Word: fermi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Laura Fermi's book. Atoms in the Family (University of Chicago Press; $4) starts with a hike outside Rome in 1924, when she met "a short-legged young man . . . with rounded shoulders and neck craned forward." Fermi was only 22, but already a brilliant physicist. Laura, 16, considered him "pretty...
...forgave his age and married him in 1928. On their honeymoon he tried to teach her physics, starting with Maxwell's Equations on the propagation of electromagnetic waves. He had no success, which was probably just as well. Fermi lived his professional life in the strange new world of mathematical physics; Laura did not try to follow him into his abstract jungle. She learned how to appreciate her husband in spite of quanta and nucleons...
Neutrons with Goldfish. There was much to appreciate. Fermi emerges from the book as alte'rnately serious and gay, abstracted but practical. He is modest about major accomplishments (his dis coveries in physics), vain about minor ones (his physical endurance in mountain climbing). His wife plainly worships him, but laughs at him just enough to keep him human. She tells how one of his crucial experiments on slow neutrons was carried on in a fountain among unsuspecting gold fish. She giggles gently at his troubles with unruly shirtfronts. She pokes friendly fun at his brilliant friends (who called Fermi...
...Italy of Fermi's youth was Mus solini's Italy. At first Fascism was merely silly, but as it grew, Fermi began to con sider leaving Italy forever. He made up his mind when Hitler's anti-Semitism flooded over the Alps. The Nobel Prize made escape easy. In 1938 Fermi took his Jewish wife and his two children to Stockholm to receive the prize. After the ceremony, they continued...
Retreat into Mystery. Two weeks after Fermi reached New York, he heard about the famous telegram telling Niels Bohr that uranium fission had been discovered in Germany. Fermi knew what it meant: that enormous energy might be extracted from the uranium atom. Soon he was part of the vast U.S. attempt to release that energy in an atomic bomb...