Alvarez, Luis Walter

Born San Francisco, California, USA, 13 June 1911

Died Berkeley, California, USA, 1 September 1988

American particle experimentalist Luis Alvarez is best known in the field of astronomy for work with his son, geophysicist Walter Alvarez that led to the idea that the wave of extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous Period, including the demise of the dinosaurs, was the result of an asteroid or comet impact. This was signified by an iridium-rich layer found at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary in a well-known deposit sequence at Gubbio, Italy.

Luis Alvarez was the son of physician Walter Alvarez, who continued to write down-to-earth columns of medical advice for the Los Angeles Times well into his 1990s. The name had come directly from Spain a generation earlier.

Luis received his B.S. (1932) and Ph.D. (1936) from the University of Chicago, the latter for work in optics, and retained a lifelong research interest in ophthalmic optics. However, he simultaneously pursued, under the guidance...