Enrico
Fermi, the son of a government official, was born in Rome, Italy,
on 29th September, 1901. Educated at the University of Pisa he obtained
his PhD in 1924.
He
a appointed professor of physics at the University of Rome in 1927
where he worked with his former student, Emilio
Segre on neutron research. This included experiments where elements
such as uranium were bombarded with neutrons. By 1935 the two men
had discovered slow neutrons, which have properties important to the
operation of nuclear reactors.
Fermi
also carried out investigations into the artificial production of
radioactivity and was awarded the Nobel prize in 1938.
Married
to an Italian Jew, Fermi disapproved of the racist rule of Benito
Mussolini and before the outbreak of the Second
World War his family emigrated to the United
States.
Fermi
worked at Columbia University and the University of Chicago where
he continued his research into nuclear physics. In Chicago
in December, 1942, Fermi produced the first nuclear chain reaction.
In
1943 Fermi joined the Manhattan Project
where he worked with Edward Teller, David
Bohm, Robert Oppenheimer, Emilio
Segre, Niels Bohr, Otto
Frisch, Felix Bloch, Rudolf
Peierls, James Franck, James
Chadwick, Leo Szilard and Klaus
Fuchs in developing the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
After
the war Fermi returned to the University of Chicago. Enrico Fermi
died of cancer on 28th November, 1954.
(1)
In the summer of 1939 Werner Heisenberg
met Enrico Fermi in Gottingen.
"Whatever
makes you stay on in Germany?" he asked. "You can't possibly
prevent the war, and you will have to do, and take the responsibility
for, things which you will hate to do or to be responsible for. If
so much anguish might produce the least bit of good, then your remaining
there might be understandable. But the chances of this happening are
extremely remote. Here you could make a completely fresh start. You
see, this whole country has been built up by Europeans, by people
who fled their homes because they could not stand the petty restrictions,
continuous quarrels and recriminations among small nations, the repression,
liberation and revolution and all the misery that goes with it. Here,
in a larger and freer country, they could live without being weighed
down by the heavy ballast of their historical past. In Italy I was
a great man; here I am once again a young physicist, and that is incomparably
more exciting. Why don't you cast off all that ballast, too, and start
anew? In America you can play your part in the great advance of science.
Why renounce so much happiness?"
"I
don't think I have much choice in the matter" I replied. "I
firmly believe that one must be consistent. Every one of us is born
into a certain environment very early in life, he will feel most at
home and do his best work in that environment. Now history teaches
us that, sooner or later, every country is shaken by revolutions and
wars; and whole populations obviously cannot migrate every time there
is a threat of such upheavals. People must learn to prevent catastrophes,
not to run away from them. Perhaps we ought even to insist that everyone
brave what storms there are in his own country, because in that way
we might encourage people to stop the rot before it can spread."
(2)
Robert Oppenheimer, interviewed for
a television documentary in 1965.
We
were a true community of people working toward a common goal. I think
that irrespective of what was done with it, irrespective of what was
to come of it, it was clear that this was a very major change in the
human situation, and the people were playing a part in history. We
started out by thinking that it might make the difference between
defeat and victory, and ended by thinking that it might make a difference
between a world periodically convulsed by increasingly ferocious global
wars and a world in which there will be none.
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