Topic: Luis Alvarez

Cliff Stoll recounts how Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez helped him secure a mortgage for his Berkeley home. When the bank required a higher salary than Stoll's $22,000 postdoc pay, Alvarez grumpily gave him a raise to $35,000 on the spot. Stoll notes that he bought the house without an inspection or knowing how many bedrooms it had, simply because the "house liked him" and the sellers were friendly.

Cliff Stoll discusses the "Nemesis" theory proposed by physicist Rich Muller, which suggests a companion star to the sun causes periodic asteroid collisions with Earth. He credits Luis and Walter Alvarez with discovering that a giant meteor caused the dinosaur extinction by creating a prolonged period of climate change. Stoll reflects on the joy of working with such high-level scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Cliff Stoll describes the origins of his bestselling book, "The Cuckoo's Egg," which detailed his efforts to catch a hacker breaking into Lawrence Berkeley Lab's Unix systems in 1986. He recounts the "scary" experience of explaining the Arpanet and TCP/IP protocols to a group of elite physicists at Luis Alvarez's house. Stoll notes that passing this rigorous examination gave him the "license to do stupid things" for the rest of his career.