The Pope of Physics

 The Pope of Physics by Gino Segre

Read: August 2021

This is a biography of Italy's most famous scientist Enrico Fermi who is duly credited with the breakthrough experiment which heralded the atomic age and he also created world's first atomic reactor (in a squash court!). Fermi came up about in a country which unlike its much advanced northern neighbor, did not even have a theoretical physics department in the whole of country when he took up the subject. Despite that early hindrance, Fermi went on to dazzle the physics world at an early age, created a group of scientists in Rome which became a center of quantum (and later atomic and nuclear) physics which was as good as any in Gottingen, Munich, or Berlin. In time he became both a theoretical and experimental physicist, a combination the likes of which the world has never since since.

So a little sad though, for all his brilliant contributions to the field of physics, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1938 for discovery of a new element which later on turned out to be a false flag. This unusual failure of analysis on Fermi's part rankled him all his life. But the delightful irony of his work was that the slow neutron experiment whose results he misread became the breakthrough for the atomic age. That experiment by Fermi opened the gate for the chain reaction which we all know today in terms of nuclear power and atom bombs. Fittingly enough, world's first atomic reactor was built by Fermi himself, with his own hands, with nothing more than graphite bricks, uranium oxide, and few cadmium rods, in a squash court of a university campus.

In the late 1930s, Fermi became uncomfortable with the way politics was taking shape in his home country. Although he was nominally a Fascist party member but he was an entirely apolitical person and grew alarmed as anti-Semitism became a state policy. His wife was a Jew and so were many of his colleagues. Soon after getting his Nobel, he defected to USA where he was drafted to build the world's first atomic bomb. Like his work, he also planned his escape to USA in a meticulous fashion. That could be a story/movie in itself. His work on fission and atomic reactors were the starting and crucial points of the development of the bomb. Despite the devastation his creation brought on the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he refused to be drawn into the morality of his actions. He was too well aware of the alternatives. Fermi later went to champion the cause of particle accelerators and computers while as a professor at the University of Chicago.

Fermi misread the outcome of his most famous experiment of slow neutron bombardment. It was later correctly analyzed as nuclear fission by Lise Meitner, an émigré German Jew scientist in a Swedish forest, sitting on an upturned tree trunk, scribbling on the soil with a broken tree branch. Its a shame that she was never given credit for her seminal work and the Nobel for discovering nuclear fission went solely to Otto Hahn in 1944.