Photographer: Unknown.
University of Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Presenting an image one naturally assumes to be of a good natured college professor mentoring a class of PhD undergraduates, with his balding and amiable countenance further lending charm. Physics Laureate Enrico Fermi poses in front of a board scribbled with the equation for fine structure constant in electromagnetic interaction – in this staged photo that was originally created for publicity purposes, possibly in 1950.
Forty nine years old at the time and having already left an indelible mark in history eight years prior, though Fermi is largely remembered as the Italian scientist who successfully produced the chain reaction required for an atomic explosion. One that incidentally emerged from his earlier experiments in nuclear irradiation in 1934 when he was still residing in his home city of Rome. His contributions in reality can be said to have influenced each and every atom in the field of modern day physics.
A luminary who finds his place among the brilliant minds of the 20th century and a prodigy who competed his doctorate at the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, gaining entry with his essay on the specific characteristics of sound. Fermi, was both an extraordinary physicist with a penchant for ingenuity and a genial human being who had begun his career as a lecturer at the University of Florence, followed by a period of professorship at the University of Rome, then after reaching the U.S., at the Columbia University and later the University of Chicago – where he had taught as a naturalized American citizen, till his death at the premature age of 53, on the 28th November, 1954.
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Like many eminent European scientists who migrated to the U.S. in the wake of the war in Europe and Adolf Hitler’s racist policy of eliminating Jews. Fermi’s own reason for leaving Italy had been his wife, Laura Capone, an Italian woman of Jewish faith, and a departure that had been necessitated by Benito Mussolini’s antisemitic laws, which had been imposed to ostracized Italian Jews and come into effect on the 14th of July, 1938 as the Manifesto of Race.
Arriving in the U.S. a month after receiving the Nobel Prize in Oslo (December 1938), Fermi within a short while had become a willing part of the top secret Manhattan Project – peopled by scientists who happened to have been his friends and colleagues from before, banded at this hour by their dislike of Nazi Germany and feverishly working around the clock to produce atomic weapons before their counterparts in Germany could beat them in the race.
The chain reaction he had ultimately produced had come about on the bitterly cold day of the 2nd of December, 1942, inside a squash court of the University of Chicago. Which at the time had been a front for the Manhattan Project with experiments and research conducted under the facade of its Metallurgical department.
Attended by Fermi’s students, colleagues and high ranking military personnel associated with the nuclear program, the test had taken place inside a reactor which Fermi and collaborating scientists had designed without a blueprint, and had been put together primarily by students and university dropouts with building skills.
Though performing the experiment within the busting city of Chicago with a population close to 3.4 million inhabitants at the time had poised a great risk with none of the supervising scientists 100% sure of the outcome, and not surprisingly raised more than eyebrows when it had been initially proposed as a substitute for the originally designated site at Lemont, a village some 27 odd miles away from Chicago – which at the time had been unavailable due a labour strike.
In an article published ten years later in 1952, Fermi had put the residents of Chicago at ease by disclosing the experiment had in no way posed a risk as the fission had been planned to take place in slow stages as compared to the accelerated rate of an actual atom bomb – with his calculations checked and doubled checked by other scientists and preliminary tests conducted to negate the possibility of a reactor explosion or nuclear contamination.
Lacking the sophisticated gadgetry and equipment of the modern era Fermi, at the time, had relied on a slide rule to gauge and conduct the atomic fission. His calculations had happened mentally and with pin pointed precision with no room for error.
The sobriquet “Pope” that has come to be associated with Fermi within the scientific community was given to him by his colleagues in the University of Rome, where he with other noted Italian physicists had initiated an international school of physics, commonly referred to as the Roman group – the sobriquet had been to honor his infallibility and brilliance.
