Dept. of Energy Honor Awarded to UC Physicist

Luis W. Alvarez, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and University of California, and Gerald F. Tape were named Monday by the Department of Energy as winners of the 1987 Enrico Fermi Award.

Each recipient will receive a gold medal and $100,000.

Tape, of Bethesda, Md., was honored for “contributions to the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons,” among other work.

The award citation for Alvarez noted “the importance and breadth of his pioneering contributions in the physical sciences and their application to high-energy physics, nuclear accelerators, instrumentation, paleontology, archeology and astronomy.”

Among Alvarez’s accomplishments was pioneering work with his son, Walter, a geologist, in what has become known as “the extraterrestrial impact theory” for explaining the mass extinction that occurred on Earth 65 million years ago.