Fermi, Enrico

Fermi, Enrico (1901–1954), nuclear physicist, Nobel laureate, and inventor of nuclear power.Born in Rome, Fermi obtained his doctorate at the Reale Scuole Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1922. After studies with Max Born in Göttingen, Germany, he returned to Italy, where in Florence he discovered Fermi‐Dirac statistics, a system for mathematically analyzing the behavior of subatomic particles. Appointed a full professor at Rome shortly thereafter, he formulated the theory of nuclear beta‐decay. In a series of experiments, he also found that slow neutrons were efficient agents of nuclear transformations and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938. With his Jewish wife, he used the prize money to escape Fascist Italy and its anti‐Semitic legislation. Coming to America, he joined the faculty of Columbia University (1939–1945).

Fermi learned of the discovery of fission from Niels Bohr early in 1939, shortly after his arrival at Columbia. With another emigré physicist, the Hungarian‐born Leo Szilard, he devised and built a series of prototype fission reactors. He continued this work at the University of Chicago as a member of the Manhattan Project, after the United States entered World War II. On 2 December 1942, in a laboratory under the university football stadium, Fermi achieved the first self‐sustaining nuclear chain reaction. His “pile,” scaled up by the DuPont Corporation at Hanford, Washington, converted uranium into plutonium, the nuclear explosive used in the first successful nuclear device tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico in July 1945. Fat Man, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on 9 August 1945, precipitated the Japanese surrender.

After the war, Fermi launched the Institute for Nuclear Studies at Chicago, where he was appointed professor in 1946, and pioneered scientific computation at Los Alamos. A member of the Atomic Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee, he opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, which he had conceived in 1942. Revered and much‐beloved in the scientific community, he died in 1954 of stomach cancer.
See also Einstein, Albert; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Atomic Bombing of; Nuclear Strategy; Nuclear Weapons; Oppenheimer, J. Robert; Physical Sciences; Science: From 1914 to 1945; Science: Since 1945.

Bibliography

Emilio Segre , Enrico Fermi, Physicist, 1972.
Laura Fermi , Atoms in the Family, reprint ed., 1995.

Robert W. Seidel