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Ernest Lawrence, a pure experimentalist, reacted to the famous theta-tau puzzle almost instantaneously. One night Ernest dropped in on Lynn Stevenson, Frank Crawford, and me as we were measuring the lifetimes of various kinds of K particles on the Bevatron floor... After Lynn had explained the puzzle in some detail, Ernest said, "You mean to tell me that all these particles have very nearly the same mass and the same half-lives and yet they aren't the same particle?" Lynn said the theorists had reasons why the particles couldn't be the same. Ernest said, "Don't you worry about it — the theorists will find a way to make them all the same." And that, of course, is what Lee and Yang finally did, but long after Ernest had disposed of the problem in his characteristically intuitive way. [p 184]

I must reiterate my feeling that experimentalists always welcome the suggestions of the theorists. But the present situation is ridiculous. Theorists now sit on the scheduling committees at the large accelerators and can exercise veto power over proposals by the best experimentalists. [p 199]

No group of peers would have approved my building the 72-inch bubble chamber. Even Ernest Lawrence told me he thought I was making a big mistake. He supported me because he knew my track record was good. I believe that U.S. science could recover from the stultifying effects of decades of misguided peer reviewing if we returned to the tried-and- true method of evaluating experimenters rather than experimental proposals. Many people will say that my ideas are elitist, and I certainly agree. The alternative is the egalitarianism that we now practice and that I've seen nearly kill basic science in the USSR and in the People's Republic of China. [p 201]
"Alvarez: adventures of a physicist" by Luis W. Alvarez (1987)
During World War II, Luis W. Alvarez participated in the Allies' development of radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, and of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. He then worked as an experimental physicist on cyclotrons, particle accelerators and bubble chambers at UC-Berkeley with Ernest Lawrence. Later in life, he used cosmic rays to "X ray" an Egyptian pyramid, developed a new theory about the extinction of the dinosaurs, and won the 1968 Nobel prize in physics for his work on elementary particles. In this autobiography, Alvarez shares insights on the process of scientific discovery, risk-taking in science and how theoretical and experimental physics interact.