Ben: OK, everyone. Forget Tesla. It’s time to start obsessing about Luis Alvarez.
[That’s Luis Alvarez in the photo, standing in front of the Great Artiste. This post began, as so much in life does, with a Twitter conversation. Ben Lillie, a physicist and writer, began it; other people added to it. One of those people was Hope Jahren, who is a biogeochemical paleontologist or something, and her additions took the whole thing right out of the realm of Twitter and into the Land of the Blog Post.]
Ann: Oh, I’ve heard of Luis Alvarez. He was a famous physicist. And he and his son, Walter, did something important about dinosaurs but I forget what. Whatever it was, I think they did it later on.
Ben: Right. This even starts out crazy. For his graduate work, Alvarez helped discover that cosmic rays are partly made of antimatter. I still meet (well, tweet) people who think anti-matter is fiction. But no, it was found in 1932. Today it’s so common we use it for medical procedures (such as PET scans). Later he also used cosmic ray muons to search for hidden chambers in the pyramids at Giza.
Ann: During the second World War, he invented the aircraft blind-landing system. And according to another Alvarez-enthusiast, @andrewtlloyd, while Alvarez was working on the landing system, he met Arthur C. Clarke and Clarke based his novel “Glide Path” on him.
Ben: OK, and then it turns out that Luis Alvarez was flying in formation with the Enola Gay when it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. And @andrewtlloyd said that the name of the plane Alvarez was on was Great Artiste, and that during the next bombing run, on Nagasaki, he dropped this letter to Japanese scientists. !!
Ann: And after the war, he and Edward Teller pushed for the next biggest bomb — the H bomb, the Super — that nobody else wanted.
Ben: Oh, I forgot the part where Alvarez won the Nobel Prize for *improving* the design for the Bubble Chamber. This guy personified Steampunk — tinkering at this and that and making amazing things. Also, bombs and evil stuff.
Ann: @andrewtlloyd wrote that his father worked for Alvarez at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, building bubble chambers and then in 1962, Alvarez went to Vietnam to work on the starlight scope, and his attache was Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. The starlight scope was basically night vision binoculars, and Alvarez convinced the army it might be a good idea for fighting insurgents at night.
Ben: ?!??!?! Damn, it just keeps going.
Ann: Also during the Vietnam War, he invented a chemical sensor called a people-sniffer that could tell the difference between a Vietnamese and an American soldier. I didn’t actually believe that when I heard it and though my sources were good, I’m not sure I believe it now.
Ben: Oh, I also forgot the part where he analyzed the footage of the Kennedy Assassination. OF COURSE HE DID How is this guy not a legend?
Ann: He liked high-powered secret elite club groups. He was a member of Jason and of the Bohemian Club. He probably did some real good for the country as a Jason but the Bohemian Club, as far as I can tell, is of use only to its members.
Hope: He also said crazy mean shit to the NYT about paleontologists not being real scientists. The paleo-field is still licking its wounds over that one.
Ben & Ann: What? No. Tell us more. Continue reading →
As a frequent flyer I have begun to be able to spot those airline passengers who have not yet twigged to the cabin crew’s role. A flight attendant could give you a more accurate figure, but I’d guess roughly a tenth of passengers think the plane is equipped with on-board waiters. A small paradigm shift is required to understand that the core value of a flight attendant is his safety expertise.
