Enrico Fermi

His brother Giulio was a year older and shared his workshop, where the two of them built electric motors, and in 1915 Giulio died during an operation on a throat abscess. Fermi bought a 900-page physics textbook, in Latin, at the secondhand market in Campo de' Fiori, and read it through. His father's colleague at the railway ministry, Adolfo Amidei, handed the boy a treatise on projective geometry to see what he would do with it, and got it back inside two months with every problem at the end solved. Fermi skipped a year of school, sat the entrance examination for Pisa at 17, and answered a question about the characteristics of sound by deriving and solving the equation for a vibrating rod. He had a doctorate at 20.

He took a new chair of theoretical physics at Rome in 1926, at 24, and gathered the group known as the Via Panisperna boys. He applied Pauli's exclusion principle to an ideal gas and produced what is now Fermi-Dirac statistics, then built a theory of beta decay that named the neutrino and described the weak interaction. In 1934 he bombarded 22 elements with neutrons and found, by accident and paraffin wax, that slow neutrons were captured far more readily than fast ones. The Nobel came in 1938, and he did not go home afterward — by January 2, 1939 he was at Columbia. On December 2, 1942, in a squash court under the stands of Stagg Field in Chicago, his pile went critical, and the first controlled chain reaction ran for the first time.

Mussolini appointed him to the Royal Academy of Italy in March 1929, and he joined the Fascist Party that April. He turned against the regime in 1938, when the racial laws threatened his wife Laura, who was Jewish, and put his assistants out of work. He collected the Nobel in Stockholm and sailed for New York instead of home. Then the prize itself came apart. Part of the citation was for new heavy elements he had not made — they were fission fragments, as the chemist Ida Noddack had suggested in 1934 and been dismissed for — and he added a footnote saying so to his printed Nobel lecture. In April 1943 he asked Oppenheimer about poisoning the German food supply with reactor byproducts. Oppenheimer said he would proceed only if it could kill half a million people.

He knew that working beside the pile carried a risk and took it. An operation in October 1954 found inoperable stomach cancer, and 50 days later he died at home in Chicago at 53. Two of his graduate assistants who worked near the pile also died of cancer. He is buried at Oak Woods Cemetery. Element 100 was named fermium the year after his death, and in 1974 the accelerator laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, became Fermilab. A gamma-ray space telescope took his name in 2008. Emilio Segre called him the last person who knew all the physics of his day, and outside physics his name is attached mostly to a question he asked over lunch about where everybody else is.

Enrico Fermi's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Fermi-Dirac statistics discovery
  The exclusion principle applied to a gas — the reason we call particles fermions 1926
• Theory of beta decay discovery
  It named the neutrino and described what is now the weak interaction 1934
• Slow neutrons discovery
  Found because the experiment worked better on a wooden table than on marble 1934
• Chicago Pile-1 invention
  The first artificial nuclear reactor, built in a squash court under Stagg Field 1942
• FERMIAC invention
  An analog computer he built to study neutron transport 1947
• On the Origin of Cosmic Radiation article
  Cosmic rays accelerated by magnetic fields in interstellar space 1949

• 1915 aged ~14 His brother Giulio dies during an operation on a throat abscess They had built electric motors together since childhood.
• July 1922 aged 20 Takes a doctorate at Pisa at the age of 20 The thesis was on X-ray diffraction images, because theory was not yet accepted in Italy.
• July 19, 1928 aged 26 Marries Laura Capon, a science student at Rome
• April 27, 1929 aged 27 Joins the Fascist Party, weeks after Mussolini names him to the Royal Academy
• March 25, 1934 aged 32 Reports neutron-induced radioactivity in 22 elements The claimed new heavy elements were fission products, which nobody worked out for four more years.
• December 1938 aged 37 Collects the Nobel Prize in Stockholm and sails to New York rather than home Italy's racial laws threatened his wife and had put his assistants out of work.
• December 2, 1942 aged 41 Chicago Pile-1 goes critical under the stands of Stagg Field Arthur Compton phoned it in as: the Italian navigator has just landed in the new world.
• July 16, 1945 aged 43 Estimates the Trinity yield by dropping paper strips into the blast wave He paced off how far they blew and said 10 kilotons. It was about 18.6.
• 1949 aged ~48 Writes with Isidor Rabi against building the hydrogen bomb He then worked on it as a consultant anyway.

• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. recruited him to Los Alamos
• Edward Teller 1908–2003
  Physicist and advocate of the hydrogen bomb whose work and policy influence shaped Cold War science and defense. opposed on the hydrogen bomb
• Chien-Shiung Wu 1912–1997
  Experimental physicist whose decisive work on parity violation transformed particle physics and challenged assumptions about natural symmetry. consulted on the Hanford xenon problem
• Glenn T. Seaborg 1912–1999
  Co-discovered plutonium and nine other transuranium elements and chaired the Atomic Energy Commission. named element 100 for him
• Maria Goeppert Mayer 1906–1972
  Physicist and Nobel laureate who developed the nuclear shell model, a fundamental account of atomic nuclei. helped toward her Nobel
• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. fellow refugee from the racial laws