from the The Writer’s Almanac
Today is the birthday of the Italian-born American physicist Enrico Fermi (books by this author) born in Rome (1901). He grew up close to his older brother, Giulio, the two spending their time dismantling small machines and engines together. Fermi was a professor of theoretical physics by 26 and began a series of experiments bombarding various elements with neutrons. Though unaware that a strange phenomenon he created in the lab was the splitting of the atom, Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in 1938. The night before he was notified by the committee, Nazis in Germany began to openly attack Jewish citizens. Anti-Semitic laws had recently been passed in Mussolini’s Italy and Fermi feared for his Jewish wife and family. He used the occasion of the prize to escape Italy and took a job at Columbia University. Later that year it was leaked that German scientists had succeeded in performing nuclear fission and the scientific community quickly went abuzz with the possible consequences of this breakthrough. Fermi’s colleague Leó Szilárd drafted a letter warning President Roosevelt of the possibility it could be weaponized and urged research at home. Federal funding was granted and Fermi was asked to join the new Manhattan Project in Chicago. It was here that he and Szilárd successfully constructed the first nuclear furnace on American soil in a squash court under the football stadium of the University of Chicago.
Fermi is considered to have begun the “atomic age” when on December 2, 1942, he created the first controlled self-sustaining nuclear reaction. He would later conduct research at Los Alamos and personally witness the Trinity test of the first nuclear bomb. He supported the use of nuclear weapons during World War II but later expressed concern over the more powerful hydrogen bombs saying, “Such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of great natural catastrophes. […] It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”
He was known by colleagues for his modesty and ability to think both theoretically and practically. He disliked complicated theories and his method of approximation when there is no obvious data is now called the “Fermi method.” He died at the age of 53 from stomach cancer, along with two assistants that worked with him on the first nuclear reactor.
Reacting to the reactor
Outgrowing its power
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 