Fermi Remembered
Edited by:- James W. Cronin
Enrico Fermi: His Work and Legacy
Edited by:- Carlo Bernardini &
- Luisa Bonolis
Enrico Fermi was one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century. He was born in Rome in 1901, and became Italy's first professor of theoretical physics, aged just 25, at the University of Rome. He created some of the cornerstones of modern theoretical physics, such as the Fermi–Dirac statistics, which explain the quantum behaviour of electrons, protons and neutrons, and the theory of beta decay, a radioactive process in which certain nuclei emit electrons or positrons. He also discovered the artificial radioactivity caused by neutron bombardment, and was awarded a Nobel prize in 1938 for his discovery of the properties of slow neutrons.
That same year he fled Italy to escape the racial laws, which affected his wife Laura, and the poor research conditions. He accepted an appointment at Columbia University in New York, where he continued his research on neutrons. In 1942 he moved to the University of Chicago, where he achieved the first self-sustained nuclear reaction. Two years later he went to Los Alamos to help construct the first nuclear bomb.
On his return to Chicago after the war, he founded the most important school of physics in the world: many of its students were to be outstanding figures in physics in the second half of the century. He also came back to theoretical and experimental physics, achieving important feats in both fields, such as the idea of the compound pion — that pions are composed of a nucleon and an antinucleon — and the hint of the first pion-nucleon resonance, obtained with the Chicago synchrocyclotron, which came into operation in September 1951.
In 2001, to commemorate the centenary of his birth, celebrations were held in both Italy and Chicago. The University of Chicago organized a symposium, and this led to the book Fermi Remembered. The book contains recollections from some of Fermi's colleagues, a description of Fermi's impact on physics, and some well selected material from the Fermi archives in Chicago. It opens with a biographical sketch by Fermi's former student Emilio Segrè, first published in Fermi's Collected Papers. Also intriguing is the correspondence between Fermi and Leo Szilard in 1939 describing the genesis of some fundamental ideas about the chain reaction. Fermi's own account of those years is reprinted from Collected Papers. The book also includes letters and documents from the postwar years concerning scientific, political and personal topics, giving insights into Fermi's character and into his scientific and teaching activities from 1945 to 1954.
There are several articles written by Fermi's research colleagues and by students “who were in that magic environment at the Institute for Nuclear Studies during the Fermi years”. The book ends with an essay by James Cronin evaluating the predictions on the future of particle physics that Fermi made in a speech in 1954 to mark his retirement as president of the American Physical Society. This book will interest both specialist and general readers, as it provides valuable archive material and sketches of Fermi's life, as well as personal reminiscences from his former students and collaborators.
As part of the Italian celebrations of Fermi's centenary, a book was produced as a resource for physics teachers in secondary schools to introduce their students to Fermi's science. Enrico Fermi: His Work and Legacy is an English translation of this book. It includes commemorative essays by Edoardo Amaldi, one of Fermi's Italian disciples, and by Fermi's colleagues and friends Enrico Persico and Franco Rasetti. There are a further 14 essays on several fields of physics that benefited from Fermi's work, including statistical mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, nonlinear systems and particle physics.
The book concludes with a chronological essay by Luisa Bonolis on Fermi's work. Some articles, such as those on the development of nuclear physics, on Fermi's legacy in particle physics, on weak interactions and on nonlinear systems, provide interesting accounts of subsequent developments in these fields. These reveal the importance of Fermi's contributions in preparing the ground for future work.
It is not only physics teachers who will enjoy this book, but also physicists and science historians who want to know more about why Fermi's work is at the core of so many modern views of physics.
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Maltese, G. Fermi's legacy. Nature 433, 460–461 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/433460a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/433460a
