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Enrico Fermi




Enrico Fermi, (born September 29, 1901 in Rome, Italy;   [Enrico Fermi.png]
died 1954) was an Italian-American physicist most noted
for his work on beta decay, the development of the first nuclear reactor and
for the development of quantum theory.

Fermi led the construction of the first nuclear pile, which produced the
first controlled nuclear chain reaction. He was one of the great leaders of
the Manhattan Project.

Fermions, as well as the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, are named in
his honor. In addition, the element fermium and Fermi statistics were named
in his honor. The Enrico Fermi US Presidential Award was established in 1956
in memory of Fermi's achievements and excellence as a scientist. The
department of the University of Chicago where he used to work is now known
as The Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
(Fermilab), was also named in his honor.

In 1938, Fermi won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "demonstrations of the
existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and
for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons."

He, his wife Laura, and their children, departed immediately from Stockholm,
where Fermi received the prize, to New York, where he began a new life in
the United States.

He is also known as the originator of the Fermi paradox in SETI research,
when in a discussion of the possibility that intelligent aliens might exist,
he famously asked "Where are they?"

Life History

Fermi was inseparable in childhood from his brother Giulio, who was just one
year older. In 1915, Giulio died during minor surgery for a throat abscess.
Enrico, desolate, threw himself into the study of physics largely as a way
of coping with his pain.

A friend of the family, Adolfo Amidei, guided Fermi's study of algebra,
trigonometry, analytic geometry, calculus and theoretical mechanics. Amidei
also suggested Fermi attend not the University of Rome but to apply to the
prestigious "Scuola Normale Superiore" of Pisa, a special university-college
for selected gifted students. The examiner at the Scuola Normale thought the
17-year-old Fermi's competition essay worthy of a doctoral exam. The
examiner summoned Fermi and predicted he would become a great scientist.

In 1918 he attended university at the Pisa Institute where he graduated with
a bachelor's degree in 1922. In 1923 Fermi spent 6 months in Gšttingen at
Max Born's school, but was not happy with the excessively formal theoretical
style of the leading school of quantum physics at the time. In 1924 he was
in Leiden, Netherlands, to meet Paul Ehrenfest, and here he also met
Einstein. Fermi took a professorship in Rome (the first course in theoric
physics, created for him by professor Orso Maria Corbino, director of the
Institute of Physics). Corbino worked a lot to help Fermi in selecting his
team, which soon was joined by notable minds like Edoardo Amaldi, Bruno
Pontecorvo, Franco Rasetti, Emilio SegrŽ. For the theoretic studies only,
Ettore Majorana too took part in what was soon nicknamed the Group of "the
Boys of via Panisperna" (by the name of the road in which the Institute had
its labs - now in the Viminale complex, dicastery of police).

The group went on with its now famous experiments, but in 1933 Rasetti left
Italy for Canada and United States, Pontecorvo went to France, SegrŽ
preferred to go teaching in Palermo.

Fermi remained in Rome until 1938, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize;
Fascism had released its racial laws, so Fermi (whose wife Laura Capon was
of Jewish religion) after the prize immediately emigrated to New York and
began working at Columbia University.

After arriving at Columbia he verified the initial nuclear fission
experiment of Hahn and Strassman (with the help of Booth and Dunning). Fermi
then began the construction of the first nuclear pile at Columbia.

Fermi recalled the beginning of the project in a speech given in 1954 when
he retired as President of the American Physical Society:

     "I remember very vividly the first month, January, 1939, that I started
     working at the Pupin Laboratories because things began happening very
     fast. In that period, Niels Bohr was on a lecture engagement in
     Princeton and I remember one afternoon Willis Lamb came back very
     excited and said that Bohr had leaked out great news. The great news
     that had leaked out was the discovery of fission and at least the
     outline of its interpretation. Then, somewhat later that same month,
     there was a meeting in Washington where the possible importance of the
     newly discovered phenomenon of fission was first discussed in
     semi-jocular earnest as a possible source of nuclear power."

After the famous letter signed by Albert Einstein (transcribed by Leo
Szilard) to President Roosevelt in 1939, the Navy awarded Columbia
University the first Atomic Energy funding of $6,000, which grew into the
Manhattan Project under and Fermi's work.

In Fermi's 1954 address to the APS he also said, "Well, this brings us to
Pearl Harbor. That is the time when I left Columbia University, and after a
few months of commuting between Chicago and New York eventually moved to
Chicago to keep up the work there, and from then on, with a few notable
exceptions, the work at Columbia was concentrated on the isotope separation
phase of the atomic energy project, initiated by Booth, Dunning and Urey
about 1940."

Fermi was a man of enormous brilliance, mental agility and common sense. He
was a very gifted theorist, as his theory of beta decay proves. He was
equally gifted in the lab, working very fast and with great insight. Fermi
often credited his speed in the lab for having won him the Nobel Prize,
saying the discoveries would soon have been made by someone else -- he just
got there first.

When he submitted his famous paper on beta decay to the prestigious journal
Nature, the journal's editor turned it down because "it contained
speculations which were too remote from reality." Thus, Fermi saw the theory
published in Italian and in German before it was published in English.

He never forgot this experience of being ahead of his time, and used to tell
his protegŽs: "Never be first; try to be second."

On November 29, 1954 Fermi died of cancer in Chicago, Illinois. He was 53.
As Eugene Wigner wrote: "Ten days before Fermi had passed away he told me,
'I hope it won't take long.' He had reconciled himself perfectly to his fate."

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