Review: Collisions, by Alec Nevala-Lee

Review: Collisions, by Alec Nevala-Lee

a review by Rich Horton

Alec Nevala-Lee is building a repuation as one of the best biographers of science, with his previous books Astounding (about a science fiction magazine and four major contributors, of whom one was a scientist (in a minor way), one a pseudo-scientists (among many "pseudo" identities, and the other two technincally trained and very interested in science (and pseudoscience!) and Buckminster Fuller: Inventor of the Future; and now with this book, a biography of the Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez. (And he is currently working on a book about the scientifically-focussed think tank the RAND Corporation.)

His books have all taken a truly scientific approach to their subjects, by which I mean not just thorough research but a degree of skepticism. This continues in Collisions. Luis Alvarez was a remarkable scientist who made a number of profound contributions to both his field and other fields. But he was also sometimes difficult to work with (although to my mind the book shows that difficult as he could be, he was working with people just as difficult,) and he was by no means above slanting his conclusions to favor his preferred viewpoint -- never to the point of anything like fraud, mind you, just a very human tendency to emphasize the positive. That said, when he was proved wrong, he admitted it, and indeed celebrated it -- a fundamental characteristic of good science is recognizing that learning that a hypothesis, or even an estabilished belief, is wrong counts as progress in the search for knowledge.

Alvarez's major contributions are many indeed, and this book covers them well. Nevala-Lee has the ability to describe the scientific advancements, and their significance, quite clearly to a lay audience. (Calibrate that if you must against the fact that I have a B. S. in Physics.) He does so economically as well. Alvarez was at heart an experimentalist as opposed to a theoritician, and so some of his contributions were in the area of inventing better instruments, or designing clever experiments, to get data that would help the theory folks prove or disprove their ideas, or give them evidence that might prompt additional theorizing. In this area he invented the "bubble chamber", a key enhancement to the cloud chamber, for tracking subatomic particle paths. (He eventually won the Nobel Prize in part for this innovation.) He devised a source of "slow neutrons". As a student he helped set up an experiment that determined the charge of cosmic rays. He also found practical nonscientific uses for some of the equipment he worked with, perhaps most dramatically in inventing a way to use radar to help land airplanes in bad weather. He did make some important physical discoveries as well, such as proving the Helium-3 was stable and present in nature, but tritium was radioactive. (I have left stuff out, of course.)

His reputation in the wider world, to be sure, derives from other contributions, such as his work on the Manhattan project. (Which led to controversy when he testified against Robert Oppenheimer when the question of Oppenheimer's clearance came up in the 1950s.) He spent a fair amount of energy refuting conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination. And most dramatically, he, along with his son Walter, Helen Michael, and Frank Asaro (whose daughter Catherine is a prominent science fiction writer), discovered the evidence (excess iridium in the very thin layer of clay in rocks from around the boundary at the end of the Cretaceous Era) that indicated that the Cretaceous extinction event was caused by an asteroid strike.

Nevala-Lee tells all these stories engagingly. He is careful to credit all of Alvarez's many collaborators -- which Alvarez always did as well. He also tells of Alvarez' occasional failures. He is very open about his shortcomings -- a tendency to be very hard on some of his colleagues, and at times to be vicious to scientists whom he felt had betrayed science, usually by opposing Alvarez' ideas in a case where Alvarez would eventually be proven right. This book is much more about Alvarez the scientist than Alvarez the man, though undoubtedly that's in part because the man was above all a scientist, sometimes to the detriment of his personal life. But we do learn about his childhood, and about his father, a prominent doctor, and about his two wives. (His first marriage collapsed largely due to the time Alvarez spent away from his wife doing his job (and to be fair, the worst of this was during the War, and its hard to blame Alvarez for that investment of time), but his second marriage seems to have been much more successful -- and Alvarez acknowledged that this was in part because he let his wife be much more involved with his work. Both his wives were very intelligent women as far as I can tell, and one minor subthread of this book subtly indicates the way in which women were kept away from pursuing scientific careers at that time.)

This is another excellent scientifically-oriented biography from Alec Nevala-Lee. As his career continues, I suspect Nevala-Lee will have given us a broad portrait of scientific advances, scientific problems, and pseudo-scientific errors in the 20th Century, and I'm looking forward to reading about all these.