"Scientists," says a California physicist, "are this century's version of the explorers of earlier times" And yet, as a nuclear chemist says, "most scientists are rather revoltingly normal in their manners and their way of life." These nine leading lights of U.S. science prove both points by their composite beginnings, their curiosities and their achievements. They also prove why the nation's scientific resources are basically sound and promising.
Luis Walter Alvarez, 46, sports-jacketed professor of physics and associate director of the University of California's Radiation Laboratory, has been called the "prize wild-idea man." Some prized wild ideas: isolation of tritium (used in thermonuclear weapons) and, with a graduate student, the discovery of helium 3 (1939); the universally used radar-operated Ground-Controlled Approach System for blind-flying aircraft (1942); a method of producing nuclear reaction without the presence of uranium or million-degree heat (1956). Born in San Francisco, the son of onetime Teacher and Mayo Clinic Physician (and now medical columnist) Walter Alvarez, he studied at the University of Chicago, switched, on the advice of a favorite professor, from chemistry to physics, took his Ph.D. in 1936. In the early years of World War II he worked at M.I.T.'s Radiation Laboratory, moved on to the Manhattan Project in 1943, Los Alamos in 1944-45. He flew in a B-29 half a mile behind the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, later lined up against J. Robert Oppenheimer's refusal to speed development of the hydrogen bomb. Light-haired, blue-eyed, easygoing, he sports a yellow Lincoln convertible, shoots mid-80s golf (he sent President Eisenhower an electronic golf trainer that he had invented), once told his father: "I probably would be a better physicist if I turned longhair and stayed in the laboratory on Saturday nights and Sundays. But I prefer to be a man as well as a physicist."