The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age by Gino Segrè (PDF)

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Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world’s physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called the Pope by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the relationship of science to politics. Fleeing Fascism and anti-Semitism, Fermi became a leading figure in America’s most secret project: building the atomic bomb. The last physicist who mastered all branches of the discipline, Fermi was a rare mixture of theorist and experimentalist. His rich legacy encompasses key advances in fields as diverse as comic rays, nuclear technology, and early computers. In their revealing book, The Pope of Physics, Gino Segré and Bettina Hoerlin bring this scientific visionary to life. An examination of the human dramas that touched Fermi’s life as well as a thrilling history of scientific innovation in the twentieth century, this is the comprehensive biography that Fermi deserves.

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⭐By the start of the 20th century, the field of physics had bifurcated into theoretical and experimental specialties. While theorists and experimenters were acquainted with the same fundamentals and collaborated, with theorists suggesting phenomena to be explored in experiments and experimenters providing hard data upon which theorists could build their models, rarely did one individual do breakthrough work in both theory and experiment. One outstanding exception was Enrico Fermi, whose numerous achievements seemed to jump effortlessly between theory and experiment.At age thirteen, the young Fermi made the acquaintance of Adolfo Amidei, an engineer who worked with his father. Amidei began to loan the lad mathematics and science books, which Fermi devoured—often working out solutions to problems which Amidei was unable to solve. Within a year, studying entirely on his own, he had mastered geometry and calculus. In 1915, Fermi bought a used book, Elementorum Physicæ Mathematica, at a flea market in Rome. Published in 1830 and written entirely in Latin, it was a 900 page compendium covering mathematical physics of that era. By that time, he was completely fluent in the language and the mathematics used in the abundant equations, and worked his way through the entire text. As the authors note, “Not only was Fermi the only twentieth-century physics genius to be entirely self-taught, he surely must be the only one whose first acquaintance with the subject was through a book in Latin.”At sixteen, Fermi skipped the final year of high school, concluding it had nothing more to teach him, and with Amidei’s encouragement, sat for a competitive examination for a place at the elite Sculoa Normale Superiore, which provided a complete scholarship including room and board to the winners. He ranked first in all of the examinations and left home to study in Pisa. Despite his talent for and knowledge of mathematics, he chose physics as his major—he had always been fascinated by mechanisms and experiments, and looked forward to working with them in his career. Italy, at the time a leader in mathematics, was a backwater in physics. The university in Pisa had only one physics professor who, besides having already retired from research, had knowledge in the field not much greater than Fermi’s own. Once again, this time within the walls of a university, Fermi would teach himself, taking advantage of the university’s well-equipped library. He taught himself German and English in addition to Italian and French (in which he was already fluent) in order to read scientific publications. The library subscribed to the German journal Zeitschrift für Physik, one of the most prestigious sources for contemporary research, and Fermi was probably the only person to read it there. In 1922, after completing a thesis on X-rays and having already published three scientific papers, two on X-rays and one on general relativity (introducing what are now called Fermi coordinates, the first of many topics in physics which would bear his name), he received his doctorate in physics, magna cum laude. Just twenty-one, he had his academic credential, published work to his name, and the attention of prominent researchers aware of his talent. What he lacked was the prospect of a job in his chosen field.Returning to Rome, Fermi came to the attention of Orso Mario Corbino, a physics professor and politician who had become a Senator of the Kingdom and appointed minister of public education. Corbino’s ambition was to see Italy enter the top rank of physics research, and saw in Fermi the kind of talent needed to achieve this goal. He arranged a scholarship so Fermi could study physics in one the centres of research in northern Europe. Fermi chose Göttingen, Germany, a hotbed of work in the emerging field of quantum mechanics. Fermi was neither particularly happy nor notably productive during his eight months there, but was impressed with the German style of research and the intellectual ferment of the large community of German physicists. Henceforth, he published almost all of his research in either German or English, with a parallel paper submitted to an Italian journal. A second fellowship allowed him to spend 1924 in the Netherlands, working with Paul Ehrenfest’s group at Leiden, deepening his knowledge of statistical and quantum mechanics.Finally, upon returning to Italy, Corbino and his colleague Antonio Garbasso found Fermi a post as a lecturer in physics in Florence. The position paid poorly and had