5 Quotes & Sayings By Luis W Alvarez

Luis W. Alvarez was born on August 5, 1918, in Cuba. He attended the University of Havana, where he became interested in physics. He obtained his Ph.D Read more

in 1940 after studying at the University of Chicago with Professor Robert Oppenheimer. After three years as a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II, Alvarez became director of the University of Puerto Rico's Nuclear Physics Laboratory. In 1948 he joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley as a professor.

Alvarez was part of an important research team that discovered the process that splits atoms into smaller nuclei by bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons. This discovery led to an understanding of nuclear fission and nuclear fusion—the splitting and combining of atoms under controlled conditions. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1961 and received several other honors for his work on atomic energy.

1
There's a limit beyond which one cannot progress. The differences between the limiting abilities of those on successively higher steps of the pyramid are enormous. I have not seen described anywhere the shock a talented man experiences when he finds, late in his academic life, that there are others enormously more talented than he. I have personally seen more tears shed by grown men and women over this discovery than I would have believed possible. . Luis W. Alvarez
2
Arthur Compton became my graduate advisor. He was the ideal graduate advisor for me: he came into my research room only once during my graduate career and usually had no idea how I was spending my time. Luis W. Alvarez
3
Robert Oppenheimer used to tell of the pioneer mysteries of building reliable Geiger counters that had low background noise. Among his friends, he said, there were two schools of thought. One school firmly held that the final step before one sealed off the Geiger tube was to peel a banana and wave the skin three times, sharply to the left. The other school was equally confident that success would follow if one waved the banana peel twice to the left and then, once, smartly to the right. (My counters were unbelievably bad because I didn't use either of these techniques.) . Luis W. Alvarez
4
Around the lab I heard that publicity was measured in an absolute unit, the "kan". That unit was too large for ordinary application and a practical unit one one-thousandth of the size served in its place, the "millikan". Luis W. Alvarez