Luis Walter Alvarez was born in San Francisco on June 13, 1911, the second child and oldest son of Walter C. Alvarez, a physician, and his wife Harriet née Smyth, and a grandson of Luis F. Álvarez, a Spanish physician, … See more

Radiation Laboratory
The British Tizard Mission to the United States in 1940 demonstrated to leading American scientists the successful application of the cavity magnetron to produce short wavelength pulsed radar. The See more

Returning to the University of California, Berkeley as a full professor, Alvarez had many ideas about how to use his wartime radar knowledge to improve particle accelerators. … See more

In 1980 Alvarez and his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, along with nuclear chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel, "uncovered a calamity that literally shook the Earth and is one of the great discoveries about Earth's history".
During the 1970s, … See more

Alvarez's sister, Gladys, worked for Ernest Lawrence as a part-time secretary, and mentioned Alvarez to Lawrence. Lawrence then invited Alvarez … See more

In 1964 Alvarez proposed what became known as the High Altitude Particle Physics Experiment (HAPPE), originally conceived as a large superconducting magnet carried … See more

In his autobiography, Alvarez said, "I think of myself as having had two separate careers, one in science and one in aviation. I've found the two almost equally rewarding." An important contributor to this was his enjoyment of flying. He learned to fly in 1933, later … See more