘is little less than a traitor.’
Disloyalty became a central issue for American physics research, notably at Berkeley, where Alvarez was keen on the requirement that colleagues should sign anti-communist oaths. Some left the university rather than sign, one of them objecting to Alvarez’s ‘high-handed position’ that everyone in the physics department should be devoting themselves to ‘war work’. In the Manhattan Project days, Groves had suspected that Oppenheimer wasn’t telling him everything he wanted to know about what was going on, and Alvarez had acted as a back-channel informant. After Hiroshima, Alvarez, infuriated by Oppenheimer’s resistance to going full throttle on development of the H-bomb, helped sow seeds of suspicion about his loyalty, passing on gossip that President Truman didn’t trust Oppenheimer.
In 1949, Alvarez and Lawrence lobbied the AEC chairman, David Lilienthal. He wasn’t keen, writing in his diary that the Berkeley pair seemed ‘bloodthirsty’: ‘Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez in here drooling over the hydrogen bomb. Is this all we have to offer?’ They found receptive politicians soon enough, but obstacles remained – and one of these was Oppenheimer’s role as a government adviser. To Alvarez, Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb represented both a suspicious softness on communism and a potential impediment to acquiring the big-ticket equipment that Big Physics demanded. In 1954, a government panel convened to decide whether Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be withdrawn gave Alvarez and other enthusiasts their chance to sideline him. Alvarez’s patron, Lawrence, gave a medical excuse to avoid testifying; Alvarez hesitated, he later said, but ‘poured myself a stiff drink’ and booked a seat on the red-eye to Washington. Oppenheimer’s position – that if the US didn’t build the H-bomb, then the Soviets wouldn’t either – was naive, Alvarez told the panel, and ‘showed exceedingly poor judgment’. What’s more, he said, Oppenheimer was ‘one of the most persuasive men that has ever lived’, and he hadn’t encountered anyone whose opposition to the H-bomb couldn’t be attributed to Oppenheimer’s influence. Alvarez found it ‘peculiar’ that a man who had led the development of the atomic bomb should now oppose its improvement, leaving the explanation for Oppenheimer’s apparent change of heart hanging in the politically charged Cold War air.
Oppenheimer’s clearance was withdrawn; the US put itself on track to building ever more destructive nuclear weapons; and atomic physics was showered with government dollars. Particle accelerators became bigger, more powerful and more expensive. But there was a problem: the accelerators could make all sorts of particles, but they needed to be detected. There were bottlenecks in the design and construction of instruments to detect, identify and represent the particles produced by smashed atoms. In 1952, Donald Glaser, a young physicist at the University of Michigan, devised an ingenious ‘bubble-chamber’ to detect, and make visible, cosmic ray particles. Alvarez instantly saw enormous potential in the device, once it could be reconfigured to detect the particles experimentally produced in accelerators. In a bubble-chamber, charged subatomic particles pass through a superheated transparent liquid, leaving a track of bubbles which can grow in size and be photographed: the path traced by the particles is evidence of their identity.
Glaser’s chamber was tiny – about an inch in diameter – but Alvarez dreamed of something much bigger and much more powerful. He made his own versions of the chamber, first two inches in diameter, then four inches, then ten, and finally, in 1959, a 72-inch monster. Its metal shell framed a glass window – ‘the largest piece of optical glass ever cast’ – which made it possible to photograph the showers of particles produced by the enormous Berkeley Bevatron, a ‘magnetic doughnut’ weighing ten thousand tons and with a diameter of 180 feet. The accelerator cost almost $9 million (some $100 million in today’s money), and Alvarez’s 72-inch bubble-chamber and supporting equipment – which Alvarez referred to as an ‘entire weapons system’ – was paid for with a special grant of $2.5 million from the AEC.
Alvarez’s bubble-chamber discovered dozens of new subatomic particles, including many ‘resonance states’ that exist only for a nanosecond or less before decaying into other particles. This ‘particle zoo’ had to be ordered and schematised by the theoreticians. But the bubble-chamber also produced enormous numbers of potentially particle-revealing ‘events’ – more than a million a year by the late 1960s – and these had to be scanned, recorded, logged and interpreted. To make observations in such quantities, Alvarez devised not just a new set of instruments but a new system of scientific production and a new way of life for particle physicists. He needed structural and cryogenic engineers to build and maintain the chamber, scanners to examine images of events, computer programmers to write code to make sense of the images, and technicians to do all sorts of support work. Scientific knowledge-making with Alvarez’s bubble-chamber took place on an industrial scale: it was highly differentiated, regimented and very, very big. ‘Luie’s army’, a coming together of several hundred scientists, engineers and technicians, was then the largest particle physics team in the world. Alvarez’s politicking for the project was crucial to its success: a colleague wrote that his ‘zeal for doing physics in this big way bordered on evangelism’.
Alvarez’s influence was manifest in the size, scale and differentiation of the scientific workplace he had brought into being, but it was also evident in his presence throughout what Eisenhower called the Cold War ‘military-industrial complex’. Alvarez found the business world ‘exciting and challenging’, and was not at all averse to the possibility of making ‘a few million dollars’. He relished his membership of the Bohemian Grove private ‘gentlemen’s club’ north of San Francisco – the very best venue for networking between scientists and political and industrial powerbrokers. He was introduced to the club by one of the key figures in both the Rand Corporation and the Ford Foundation, and a special arrangement was made that he get a new automobile every year at cost. Alvarez was on the board of IBM and he was one of the original directors of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation when it went public – again, courtesy of connections made at Bohemian Grove. In the 1950s, he was heavily involved in a commercial venture to develop colour television, backed by Paramount Pictures. There are more than a hundred patents in Alvarez’s name, several of which relate to this project. In the 1960s, Alvarez was a partner in the founding of an optics company, whose inventions included a golf swing analyser (presented to Eisenhower) and a diagnostic tool for ophthalmologists. Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera, wanted to engage Alvarez as a special consultant, but to Alvarez’s immense irritation the University of California refused to release him from its patenting restrictions. When, in 1978, he took early retirement from the university, one of his stated reasons was ‘to escape from my very restrictive patent contract’.