little prestige, but at least it was a step onto the academic ladder, and Fermi was happy to accept it. There, Fermi and his colleague Franco Rasetti did experimental work measuring the spectra of atoms under the influence of radio frequency fields. Their work was published in prestigious journals such as Nature and Zeitschrift für Physik.In 1925, Fermi took up the problem of reconciling the field of statistical mechanics with the discovery by Wolfgang Pauli of the exclusion principle, a purely quantum mechanical phenomenon which restricts certain kinds of identical particles from occupying the same state at the same time. Fermi’s paper, published in 1926, resolved the problem, creating what is now called Fermi-Dirac statistics (British physicist Paul Dirac independently discovered the phenomenon, but Fermi published first) for the particles now called fermions, which include all of the fundamental particles that make up matter.This paper immediately elevated the twenty-five year old Fermi to the top tier of theoretical physicists. It provided the foundation for understanding of the behaviour of electrons in solids, and thus the semiconductor technology upon which all our modern computing and communications equipment is based. Finally, Fermi won what he had aspired to: a physics professorship in Rome.In Rome, Fermi became head of the mathematical physics department at the Sapienza University of Rome, which his mentor, Corbino, saw as Italy’s best hope to become a world leader in the field. He helped Fermi recruit promising physicists, all young and ambitious. They gave each other nicknames: ecclesiastical in nature, befitting their location in Rome. Fermi was dubbed Il Papa (The Pope), not only due to his leadership and seniority, but because he had already developed a reputation for infallibility: when he made a calculation or expressed his opinion on a technical topic, he was rarely if ever wrong. Meanwhile, Mussolini was increasing his grip on the country. In 1929, he announced the appointment of the first thirty members of the Royal Italian Academy, with Fermi among the laureates. In return for a lifetime stipend which would put an end to his financial worries, he would have to join the Fascist party. He joined. He did not take the Academy seriously and thought its comic opera uniforms absurd, but appreciated the money.By the 1930s, one of the major mysteries in physics was beta decay. When a radioactive nucleus decayed, it could emit one or more kinds of radiation: alpha, beta, or gamma. Alpha particles had been identified as the nuclei of helium, beta particles as electrons, and gamma rays as photons: like light, but with a much shorter wavelength and correspondingly higher energy. When a given nucleus decayed by alpha or gamma, the emission always had the same energy: you could calculate the energy carried off by the particle emitted and compare it to the nucleus before and after, and everything added up according to Einstein’s equation of E=mc². But something appeared to be seriously wrong with beta (electron) decay. Given a large collection of identical nuclei, the electrons emitted flew out with energies all over the map: from very low to an upper limit. This appeared to violate one of the most fundamental principles of physics: the conservation of energy. If the nucleus after plus the electron (including its kinetic energy) didn’t add up to the energy of the nucleus before, where did the energy go? Few physicists were ready to abandon conservation of energy, but, after all, theory must ultimately conform to experiment, and if a multitude of precision measurements said that energy wasn’t conserved in beta decay, maybe it really wasn’t.Fermi thought otherwise. In 1933, he proposed a theory of beta decay in which the emission of a beta particle (electron) from a nucleus was accompanied by emission of a particle he called a neutrino, which had been proposed earlier by Pauli. In one leap, Fermi introduced a third force, alongside gravity and electromagnetism, which could transform one particle into another, plus a new particle: without mass or charge, and hence extraordinarily difficult to detect, which nonetheless was responsible for carrying away the missing energy in beta decay. But Fermi did not just propose this mechanism in words: he presented a detailed mathematical theory of beta decay which made predictions for experiments which had yet to be performed. He submitted the theory in a paper to Nature in 1934. The editors rejected it, saying “it contained abstract speculations too remote from physical reality to be of interest to the reader.” This was quickly recognised and is now acknowledged as one of the most epic face-plants of peer review in theoretical physics. Fermi’s theory rapidly became accepted as the correct model for beta decay. In 1956, the neutrino (actually, antineutrino) was detected with precisely the properties predicted by Fermi. This theory remained the standard explanation for beta decay until it was extended in the 1970s by the theory of the electroweak interaction, which is valid at higher energies than were available to experimenters in Fermi’s lifetime.Perhaps soured on theoretical work by the initial rejection of his paper on beta decay, Fermi turned to experimental exploration of the nucleus, using the newly-discovered particle, the neutron. Unlike alpha particles emitted by the decay of heavy elements like uranium and radium, neutrons had no electrical charge and could penetrate the nucleus of an atom without being repelled. Fermi saw this as the ideal probe to examine the nucleus, and