{"id":345149,"date":"2025-08-15T00:04:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T00:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/345149\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T00:04:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T00:04:15","slug":"luis-walter-alvarezs-eclectic-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/345149\/","title":{"rendered":"Luis Walter Alvarez\u2019s eclectic career"},"content":{"rendered":"<p data-component=\"paragraph\" class=\"css-1l5amll e1y9q0ei0\">Luis Walter Alvarez\u2019s career was marked by two explosions. The first was one the physicist enabled: a plutonium bomb, whose design he oversaw, destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.economist.com\/asia\/2025\/08\/06\/nuclear-nightmares-are-back\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">August 1945<\/a>. The second was one he theorised: the terrestrial impact 65m years ago of an asteroid sufficiently powerful to drive the dinosaurs to extinction. It may be for the asteroid theory\u2014developed alongside his son and widely accepted after his death\u2014that Alvarez is best remembered, rather than his groundbreaking contributions to the Manhattan Project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Luis Walter Alvarez\u2019s career was marked by two explosions. The first was one the physicist enabled: a plutonium&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3845],"tags":[2766,74,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-345149","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-physics","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115029859602189809","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}