Talk:Luis Walter Alvarez/Archive 1

Why here
"Known somewhat disparagingly as the "Jet-wash theory", critics point to the fact that two motorcyle policemen behind the president's car were splattered with blood and brain matter as evidence that the shot came from the front. However, on the Zapruder film they can be seen driving into the blood spray, which shot upwards and to the front."

Why is this here? It clearly belongs elsewhere, like, I don't know.....the article on Kennedy maybe?

Re:"Why is this here?" agreed, belongs elsewhere.

Excised text from Frey effect
The following text was added to the Frey effect page. It's mostly irrelevant to that page, POV in parts (my opinion), and badly written (numerous spelling and grammar mistakes). It seems one or more cranks have been trolling and/or vandalizing the Frey effect page for a while, so I'm taking the liberty of assuming that it was inserted maliciously and removing it. Anyhow, some of the text I removed might be possible to incorporate into this article on Alvarez, so I'm copying it here. Keep in mind, however, that I have reasons to believe some of this material may be POV and possibly even factually inaccurate. Colin M. 07:21, 5 September 2005 (UTC)


 * The Scientists Behind The Superweapon.

Perfect examples of the mentality, motivations and the kind of people behind the development of such technologies are illustrated by American particle physicists like Luis Walter Alvarez, the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, and his associates.

His father, Dr. Walter Clement Alvarez, was a medical researcher at the University of California at San Francisco.

At the University of Chicago in 1928, he was especially interested in organic chemistry and planned to major in chemistry. But after discovering physics, he soon changed his major to physics and received his B.S. in 1932.

Alvarez stayed at Chicago for his graduate work and his assigned advisor was Arthur Holly Compton who won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the effect named after him. This discovery, also known as the Compton scattering demonstrated the particle concept of electromagnetic radiation, especially in the X-ray scattering. Moreover, Compton developed the method for observing at the same instant individual scattered X-ray photons.

It is significant that in 1942, Compton appointed Julius Robert Oppenheimer as the top theorist of a Committee charged with investigating the properties and manufacture of uranium. In the summer of that same year, the Committee's work was taken over by the US Army to become the first American superweapon project, the Manhattan Project.

Alvarez earned all his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago. His doctoral dissertation concerned the diffraction of light. A little earlier he discovered the East-West Effect of cosmic rays, demonstrating that cosmic rays consist of some kind of positively charged particles.

Less than a month after passing his oral examinations for the Ph.D. degree, Alvarez moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained until retiring in 1978. He became a research scientist with Ernest Orlando Lawrence who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the cyclotron and its applications. The aim leading to the invention of the cyclotron was was to produce very high energy particles required for atomic disintegration. During World War II, his Radiation Laboratory became one of the major centers for atomic research, key for the development of the American superweapon project. For that end, Lawrence notably developed the calutron, a mass spectrometer used for separating the isotopes of uranium.

Within his first year at Berkeley, Alvarez discovered the process of K-electron capture, in which some atomic nuclei decay by absorbing one of the electrons in its first orbital.

In his research with 1952 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Felix Bloch, Alvarez developed a method for producing a beam of slow moving neutrons. It is noteworthy to mention that during World War II, Bloch first worked for the American atomic superweapon program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, before resigning and joining the American Radio Angle Detection And Ranging Project or RADAR Project at Harvard University, where radio waves were used as a carrier for remotely detecting, ranging, and mapping targets. But he was finally awarded the Nobel Prize with Edward Mills Purcell for investigating the nuclear magnetic resonance, the underlying principles of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imagery or MRI, allowing the acquisition of physical, chemical, electronic and structural information of a molecule.