began to use neutron sources to bombard a variety of elements to observe the results. One experiment directed neutrons at a target of silver and observed the creation of isotopes of silver when the neutrons were absorbed by the silver nuclei. But something very odd was happening: the results of the experiment seemed to differ when it was run on a laboratory bench with a marble top compared to one of wood. What was going on? Many people might have dismissed the anomaly, but Fermi had to know. He hypothesised that the probability a neutron would interact with a nucleus depended upon its speed (or, equivalently, energy): a slower neutron would effectively have more time to interact than one which whizzed through more rapidly. Neutrons which were reflected by the wood table top were “moderated” and had a greater probability of interacting with the silver target.Fermi quickly tested this supposition by using paraffin wax and water as neutron moderators and measuring the dramatically increased probability of interaction (or as we would say today, neutron capture cross section) when neutrons were slowed down. This is fundamental to the design of nuclear reactors today. It was for this work that Fermi won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1938.By 1938, conditions for Italy’s Jewish population had seriously deteriorated. Fermi’s wife Laura, despite her father’s distinguished service as an admiral in the Italian navy, was now classified as a Jew, and therefore subject to travel restrictions, as were their two children. The Fermis went to their local Catholic parish, where they were (re-)married in a Catholic ceremony and their children baptised. With that paperwork done, the Fermi family could apply for passports and permits to travel to Stockholm to receive the Nobel prize. The Fermis locked their apartment, took a taxi, and boarded the train. Unbeknownst to the fascist authorities, they had no intention of returning.Fermi had arranged an appointment at Columbia University in New York. His Nobel Prize award was US$45,000 (US$789,000 today). If he returned to Italy with the sum, he would have been forced to convert it to lire and then only be able to take the equivalent of US$50 out of the country on subsequent trips. Professor Fermi may not have been much interested in politics, but he could do arithmetic. The family went from Stockholm to Southampton, and then on an ocean liner to New York, with nothing other than their luggage, prize money, and, most importantly, freedom.In his neutron experiments back in Rome, there had been curious results he and his colleagues never explained. When bombarding nuclei of uranium, the heaviest element then known, with neutrons moderated by paraffin wax, they had observed radioactive results which didn’t make any sense. They expected to create new elements, heavier than uranium, but what they saw didn’t agree with the expectations for such elements. Another mystery…in those heady days of nuclear physics, there was one wherever you looked. At just about the time Fermi’s ship was arriving in New York, news arrived from Germany about what his group had observed, but not understood, four years before. Slow neutrons, which Fermi’s group had pioneered, were able to split, or fission the nucleus of uranium into two lighter elements, releasing not only a large amount of energy, but additional neutrons which might be able to propagate the process into a “chain reaction”, producing either a large amount of energy or, perhaps, an enormous explosion.As one of the foremost researchers in neutron physics, it was immediately apparent to Fermi that his new life in America was about to take a direction he’d never anticipated. By 1941, he was conducting experiments at Columbia with the goal of evaluating the feasibility of creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction with natural uranium, using graphite as a moderator. In 1942, he was leading a project at the University of Chicago to build the first nuclear reactor. On December 2nd, 1942, Chicago Pile-1 went critical, producing all of half a watt of power. But the experiment proved that a nuclear chain reaction could be initiated and controlled, and it paved the way for both civil nuclear power and plutonium production for nuclear weapons. At the time he achieved one of the first major milestones of the Manhattan Project, Fermi’s classification as an “enemy alien” had been removed only two months before. He and Laura Fermi did not become naturalised U.S. citizens until July of 1944.Such was the breakneck pace of the Manhattan Project that even before the critical test of the Chicago pile, the DuPont company was already at work planning for the industrial scale production of plutonium at a facility which would eventually be built at the Hanford site near Richland, Washington. Fermi played a part in the design and commissioning of the X-10 Graphite Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which served as a pathfinder and began operation in November, 1943, operating at a power level which was increased over time to 4 megawatts. This reactor produced the first substantial quantities of plutonium for experimental use, revealing the plutonium-240 contamination problem which necessitated the use of implosion for the plutonium bomb. Concurrently, he contributed to the design of the B Reactor at Hanford, which went critical in September 1944, running at 250 megawatts, that produced the plutonium for the Trinity test and the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki.During the war years, Fermi divided his time among the