The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age, Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin, Henry Holt and Co, 2016. $30.00 (368pp.). ISBN 978-1-62779-005-5 Buy at Amazon
There are many reasons to love The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age, a new biography of the celebrated Italian physicist. It is humane, scientifically astute, and beautifully written. And what a life it chronicles!
Fermi, born in 1901 into a middle-class Roman family, showed an early talent for mathematics. At 17, just a little too young to be drafted into World War I, he wrote an essay as part of a series of highly competitive exams that earned him entry as a physics student into the Scuola Normale and a reputation for genius.
After conducting research aimed at applying general relativity to the motion of charged particles, Fermi received a physics doctorate magna cum laude in 1922. In the early 1920s, as Benito Mussolini was gaining power, the apolitical Fermi was taken under the wing of politically connected physics professor Orso Mario Corbino. With Corbino’s help, Fermi received fellowships at the University of Göttingen, where he met Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Paul Dirac, and at the University of Leiden, where he met Albert Einstein.
In 1926, as quantum mechanics was emerging, Fermi was appointed to a position Corbino had created for him and became the University of Rome’s first professor of theoretical physics. There, he established a world-renowned physics group that included Franco Rasetti, Edoardo Amaldi, and Emilio Segrè. In that informal, productive, and creative atmosphere, he was sometimes jokingly called the Pope because of his apparent infallibility. In 1928 he married Laura Capon, who came from a well-to-do assimilated Jewish family.
After Fermi achieved fame for his work on the theory of beta decay, his group brought new distinction to Italy by using a small radioactive neutron source to irradiate numerous materials with neutrons. That meticulous work led to Fermi’s being awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics.
With the advent of anti-Semitic laws in Italy and the growing alliance between Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, the Fermis surreptitiously emigrated to the US after the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. Within weeks of arriving in New York and starting his position at Columbia University, Fermi learned of the discovery of fission. As World War II began, he undertook his crucial wartime work, which built on his prewar neutron-physics expertise. By 1942 he had moved to the University of Chicago where, on a former squash court, he built the first reactor and created the first sustained neutron chain reaction. He provided advice for the construction and operation of the Manhattan Project’s first plutonium production reactors in Hanford, Washington, and later moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to become a group leader with the bomb design project.
After the war the Fermis returned to Chicago, where Enrico headed the Institute for Nuclear Studies. At his urging, computing facilities and a cyclotron were built there, which opened the way for groundbreaking research in the new field of elementary-particle physics. After nearly a decade in productive postwar research, Fermi died of stomach cancer in late 1954.
Authors Gino Segrè, the nephew of Fermi’s colleague Emilio Segrè, and Bettina Hoerlin, whose father Hermann Hoerlin was an industrial physicist and group leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory, are wonderful writers with a deep sense of the personalities, science, historical backdrop, and locales of Fermi’s story. Although the book told a familiar tale, I literally could not put it down once I started it. Its account nicely complements Emilio Segrè’s Enrico Fermi: Physicist (University of Chicago Press, 1970), which contains more scientific detail, and Laura Fermi’s classic Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi (University of Chicago Press, 1954), with its lively and charming first-person narrative.
The book also contains new insights that paint a poignant picture of a human genius. For example, as he lay dying, Fermi calmly measured the flux of his intravenous nutrients, counting drops with his stopwatch. The story brings to mind his legendarily calm calculation of the detonation power at Trinity. The book also contains an extraordinary essay arguing that Fermi’s approach to physics “combined a breadth of knowledge, mathematical acumen, a strong dose of intuition, and mental agility.” That essay alone, perhaps alongside a description of Einstein’s much more visual approach, would be wonderful for a course on variants of scientific creativity.
I strongly recommend The Pope of Physics for anyone who wants to know more about Fermi or to use his example in teaching.
Catherine Westfall is a historian of physics at Michigan State University in East Lansing. She has written books on the development of the first atomic bombs at Los Alamos and on the history of Fermilab.
