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Search for the first beam from the proton linear accelerator, October 16, 1947. Alvarez's 8:30 p.m. blackboard calculation proving that geometry must be changed and that the "machine would not work", with an added note that at 2:40 a.m., six hours later, they achieved the beam. Luis Walter Alvarez (June 13, 1911 - September 1, 1988) was an American experimental physicist and inventor. In 1936, he went to work for Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley where he devised a set of experiments to observe K-electron capture in radioactive nuclei, predicted by the beta decay theory but never observed. In 1940s he spent a few months at the University of Chicago working on nuclear reactors for Fermi before going to Los Alamos to work for Oppenheimer on the Manhattan project. After the war Alvarez was involved in the design of a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber that allowed his team to take millions of photographs of particle interactions, develop complex computer systems to measure and analyze these interactions, and discover entire families of new particles and resonance states. This work resulted in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968. He died of cancer in 1988 at the age of 77.
