Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2011
Volume 56, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, April 30–May 3 2011; Anaheim, California
Session X2: Working with Luis Alvarez (1911-1988) |
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Sponsoring Units: FHP Chair: Stanley Wojcicki, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Room: Grand BCD |
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 10:45AM - 11:21AM |
X2.00001: Working with and Learning from Luis Alvarez Invited Speaker: I joined the ``Alvarez Group'' in 1965 and became the last graduate student of Luis Alvarez. I was particularly interested in how he did it - how he found new projects, decided on new approaches, and rejected ideas that were going nowhere. I soon found myself in a unique position - the person that he would present his craziest ideas to. He always wanted me to prove him wrong - so that he wouldn't waste time on things destined to fail, and could instead invent something new to do. I'll talk about his abandoned ideas, his method for finding and deciding on projects, and how I was convinced he was utterly wasting his time on a project to work with his son Walter to figure out what killed the dinosaurs. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 11:21AM - 11:57AM |
X2.00002: Working With Luie on Bubble Chambers Invited Speaker: To process annually each million stereo photographs of bubble chamber tracks required a complex automated system of scanning, event recognition, track-following and measurement, event reconstruction, hunting for ``resonances'' and new particles, all the way to filling out the annual ``Rosenfeld Tables'' of sub-nuclear particles. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 11:57AM - 12:33PM |
X2.00003: Working (And Sparring) With Luis: Some Personal Recollections Invited Speaker: Luis Alvarez was the most remarkable physicist I have ever worked with. As a member of his bubble chamber group at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley and subsequently as a leader of that group for several years, I could appreciate his outstanding attributes as a physicist and his forceful and colorful personality. Each day at the lab seemed exciting. Although he created the largest research group in particle physics in the world at the time, Luis was an ardent foe of group-think, which he characterized as ``intellectual phase-lock''. He had an uncanny intuition about physics and technology, coupled with an insatiable curiosity about the world around him. He is justly renowned as a member of the Inventors Hall of Fame for his myriad inventions and as a Nobel Laureate in physics for his contributions to particle physics through his development of the hydrogen bubble chamber technique, leading to the discovery of a large number of resonance states. However, it was his wide-ranging curiosity which led him to one of his finest achievements, while working with his son Walter -- developing the asteroid impact theory as the explanation of the extinction of the dinosaurs. I will offer some personal recollections of Luis and the group in this period, including some of his other intriguing efforts which illustrate the breadth of his interests, pertaining to the Kennedy assassination and x-raying the pyramids, among them. All in all, a brilliant and most unusual scientist and stimulating colleague. [Preview Abstract] |
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