Kitchen physics is about the pure intellectual refreshment of wondering about something that you observe in the world with your own unaided powers, and then investigating it. You can well imagine the appeal of getting back to basics for someone who was drawn to a scientific career when the prospect had a more intimate scale to it. Such qualities are orthogonal, let us say, to the underlying truth-motive of science. A healthy dose of careerism and political talent was required.
Inevitably, such an environment selected for certain human types, the kind who would find such a life appealing. Scientists became scientist-bureaucrats: savvy institutional players adept at getting government grants, managing sprawling workforces, and building research empires. Scientific papers came to have, not a handful of authors, but hundreds. But over the next few decades particle accelerators became enormous installations (CERN, SLAC) requiring the kind of real estate only governments and major institutions, indeed consortiums of institutions, can secure. Today you can build one yourself, if you like. It was a device that would comfortably fit on a table top. This was fairly early on in the transition of the practice of science into “big science”.Īlvarez won the Nobel Prize in 1968 for his invention and use of the bubble chamber, an instrument for detecting particle decays. And he made time for this even while working at the frontier of particle physics, in the lab of Louis Alvarez at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He pursued such investigations, not simply as a pedagogical exercise, but to satisfy his own curiosity.
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