Fermi's Nobel-winning new elements turned out to be fission products
Enrico Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize partly for creating new elements by firing slow neutrons at uranium and thorium. What he had actually produced were fragments of split atoms. Four years later his Chicago team achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, and the synthetic element fermium now bears his name.
Fermi was born in Rome on 29 September 1901, third child of a railway ministry official and a schoolteacher. As a boy he built electric motors with his brother Giulio, whose death during throat surgery in 1915 later made their parents reluctant to let Enrico study away from Rome. He taught himself from a 900-page Latin physics text bought at the Campo de' Fiori market, and when his father's colleague Adolfo Amidei lent him a projective geometry book, he returned it two months later with every problem solved. Amidei called him a prodigy and kept supplying books.
At 17 he took first place in the entrance exam for the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, using Fourier analysis to solve the equation of a vibrating rod. His laboratory director, Luigi Puccianti, admitted there was little he could teach him and asked Fermi to run seminars on quantum physics instead. With Franco Rasetti and Nello Carrara, the department's only other students, he had the lab to himself.
Soon after Wolfgang Pauli's exclusion principle appeared in 1925, Fermi applied it to an ideal gas, giving what is now Fermi-Dirac statistics; particles obeying it are called fermions. He named Pauli's proposed neutral particle the neutrino and built a theory of beta decay now known as the weak interaction, and found that slow neutrons are captured more readily than fast ones.
In 1938 Italy's racial laws threatened his Jewish wife, Laura Capon, and the family left for the United States. Chicago Pile-1 went critical under his leadership on 2 December 1942. At the Trinity test on 16 July 1945 he gauged the blast's yield using his own rough-estimation technique, the Fermi method. After the Soviet bomb of August 1949 he opposed the hydrogen bomb on moral and technical grounds, and in 1954 he testified for J. Robert Oppenheimer. Fermilab, the Fermi paradox and fermium all honour him. He died on 28 November 1954.
Source: Enrico Fermi