Chicago research group, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and the bomb design and production group at Los Alamos. As General Leslie Groves, head of Manhattan Project, had forbidden the top atomic scientists from travelling by air, “Henry Farmer”, his wartime alias, spent much of his time riding the rails, accompanied by a bodyguard. As plutonium production ramped up, he increasingly spent his time with the weapon designers at Los Alamos, where Oppenheimer appointed him associate director and put him in charge of “Division F” (for Fermi), which acted as a consultant to all of the other divisions of the laboratory.Fermi believed that while scientists could make major contributions to the war effort, how their work and the weapons they created were used were decisions which should be made by statesmen and military leaders. When appointed in May 1945 to the Interim Committee charged with determining how the fission bomb was to be employed, he largely confined his contributions to technical issues such as weapons effects. He joined Oppenheimer, Compton, and Lawrence in the final recommendation that “we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”On July 16, 1945, Fermi witnessed the Trinity test explosion in New Mexico at a distance of ten miles from the shot tower. A few seconds after the blast, he began to tear little pieces of paper from from a sheet and drop them toward the ground. When the shock wave arrived, he paced out the distance it had blown them and rapidly computed the yield of the bomb as around ten kilotons of TNT. Nobody familiar with Fermi’s reputation for making off-the-cuff estimates of physical phenomena was surprised that his calculation, done within a minute of the explosion, agreed within the margin of error with the actual yield of 20 kilotons, determined much later.Everybody who encountered Fermi remarked upon his talents as an explainer and teacher. Seven of his students: six from Chicago and one from Rome, would go on to win Nobel Prizes in physics, in both theory and experiment. He became famous for posing “Fermi problems”, often at lunch, exercising the ability to make and justify order of magnitude estimates of difficult questions. When Freeman Dyson met with Fermi to present a theory he and his graduate students had developed to explain the scattering results Fermi had published, Fermi asked him how many free parameters Dyson had used in his model. Upon being told the number was four, he said, “I remember my old friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” Chastened, Dyson soon concluded his model was a blind alley.After returning from a trip to Europe in the fall of 1954, Fermi, who had enjoyed robust good health all his life, began to suffer from problems with digestion. Exploratory surgery found metastatic stomach cancer, for which no treatment was possible at the time. He died at home on November 28, 1954, two months past his fifty-third birthday. He had made a Fermi calculation of how long to rent the hospital bed in which he died: the rental expired two days after he did.This is a masterful biography of one of the singular figures in twentieth century science. The breadth of his interests and achievements is reflected in the list of things named after Enrico Fermi. Given the hyper-specialisation of modern science, it is improbable we will ever again see his like.

⭐Scientists come in at least as many flavors as fruit. Some are inspired philosophers, others are get-your-hands-dirty mechanical craftsmen, yet others are like birds which can survey multiple parts of the scientific landscape from a very high altitude. But whatever other classification you may use, there are two distinctions which scientists have always exemplified. They can be either theoreticians or experimentalists, and especially these days, they are all specialists. In an age where it can take a lifetime to understand the complexities of even a narrow part of your science, excelling at every subfield of a scientific discipline, let alone both theory and experiment, would seem like an impossible feat.Enter Enrico Fermi, the likes of whom we are unlikely to see for a very long time. Bucking almost every neat scientific distinction, Fermi was the only scientist of the twentieth century who was supremely accomplished in both theoretical and experimental physics. Almost any of his discoveries would have been enough to net a Nobel Prize, and yet he made at least a dozen of them. In addition he was one of the three or four physicists of the century who were universalists, making contributions to and displaying a sound grasp of pretty much every branch of physics, from the microscopic to the cosmic. You could ask him any problem, and as long as he could calculate it he could give you an answer: no wonder that his colleagues called him the “Pope of Physics”. It also helped that he lived through a century in which physics made momentous contributions to the human intellect and condition, and he was both fortunate and supremely qualified to be a major part of these contributions. As just one aspect of his extraordinary imprint on physics, no scientist has as many measurements, rules, laws, particles, statistics, units, and energy levels named after him as Fermi. He was also one of America’s greatest immigrants.This is a fine biography of Fermi written by a practicing physicist and a historian of science, both of whom had connections to Fermi through family. The authors document Fermi’s upbringing in politically troubled Italy. Fermi was a child prodigy who combined great intellect with hard self-reliance