in 1932. Alvarez stayed at Chicago for his graduate work and his assigned advisor was Nobel Laureate
Arthur Compton , whom Alvarez considered "the ideal graduate advisor for me" because he visited Alvarez's laboratory only once during his graduate career and "usually had no idea how I was spending my time."
Alvarez earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago before joining the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained until retiring in 1978. His doctoral dissertation concerned the diffraction of light, a topic considered relatively trivial, but his other graduate work proved to be more useful. In one series of experiments, for example, he and some colleagues discovered the "east-west effect" of cosmic rays, which explained that the number of cosmic rays reaching the Earth's atmosphere differed depending on the direction from which they came. The east-west effect was evidence that cosmic rays consist of some kind of positively charged particles. A few days after passing his oral examinations for the Ph.D. degree, Alvarez married Geraldine Smithwick, a senior at the University of Chicago, with whom he later had two children, Walter and Jean.
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