What Dinosaurs, Pyramids, and the Atomic Bomb Have in Common

Sometimes, being an expert in one scientific field does not translate to another.

The ability to design a nuclear  reactor doesn’t make you qualified to dish out health advice… unless that  advice is to avoid eating uranium.

But if you’re particularly  clever, you might find yourself making headlines for discoveries  in multiple scientific fields.

And today, we’re going to  talk about one such scientist: a particle physicist named Luis Alvarez, who investigated everything from atomic bombs, to Egyptian pyramids, to what  actually killed the dinosaurs.

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Luis Alvarez was born in  1911, which put him in a great position to contribute to the  newfangled field of particle physics.

For example, that was the same  year that Ernest Rutherford proposed an updated concept of an atom, where most of its mass is concentrated  in a small, compact nucleus.

But it was also two decades  before we knew that nuclei didn’t just have protons  in them, but neutrons, too.

Alvarez got a PhD in physics  from the University of Chicago before heading to UC Berkeley’s  Radiation Laboratory.

And like any good scientist, he was constantly trying out new things and experimenting.

So it’s no surprise that he was soon pulled into one of the biggest science experiments in history.

Life comes at you fast, and so did World War II.

Alvarez started off working  in the microwave radar space.

But eventually, he wound  up at the hottest place for scientists in the early  1940s: Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Working on …you guessed it… The Manhattan Project.

You probably remember from history class… or the movie Oppenheimer… that the U.S. dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan.

But you might not remember that they were fundamentally different pieces of tech.

Little Boy was a gun-type bomb  powered by the element uranium.