and perseverance, qualities which were inculcated by his hardworking parents. A life-changing tragedy at age fifteen – the sudden death of his brother with whom he was best friends – turned him toward physics and mathematics. His performance as a seventeen year old in the entrance examination for a well-known university in Pisa displayed knowledge that would have been substantial for a graduate student. From then on his scientific development proceeded smoothly, and before he was 30 he was both Italy’s greatest physicist as well as one of the world’s greatest scientists.The book lays out many of Fermi’s major discoveries. Two in particular bracket his unsurpassed talents as both a theoretician and an experimentalist. In 1933 Fermi came up with a mathematical theory of radioactive decay and the weak nuclear force. And in 1942 he and his team assembled the world’s first nuclear reactor. It is almost impossible to imagine any other scientist accomplishing these two very different and very important feats; the famed historian C. P. Snow paid Fermi the ultimate tribute in this regard when he said that, had Fermi been born twenty years before, he could have discovered both Niels Bohr’s quantum theory of the atom (theory) and Ernest Rutherford’s atomic nucleus (experiment). In the 1930s Fermi and his team became the world expert on neutrons; life in the physics institute on Via Panisperna in Rome was bucolic in spite of being intense. He almost single-handedly discovered the power of slow neutrons which are used to harness nuclear energy in reactors. He and other leading physicists also narrowly missed discovering nuclear fission, mistaking fission products for elements beyond uranium. Rome under his scientific tutelage became a magnet for scientists like Hans Bethe and Edward Teller who learnt the art of problem-solving in physics from the master. Fermi’s marriage to a very intelligent and resourceful woman, Laura, cemented his family life. But the pall of fascism was dropping on Italy through the person of Benito Mussolini. Laura was Jewish, and by 1938 Fermi realized that he had to emigrate to another country. Fortunately the receipt of the 1938 Nobel Prize gave him the perfect opportunity to flee to the United States. Along with other brilliant scientists like Bethe, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and John von Neumann, Fermi became one of fascism’s greatest gifts to this country.In the United States Fermi was already known as the leading nuclear physicist of his generation. When nuclear fission was discovered in Germany at the end of 1938, there were legitimate fears that the Nazis would harness it to build an atomic bomb. Efforts to investigate fission in the US kicked into high gear, especially after Pearl Harbor. It was not surprising that the scientific community turned toward Fermi to assemble the world’s first nuclear reactor. The book’s account of this tremendous feat involving black graphite bricks and faces, the squash stand at the university and the sometimes amusing consequences of secrecy is worth reading. First at Columbia and then memorably at Chicago, Fermi and his team achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction on December 6, 1942: a coded telegram went out to the leaders of the Manhattan Project saying that the “Italian navigator had landed in the New World”. Even if he had accomplished nothing else this would have been sufficient to enshrine Fermi’s name in history. But he kept on making major contributions, first at Chicago and then at Los Alamos. At Los Alamos Fermi’s universal expertise was so valued that Oppenheimer created an entire division named after him (the F division). He became a kind of all-round troubleshooter who could solve any problem in theoretical or applied physics, or in engineering for that matter. He had an uncanny feel for numbers, and became known for posing and solving ‘Fermi problems’ which benefited from quick, back of the envelope, order-of-magnitude estimates. The iconic realization of the Fermi method was during the world’s first atomic test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, when, as the shockwave reached him, Fermi threw pieces of paper into the air and calculated the yield of the test based on the distance at which they fell. This calculation compared favorably with more sophisticated measurements that took several days to acquire.After the war Fermi became a professor at Chicago where he again served as a magnet for the new generation of physicists exploring the frontiers of particle physics and cosmology. He was an incredibly clear and succinct teacher, and gave his students a true feel for the entire landscape of physics. Teaching was not just limited to classrooms but spilled over into the lunch cafeteria and on hikes. Physicists like Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman made pilgrimages to see him from around the country, and six of his students received Nobel Prizes. Even after winning enough accolades for a lifetime, he worked harder and more diligently than anyone else. His colleagues joked that he was the man with an inside track to God, so all-encompassing were his scientific and computing abilities. His notes on thermodynamics, quantum mechanics and nuclear physics are still available and they attest to his clarity. At Chicago he not only made important contributions to experimental particle physics but he also made the first forays into computing. The so-called Monte-Carlo method which allows one to explore features of a system by making random jumps bears his imprint.While not a very