Collisions
A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs
25 July 2025
Territory Rights — Worldwide.
Description
A riveting biography of the Nobel Prize–winning experimental physicist hailed as “the greatest scientific detective of the twentieth century"
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.
Reviews
"Clear-eyed and resistant to hyperbole even when his subject would seem to warrant it, Nevala-Lee is the right man to take the measure of Alvarez... With “Collisions,” his gift for making complex scientific ideas digestible and complex personalities vivid and present finds its most potent expression yet." — Chris Klimek, Washington Post
"'Collisions’ is a wonderfully rich, exciting and informative work... his book is a remarkable achievement and a fitting monument to one of the most intricate and ingenious minds of the American century." — John Banville, The Washington Post
"A tantalizing characterization." — Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review
"Collisions is a penetrating examination of how scientific discoveries derive not simply from complex theories but from hard work, ambition, narcissism, and luck. Anyone intrigued by the history of science and the atomic age will love this book." — Caroline Fraser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
