Luis Walter Alvarez was an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for his discovery of resonance states in particle physics using the hydrogen bubble chamber. In 2007 the American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century."
Alvarez with a magnetic monopole detector in 1969
Nobel Laureate Arthur Compton, left, with young graduate student Luis Alvarez at the University of Chicago in 1933
Receiving the Collier Trophy from President Harry Truman, White House, 1946
Luis Alvarez's Los Alamos badge
Experimental physics is the category of disciplines and sub-disciplines in the field of physics that are concerned with the observation of physical phenomena and experiments. Methods vary from discipline to discipline, from simple experiments and observations, such as Galileo's experiments, to more complicated ones, such as the Large Hadron Collider.
Sir Ernest Rutherford's laboratory, early 20th century. (9660575343)
A view of the CMS detector, an experimental endeavour of the LHC at CERN.