sentimental man, Fermi’s friendliness, integrity, modesty and impartial, non-emotional attitude endeared him to almost everyone he came in contact with. He was friendly and had an impish sense of humor, but while not cold was also not a warm person who engaged intimately with those around him; this quality led to a family life which while not unhappy was also not particularly joyous, and his relative lack of affection was reflected in the brisk relationship that Fermi had with his daughter and son. He despised politics but still served on important government committees because of his feelings of duty toward his adopted country. Remarkably, his neutrality through some very politically fraught times was not detested, and he was one of the very few scientists who was admired by people who were each other’s sworn enemies. While he opposed the hydrogen bomb on moral terms and testified on behalf of Oppenheimer during the latter’s infamous hearing, he also served as a consultant to Los Alamos once he realized that the Russians might also get the bomb; characteristically enough, he correctly predicted how long it would take them to build their first thermonuclear weapon. People looked to him for impartial guidance in almost every matter which could benefit from rational introspection.Art and music baffled Fermi, but his rational analysis of these things only endeared him more to his friends and colleagues. At an art exhibit on the immigrant experience for instance, he calculated the ratio of the lengths of legs and heights of the immigrants in the photos and concluded that his own dimensions fit the statistical distribution. At Los Alamos he quickly memorized the rules of square dancing and danced with unerring accuracy but almost zero passion. His modesty and tendency to shun the limelight was also a great draw. He could as easily chat with janitors as with other Nobel Laureates. No task was beneath him, and his great ability to perform routine work without complaints or fatigue was instrumental in his success: whatever it took to solve a problem, Fermi would do it. When flabbergasted scientists asked him how he did it, Fermi would often reply with a smile, “C.i.f, con intuito formidable” (“with formidable intuition”). Often his distinguishing quality was pure stamina; whether it was a tennis match or a physics problem, he would beat the problem (and his opponents) into submission by sheer perseverance and doggedness. His manner of playing sports mirrored his manner of doing science: shun the style and elegance, and go straight and relentlessly for the solution using every technique at your disposal. The method of approximate guesses which came to be named after him has been used to estimate a wide variety of disparate numbers, from the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy to the number of piano tuners in Chicago (his favorite example).This giant of science was struck down by cancer in 1954 when he was still in his prime. The book talks about visits made by various famous scientists and friends to the hospital where he was installed after exploratory surgery indicated no hope. They could not believe that the indefatigable Enrico would soon be no more. All came away shaken, not because they saw an emotionally fraught man in pain but because they saw a perfectly calm and rational man who had reconciled himself with reality. He knew exactly what was happening to him and was making plans for publishing his last set of notes. Characteristically, he was measuring the rate of saline intake and calculating how many calories he was getting from it. When he came home and his wife rented a hospital bed for him, he predicted that he would only need it until the end of the month. True to his amazing calculating prowess, he passed away two days before the predicted date, on November 28, 1954.This book in general lays out a warm and engrossing picture of Enrico Fermi. As I see it, it is up against two challenges. Firstly, it’s relatively sparse on the science and does not always provide adequate background. In this context it is a light read and comes across somewhat unfavorably compared to Richard Rhodes’ seminal book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” which goes into great depth regarding Fermi’s work, especially on the Chicago nuclear reactor. Rhodes’ volume is also better on giving us a detailed picture of Fermi’s contemporaries. Secondly, it cannot resist comparison with two old Fermi biographies. His wife Laura’s endearing biography of him named “Atoms in the Family”, published only a few months before his death, provides as intimate a picture of the personally reticent Fermi as we can expect. This book’s view understandably is not as intimate. The same goes for “Enrico Fermi: Physicist”, a biography of Fermi written by his friend, fellow Nobel laureate and uncle of one of the present book’s authors, Emilio Segre. Segre was a top-notch physicist who worked with Fermi from the beginning and who does much recreating the early days of Fermi’s experiments in Rome. That description provides another personal touch which is again not as vivid in this volume.Notwithstanding these comparisons, I am glad that Segre and Hoerlin wrote this book to introduce one of history’s greatest and most unique scientists to a new generation. No scientist has contributed more practically and in a more versatile manner to modern physics. And few scientists have combined extraordinary and universal scientific talents with the kind of personal humility and decency that Fermi exemplified. For all this his life story needs to be known anew.

