Atomic Physicist
Enrico Fermi
He was the last of the double-threat physicists: a genius at creating both esoteric theories and elegant experiments
BY RICHARD RHODES
If the 19th century was the century of chemistry, the 20th was
the century of physics. The burgeoning science supported such
transforming applications as medical imaging, nuclear reactors,
atom and hydrogen bombs, radio and television, transistors,
computers and lasers. Physical knowledge increased so rapidly
after 1900 that theory and experiment soon divided into separate
specialties. Enrico Fermi, a supremely self-assured Italian
American born in Rome in 1901, was the last great physicist to
bridge the gap. His theory of beta decay introduced the last of
the four basic forces known in nature (gravity, electromagnetism
and, operating within the nucleus of the atom, the strong force
and Fermi's "weak force"). He also co-invented and designed the
first man-made nuclear reactor, starting it up in a historic
secret experiment at the University of Chicago on Dec. 2, 1942.
In the famous code that an administrator used to report the
success of the experiment by open phone to Washington, Fermi was
"the Italian navigator" who had "landed in the new world."
He had personally landed in the new world four years earlier,
with a newly minted Nobel Prize gold medal in his pocket,
pre-eminent among a distillation of outstanding scientists who
immigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s to escape anti-Semitic
persecution in Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy--in
Fermi's case, of his Jewish wife Laura.
A dark, compact man with mischievous gray-blue eyes, Fermi was
the son of a civil servant, an administrator with the Italian
national railroad. He discovered physics at 14, when he was left
bereft by the death of his cherished older brother Giulio during
minor throat surgery. Einstein characterized his own commitment
to science as a flight from the I and the we to the it. Physics
may have offered Enrico more consolatory certitudes than
religion. Browsing through the bookstalls in Rome's Campo dei
Fiori, the grieving boy found two antique volumes of elementary
physics, carried them home and read them through, sometimes
correcting the mathematics. Later, he told his older sister
Maria that he had not even noticed they were written in Latin.
