Felipe Arraño’s Reviews > The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics > Status Update

Coming Into My Own - Luis W. Alvarez (1911-1988) wrote this chapter as part of his autobiography; he was a versatile experimental physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1968 for his studies of subatomic particles (p. 730). He drank a millicurie of sodium 24 (radioactive) in an experiment with Joe Hamilton in 1937; this dose was actually a hundred million times more than the amount considered safe after Chernobyl’s explosion in 1986 (it was ten picocuries per liter of rainwater); he felt outraged for this media exaggeration (pp. 739-740).