Alvarez never managed to make huge amounts of money from his business ventures, but he was a major presence as a Cold War adviser to the military. He was a trustee of the MIT spin-off Mitre Corporation, consulting on air defence systems, and a member of Jason, the powerful defence advisory group of elite scientists established after the Sputnik shock. Given top-security clearance, he advised on night-vision technology for use in the Vietnam War, on reconnaissance satellites, and on an electron-beam weapon. Alvarez liked to be close to money, to power, and to state secrets. The CIA called on him in the 1950s during their inquiries into whether UFOs posed a threat to national security, and he was cleared to work on a panel of the National Security Agency. Said to be a ‘lifelong Republican’, Alvarez was keen to serve America’s Cold War security interests. But there were limits. In the course of his work for Jason, he discovered a technique for detecting hidden explosives. It was generally understood that Jason inventions belonged to the government, so colleagues were surprised to find that Alvarez had filed a personal patent on the technology. William Press, another Jason member, was delegated to negotiate with Alvarez, but he proved intransigent. Alvarez told Press that when, during the war, he had invented a ground control plane landing system, he had assigned the patent rights to the government on the understanding that after the conclusion of hostilities the rights would revert to him. In the event, however, the government had retained the rights. Alvarez did not mean to repeat his mistake: ‘It should have made me rich,’ he said. There was, Press remarked, ‘a selfish, grasping aspect to Luis’s character’.
Alvarez was doing well in the 1960s – he was kept busy as a government consultant and his ties to industry were rewarding – but the industrialised particle physics he had done so much to bring about no longer made him happy. He told interviewers in 1967 that, compared to the nuclear physics of the prewar period, ‘I hardly recognise that it’s the same business’ – it had become ‘just a little dull’. Many aspects of the bubble-chamber form of work organisation had become typical of experimental physics. Once, as the head man, he had been fully hands-on; now, he said, technicians ran the experiments; graduate students ‘put things into computers and analyse the print-out’; and the physicists weren’t even in the room with the chamber. Instead, ‘they ask the bubble-chamber operators to expose a certain number of millions of frames of film, and then they ask somebody else to measure them, and then run them through computer programmes, and then they start with computer programme output and process this data.’ Alvarez hated this way of doing physics, and he hated the theorists having what he called ‘veto power’ over what experimentalists proposed to do.
‘Most of us do physics,’ Alvarez wrote, ‘because it’s fun,’ but he wasn’t having fun anymore. Teamwork on this scale seems to have brought out the worst in him. ‘His behaviour put everyone’s nerves on edge,’ a colleague said, eroding the lab’s morale and the quality of its work; others bridled at his tendency to humiliate students and colleagues when they didn’t perform to his standards. ‘Luie was considered brilliant, creative and terrifying,’ another co-worker said, ‘known for unmercifully battering his postdocs and other scientists.’ Everyone respected him, but many couldn’t bear working with him. Alvarez despaired at what had become of particle physics. ‘There is no way,’ he said, ‘that a person with my personal qualities could go into nuclear physics or particle physics at the present time.’ In 1968, he took his own advice and resigned from the Berkeley bubble-chamber group – just months before the work he’d done in it was awarded the Nobel.
Alvarez wasn’t the first bubble-chamber physicist to jump ship, nor were his reasons unique. Donald Glaser, the original inventor of the technique, was brought to Berkeley to do particle physics, but didn’t like the ways in which his vision of small-scale cosmic-ray research had been fundamentally changed – notably by his new colleague Alvarez. Glaser’s romantic idea was that he could freely follow his curiosity: ‘I would sit by myself on a mountain and discover particles,’ he said, and work with a small group of colleagues ‘in sort of splendid beautiful surroundings’. But, as things had developed in particle physics, ‘you had to submit things to committee after committee … and so you became essentially a … politician-administrator in which the science part is a very small part.’ So, shortly after being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1960, Glaser turned away from physics altogether, first taking up molecular biology and then, when that too began to take on some of the bigness and organisational features of particle physics, moving into neurobiology.
Alvarez didn’t quit physics, but he did want to do hands-on research again, to work on a smaller scale and, above all, to break free of the bureaucratic constraints that were unavoidable when working with large teams and enormously costly equipment. That’s to say, Alvarez wanted to unwind much of the scientific history he had helped to create. His solutions for a better way of scientific life included a return to cosmic ray physics, for which he needed little more than rudimentary particle detectors and some balloons to hoist them 100,000 feet into the air. They also included the attempt to find unknown chambers in the Egyptian pyramids, the investigation into the ballistics of the Kennedy assassination and, above all, his research into the causes of the extinction of the dinosaurs – for which he won much public attention, some scientific success, and great personal satisfaction in finally getting to spend extended time with his son, the geologist Walter Alvarez. Luis Alvarez thought it was the dinosaur work for which he would ‘probably be remembered longest’. But his more enduring legacy is likely to be the changes he made in the organisational life of physics, changes which have proved persistent in so many fields, and have come to mark more and more of what it is to do modern science.