⭐In large-part this is exactly what the cover say’s, a compressed but nonetheless well written history of Enrico Fermi’s life. as a leading Italian, and subsequently naturalised American physicist, who unlike many of his contemporary peers was both theoretician and experimenter. The building of critical pile 1 (CP-1) with his colleagues, and achieving criticality, really was the prelude to Oppenheimer and Groves leadership in developing and testing the first atomic bomb at Trinity Site. The question, of course, is did America need to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to finish the war in the Pacific, or was it a case of, we’ve spent the money and need to demonstrate to Russia that we are still the stronger nation militarily? In truth we may never know the answer. If, however, you want more background to the actual bomb, then it’s worth reading Richard Rhodes ‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’ and General Leslie M. Groves book ‘Now it can be told’. Since Gino Segre and his wife, Bettina Hoerlin co-authored ‘The Pope of Physics’, which latterly discusses the Super, or hydrogen bomb, you may also want to read Richard Rhodes ‘Dark Sun’. As regards Germany’s atomic research during World War II, it’s worth reading Thomas Powers ‘Heisenberg’s War’.

⭐Enrico Fermi was a truly remarkable scientist, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century and probably the last great ‘all rounder’, in that he was equally at home with theory and experiment, and worked in a wide range of fields, including nuclear physics, condensed matter physics and astrophysics. You can hardly open a physics textbook without finding his name attached to some theory, phenomenon, energy level, unit etc. One of his greatest achievements was constructing the first successful mathematical theory to explain weak radioactive decays of nuclei. His Nobel Prize could have been for a number of his discoveries, but was actually for his work in the field of neutron interactions with nuclei. Ironically, this is one area where he (and other physicists) missed discovering nuclear fission, mistaking fission products for elements beyond uranium. In 1942 he and his team famously assembled the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear reaction in a pile laboriously assembled in a disused squash court in a basement at the University of Chicago (presumably no Safety Officers were informed!). This was preliminary work connected with producing the first atomic bomb. Later, almost single-handedly, he went on to show how slow neutrons could be used to produce nuclear energy in reactors. He continued to do important work on the atomic bomb programme during and after the war, and the Director of Los Alamos, Oppenheimer, valued his contributions so highly that he created an entire division named after him (the F division).This biography charts Fermi’s entire life from his birth in 1901 to his early death in 1954. Fermi was a child prodigy who combined great intellect with perseverance, qualities which had their origin in his hardworking parents. His remarkable talents were soon recognized and he was supported by a few far-sighted senior scientists. Later he established a small group (Fermi’s Boys) in Rome that produced much exciting work in nuclear physics and whose members went on to establish major reputations themselves. By the age of 30 he was both Italy’s greatest physicist as well as one of the world’s greatest scientists. Clear teaching was always central to Fermi’s way of working and his published notes are still well worth reading. His move to America followed the rise of fascism in Italy. There is much science along the way, both about his work in Italy and America, but it is very well explained without too much technical detail.There is also much about Fermi the man and the relationship with his collaborators and family. Fermi was not a cold man, but his first love was science; music, art and such thing held no interest for him. He was friendly and modest, and even had a good sense of humour, but he could not be described as a warm person, a fact that resulted in a family life that while not unhappy, was not overly joyous, and lead to somewhat distant relationships with his son and daughter. It was only in later years that his wife Laura emerged as a person in her own right and she subsequently authored several successful science books, and a biography of her husband ‘Atoms in the Family’, the latter shortly before his death. Fermi despised politics, but nevertheless served on important government committees out of a sense of loyalty to his adopted country.This is a fine book with a good mix of Fermi’s science achievements and his personal life. The former are described in sufficient technical detail to be understandable by the general reader, which I think is the right approach for a book that aims to be more than just a scientific biography. One of the authors, Gino Segre, has an earlier book ‘Faust in Copenhagen’ which describes the early days of quantum theory and the personalities involved. I am sure the present volume will achieve a similar success. It certainly deserves it.

⭐This is a brilliant book. Well written, one does not want to put it down. It is wonderful to read the works of such eminant scientists, was beautifully and carefully documented. Thank you to the author. The book was well packed from the US to the UK and arrived in record time..

⭐Gave as a gift and was gratefully received as a favourite read.

⭐Great reading and a justifiable title for a man who did far more for physics than perhaps he was given credit for. The tension and suspense of his exit from Europe would make a great film.

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