Luis Álvarez dies

1988/10/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Fisika
• Biografiak

Although this physicist has contributed much to science, he is best known for his theory of the disappearance of dinosaurs with his son Walter. According to this theory, the disappearance of dinosaurs and most of the vegetation is because a giant meteorite hit the Earth 65 million years ago. This theory was proposed because in the sediments of the time large amounts of a very scarce iridium element have been found on Earth.

Luis Alvarez was born in San Francisco in 1911. He studied at the universities of California and Chicago. He worked on developing new radar systems during World War II. He invented a radar system for planes to land without seeing anything.

In 1968 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in particle physics. He worked with Glaser's bubble chamber and detected and analyzed short-lived resonance particles. He discovered that elementary particles are made up of smaller ones.