The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age

Gino Segre, “The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age,” Henry Holt & Co, 2016, 308 pgs.

The past couple of years I have read about evolution and began to conclude that we are all much the same—then I read this book.  Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) is certainly not much the same as me; and, we are not one or two mutations different.  He basically taught himself physics, mathematics, and three foreign languages, all before he was 19 years-old; I, on the other hand, spent most of those years perfecting my jump shot and fast ball.

Note, the title “Pope of Physics” was jokingly bestowed on Fermi at the start of his career by his colleagues because he was able to use “the simplest of means to estimate the magnitude of any physical phenomena.”

Enrico’s most significant discoveries, made in the 1940s after his move to America, involved the possibility of using slow neutrons to induce fission reactions and create a chain reaction. Fermi's scientific work arguably played a key role in the rapid conclusion of World War II and the shaping of the subsequent Cold War.

My Notes:

Pg. 22:  In 1918 Enrico Fermi arrived in Pisa and was one of a handful of physics students.  The subject was not highly regarded in Italy, nor did anyone seem to notice the great advances taking place in the field elsewhere.  Fermi was the only person in Pisa to have any real understanding of Max Planck’s 1900 introduction of the quantum, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and Neil Bohr’s 1913 model of the atom. 

Pg. 117:  Germany’s anti-Semitism had been very much alive even before Hitler came to power.  However, there were few signs of such sentiments in Italy, generally regarded as the least anti- Semitic of all large European countries.  Part of this may be because Italy’s Jews, who numbered approximately fifty thousand, represented a far smaller percentage of the population than in most of those other countries, a tenth of what it was in Germany.  So, Mussolini’s launching of an anti-Semitic campaign in July 1938 took his compatriots by surprise.  On September 1 the Italian Council of Ministers announced the expulsion of Jews teaching at any level of Italian schools.  As Enrico’s wife, Laura, was Jewish, this was a tipping point in their decision to emigrate.

Pg. 188:  In the fall of 1942 it was decided to use the University of Chicago’s football field structures to secretly house the experiment for fission control which would lead to the atom bomb.  This move to Chicago was made necessary because Stone & Webster, who was building the originally intended structure, went on strike.

Pg. 213:  On July 11, 1944 Laura and Enrico Fermi became United States citizens.  The family, who had been labeled as enemy aliens a few years before, took the solemn oath of loyalty. 

Pg. 219:  The fear that the Germans would be the first to develop an atomic bomb served as the greatest incentive for the American and British development.  However after the war, it was discovered that in 1944 the German research in fact had been nowhere close to developing a bomb.  The German workforce of outstanding physicists, many of whom were Jewish or married to someone Jewish, had been seriously depleted by racial laws. 

Pg. 220:  The Manhattan Project in June 1944 had 129,000 employees counting construction workers, machine operators, military personnel, and scientists. 

Pg. 236:  There was no question within government circles that the bomb should be used.  How to do so was still debated.  It was determined that the bomb would be used on a city without prior warning.  Also, it should be a city not previously bombed so an accurate determination of the damage due to the bomb could be assessed; this took Tokyo off the list and put Hiroshima in the number one spot.  Kyoto had been taken off because of its huge cultural significance. 

 (Two bombs after Trinity were made: one using Plutonium and the other U235; they were dropped on August 6^th and 9^th 1945 and on August 15^th the Japanese surrendered).

Pg. 245:  A 1945 Gallup poll conducted immediately after the bombing documented that 85 percent of Americans approved of using the new atomic weapon on Japanese cities.  A 2015 survey found that 56 percent of Americans believe the use of nuclear weapons was justified.  The issue continues to divide Americans.

Pg. 264:  By 1946 the older Einstein, Bohr, and Schrodinger, still esteemed, were well past their productive prime.  To a large extend, the dominant theorists of Fermi’s generation, such as Dirac, Heisenberg, and Pauli, had remained in familiar territory, still searching for an equation that would explain the behavior of nuclear constituents.  The next wave of leaders in Physics was coming from America under Fermi’s leadership.