《Collisions》作者：Alec Nevala-Lee【EPUB】

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To his admirers, Luis W. Alvarez was the most accomplished, inventive, and versatile experimental physicist of his generation. During World War II, he achieved major breakthroughs in radar, played a key role in the Manhattan Project, and served as the lead scientific observer at the bombing of Hiroshima. In the decades that followed, he revolutionized particle physics with the hydrogen bubble chamber, developed an innovative X-ray method to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Chephren, and shot melons at a rifle range to test his controversial theory about the Kennedy assassination. At the very end of his life, he collaborated with his son to demonstrate that an asteroid impact was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, igniting a furious debate that raged for years after his death.

Alvarez was also a combative and relentlessly ambitious figure―widely feared by his students and associates―who testified as a government witness at the security hearing that destroyed the public career of his friend and colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the first comprehensive biography of Alvarez, Alec Nevala-Lee vividly recounts one of the most compelling untold stories in modern science, a narrative overflowing with ideas, lessons, and anecdotes that will fascinate anyone with an interest in how genius and creativity collide with the problems of an increasingly challenging world.

作者介绍：

Alec Nevala-Lee was born in Castro Valley, California, and graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in classics. He is the author of the Hugo and Locus Awards finalist Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (Dey Street Books / HarperCollins) and the novels The Icon Thief, City of Exiles, and Eternal Empire (Penguin). His book Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller (Dey Street) was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and one of Esquire’s fifty best biographies of all time. Collisions, his biography of the physicist Luis W. Alvarez, will be released by W. W. Norton on June 10, 2025. His short stories have been published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Lightspeed Magazine, and two editions of The Year's Best Science Fiction, and his nonfiction has appeared in print and online in such publications as the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, Salon, Longreads, The Rumpus, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He also edits a bimonthly puzzle feature, “Unknowns,” for Analog. His next book, Whiz Kids: The Oracles of RAND and the World They Made, will be published by Norton in 2028. He lives with his wife and daughter in Oak Park, Illinois.