Collisions

Luis W. Alvarez (1911–1988) began his storied career developing the atomic bomb and went on to conduct ground-breaking work on the building of the ancient Egyptian pyramids, the assassination of JFK and the extinction of the dinosaurs. One of the preeminent scientists of the twentieth century, Alvarez was as obstinate as he was brilliant. He testified in 1954 against J. Robert Oppenheimer at the infamous security hearing that destroyed the latter’s reputation and fifteen years later he attempted to support the lone gunman theory of the Kennedy assassination by shooting melons at a rifle range. In the first comprehensive biography of this pivotal figure, acclaimed biographer and novelist Alec Nevala-Lee captures Alvarez’s achievements and ideas in vivid detail, focusing on the way collisions—in his combative personal life and his epochal work on accelerator physics, bubble chambers, the asteroid extinction hypothesis and more—yielded his greatest insights.