It is not uninteresting to highlight that Purcell earned his Ph.D at Harward University under Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge, and where he remained throughout his career. In 1934, Bainbridge designed and aided in the construction of two important cyclotrons at Harvard University. Later, he was recruited by Julius Robert Oppenheimer to work on the American superweapon Manhattan Project at Los Alamos as director of the first atomic bomb test, code named Project Trinity. Bainbridge also designed and built spectrometers that measured mass with extreme accuracy. During World War II, Purcell headed the group working on very short wavelength radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory, where microwave radar was being urgently developed. In 1945, Purcell with his collaborators Robert Vivian Pound and Henry Cutler Torrey observed nuclear magnetic resonance, while still working on a series of books on radar. In 1951, Purcell with his student Harold Irving Ewen were the first to use the 21 cm radio wavelenght from neutral hydrogen hyperfine emission, as remote detection tool, thus allowing soon the mapping of entire extraterrestrial regions, that is galactic, and until then hidden by cosmic dust clouds. He also developed with Pound the concept of negative spin temperatures, which was a precursor to the maser and laser. More significant, he applied with Howard C. Berg physics to biological problems in their description of the physics of chemoreception, the sensory process where specialized cells in the body convert chemical stimuli directly or indirectly into nerve impulses. Even more important, Purcell was science advisor to three presidents, Dwight David Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Lyndon Baines Johnson!

In 1940, Alvarez started to work for the US military with the development of narrow beam radar system for bad weather at the MIT.

In 1943, Alvarez left the MIT to join the Manhattan Project research team working in Los Alamos, and developed the detonating device used for the first plutonium bomb. Then, he closely monitored the dropping of the first atomic bomb by the "Enola Gay" on Hiroshima, aboard another B-29.

Alvarez never expressed any doubts or hesitation about the decision to use the atomic bombs and soon became one of a small number of scientists who strongly advocated the continuation by the United States of its nuclear weapons program after the war and the development of the hydrogen bomb as soon as possible.

After the war, Alvarez returned to Berkeley as a full professor. Convinced that the future of nuclear physics lay in high energy research, he focused his research on powerful particle accelerators.

By 1947, Alvarez had designed and constructed his first linear proton accelerator.

After the problem of creation of particles in some type of accelerators, Alvarez shifted his interest to the detection and identification of those particles, starting from 1950.

This occured in 1953 after meeting Donald Arthur Glaser who won the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the bubble chamber. This device allowed the detection of particles as they pass through a container of superheated fluid. Note that shortly after, in 1964, Glaser was given the additional title of Professor of Molecular Biology, and since 1989, he is even Professor of Physics and Neurobiology !

Alvarez soon realized that the bubble chamber could be refined and improved to track the dozens of new particles then being produced in Berkeley's newly constructed giant 184-inch synchrocyclotron, at the university's radiation laboratory. In order to track and records events that lasted no more than a billionth of a second, he developed relay systems that transmitted messages at high speeds and new powerful computer programs, along with the construction of ever larger bubble chambers to record ever greater number of events. Thus, Alvarez eventually discovered dozens of new elementary particles, culminating with his 1968 Nobel Prize for physics.

Finally, he first used high energy subatomic particles as highly penetrating remote detection carriers, by scanning the pyramid of King Kefren at Giza with muons for possible hidden chambers, in 1965.

Which Alvarez proposed the "jet-recoil" theory?
The following text is in the article.


 * "Alvarez also proposed a jet-recoil theory for the Kennedy assassination to explain why John F. Kennedy's head jerked backwards if Lee Harvey Oswald, shooting from behind the president, was the assassin."

Which Alvarez proposed this? The sentence is in a paragraph following a paragraph discussing both Walter Alvarez (son) and Luis Alvarez (father) and it is unclear who proposed the theory.--TGC55 10:40, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Alvarez
Hmmm... this article should be Luis Walter Álvarez, or not? --Taraborn (talk) 18:38, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Alvarez Some Major Changes

 * I am a former graduate student of Luis Alvarez. I and several other of his students would like to make some major additions as well as some major revisions to his page.  In particular we would like to add sections on Early Work and Post-War Work and considerably extend the section on War Work.  We'd also very much like to change the photograph.  Does anyone have any serious reservations or thoughts about us doing this?  Jerry Anderson User jaander 67.169.11.157 (talk) 02:50, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

No reservations from me. I think it will be good to have additional content. Maybe also some information about the two companies he helped start. Tuyvan (talk) 01:35, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I have excised the text regarding Alvarez and the "foo fighters" which is posted by an anonymous editor under 67.169.11.157. Alvarez had a strong view that UFO's were purely natural phenomena explainded by a variety of circumstances. His view completely matched the Robertson Report, and any attempt to ascribe a different view to him is inaccurate. He did not particularly investigate them as "radar phenomena".If the interest editor would contact me we can discuss the matter. User Jaander —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jaander (talk • contribs) 07:17, 19 January 2009 (UTC)