Enrico Fermi (born September 29, 1901, Rome, Italy—died November 28, 1954, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) was an Italian-born American scientist who became one of the chief architects of the nuclear age. He developed the mathematical statistics required to clarify a large class of subatomic phenomena, explored nuclear transformations caused by neutrons, and directed the first controlled chain reaction involving nuclear fission. He was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Early life and education

Fermi’s father, Alberto Fermi, was a chief inspector of the government railways; his mother was Ida de Gattis, a schoolteacher. In 1918 Enrico Fermi won a scholarship to the University of Pisa’s distinguished Scuola Normale Superiore, where his knowledge of recent physics benefited even the professors. After receiving a doctorate in 1922, Fermi used fellowships from the Italian Ministry of Public Instruction and the Rockefeller Foundation to study in Germany under Max Born, at the University of Göttingen, and in the Netherlands under Paul Ehrenfest, at the State University of Leiden.

European career: Fermi-Dirac statistics, beta decay, and neutrons

Fermi returned home to Italy in 1924 to a position as a lecturer in mathematical physics at the University of Florence. His early research was in general relativity, statistical mechanics, and quantum mechanics. Examples of gas degeneracy (appearance of unexpected phenomena) had been known, and some cases were explained by Bose-Einstein statistics, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles known as bosons.

Between 1926 and 1927 Fermi and the English physicist P.A.M. Dirac independently developed new statistics, now known as Fermi-Dirac statistics, to handle the subatomic particles that obey the Pauli exclusion principle; these particles, which include electrons, protons, neutrons (not yet discovered), and other particles with half-integer spin, are now known as fermions. This was a contribution of exceptional importance to atomic and nuclear physics, particularly in this period when quantum mechanics was first being applied.

This seminal work brought Fermi an invitation in 1926 to become a full professor at the University of Rome. Shortly after Fermi took up his new position in 1927, Franco Rasetti, a friend from Pisa and another superb experimentalist, joined Fermi in Rome, and they began to gather a group of talented students about them. These included Emilio Segrè, Ettore Majorana, Edoardo Amaldi, and Bruno Pontecorvo, all of whom had distinguished careers. Fermi, a charismatic, energetic, and seemingly infallible figure, clearly was the leader—so much so that his colleagues called him “the Pope.”

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In 1929 Fermi, as Italy’s first professor of theoretical physics and a rising star in European science, was named by Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini to his new Accademia d’Italia, a position that included a substantial salary (much larger than that for any ordinary university position), a uniform, and a title (“Excellency”).

During the late 1920s quantum mechanics solved problem after problem in atomic physics. Fermi, earlier than most others, recognized that the field was becoming exhausted, however, and he deliberately changed his focus to the more primitively developed field of nuclear physics. Radioactivity had been recognized as a nuclear phenomenon for almost two decades by this time, but puzzles still abounded.

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In beta decay, or the expulsion of a negative electron from the nucleus, energy and momentum seemed not to be conserved. In 1934 Fermi made use of the neutrino, an almost undetectable particle that had been postulated a few years earlier by the Austrian-born physicist Wolfgang Pauli, to fashion a theory of beta decay in which balance was restored. This led to recognition that beta decay was a manifestation of the weak force, one of the four known universal forces (the others being gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong force).

In 1933 the French husband-and-wife team of Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie discovered artificial radioactivity caused by bombarding elements with alpha particles (helium nuclei). Fermi quickly reasoned that the neutral neutron, found a year earlier by the English physicist James Chadwick, would be an even better projectile with which to bombard charged nuclei in order to initiate such reactions. In 1934, with his colleagues, Fermi subjected more than 60 elements to neutron bombardment, using a Geiger-Müller counter to detect emissions and conducting chemical analyses to determine the new radioactive isotopes produced. Along the way, they found by chance that neutrons that had been slowed in their velocity by passing through paraffin and colliding with the hydrogen atoms in that substance often were more effective.

When testing uranium Fermi and his colleagues observed several activities, but they could not interpret what occurred. Some scientists thought that they had produced transuranium elements, namely elements higher than uranium at atomic number 92. The issue was not resolved until 1938, when the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann experimentally, and the Austrian physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch theoretically, cleared the confusion by revealing that the uranium had split and the several radioactivities detected were from fission fragments.

Fermi was little interested in politics, yet he grew increasingly uncomfortable with the fascist politics of his homeland. When Italy adopted the antisemitic policies of its ally, Nazi Germany, a crisis occurred, for Fermi’s wife, Laura, was Jewish. The award of the 1938 Nobel Prize for Physics serendipitously provided the excuse for the family to travel abroad, and the prize money helped to establish them in the United States.