The Last Man Who Knew Everything Read online

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  Copyright © 2017 by David N. Schwartz

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  First Edition: November 2017

  Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Basic Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Schwartz, David N., 1956–author.

  Title: The last man who knew everything : the life and times of Enrico Fermi, father of the nuclear age / David N. Schwartz.

  Description: New York : Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc., [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017020558| ISBN 9780465072927 (hardcover) | ISBN 0465072925 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780465093120 (ebook) | ISBN 0465093124 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fermi, Enrico, 1901–1954. | Physicists—Italy—Biography. | Physicists—United States—Biography. | Nuclear physicists—Italy—Biography. | Nuclear physicists—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC QC16.F46 S39 2017 | DDC 530.092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020558

  E3-20171103-JV-PC

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction

  PART ONE: BECOMING FERMI

  CHAPTER ONE Prodigy

  CHAPTER TWO Pisa

  CHAPTER THREE Germany and Holland

  CHAPTER FOUR Quantum Breakthroughs

  CHAPTER FIVE Of Geckos and Men

  PART TWO: THE ROME YEARS

  CHAPTER SIX Family Life

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Rome School

  CHAPTER EIGHT Beta Rays

  CHAPTER NINE Goldfish

  CHAPTER TEN Physics as Soma

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Nobel Prize

  PART THREE: THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

  CHAPTER TWELVE The New World

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Splitting the Atom

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Fermi Meets the Navy

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Piles of Graphite

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Move to Chicago

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN “We’re Cookin’!”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Xenon-135

  CHAPTER NINETEEN On a Mesa

  CHAPTER TWENTY An Unholy Trinity

  PART FOUR: THE CHICAGO YEARS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Return to Chicago

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO In the Public Eye

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE A Patent Fight

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Brilliant Teacher, Beloved Mentor

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Travels Abroad

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Home to Die

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Fermi’s Legacy

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also By David N. Schwartz

  Praise for The Last Man Who Knew Everything

  Credits

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  For Susan, with love, affection, and gratitude

  PREFACE

  MY FATHER WAS A PARTICLE PHYSICIST. IN 1962, HE AND TWO of his colleagues conducted an experiment that demonstrated the existence of two distinct types of “neutrinos,” ghostly subatomic particles that can pass through hundreds of millions of miles of lead without bumping into a single atom. Hypothesized in a leap of imagination by the acerbic Viennese physicist Wolfgang Pauli, the neutrino’s creation in radioactive processes was first explained by Enrico Fermi, who also gave the particle its Italianate name, meaning “little neutral one.” The 1962 experiment—a direct legacy of one of Fermi’s most famous scientific achievements—made the front page of the New York Times and won my father and his collaborators the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics.

  My connection to Fermi might well have been more direct if it were not for my father’s stubbornness as an undergraduate. When he was a senior at Columbia in 1953, my father approached his favorite teacher, Jack Steinberger, and said that he wanted to stay at Columbia for his doctorate. He asked Jack to be his thesis adviser. Quite sensibly, Jack explained that it would be a mistake for my father to stay at Columbia and suggested doing a doctorate at the University of Chicago with Fermi. Jack had been one of Fermi’s first postwar graduate students, and the experience had changed Jack’s life. With all the callowness youth can muster, my father objected that if he went to Chicago he would lose all the graduate credits he had accumulated as an undergraduate at Columbia. Jack relented and went on to become my father’s thesis adviser and then collaborator on the 1962 neutrino experiment.

  So I always knew that Enrico Fermi was an important physicist, at least as far as my household was concerned.

  My father passed away in 2006, at the relatively young age of seventy-three. Some seven years later, my mother called with the news that she had finally gone through a file cabinet my father kept in the family garage. She found hundreds of papers and documents stashed away and had no idea what to do with them. I suggested that she send them to me. When they arrived, I went through them and pulled out a series of entertaining letters and papers by a physicist named Valentine Telegdi. Telegdi was a young Fermi colleague in the early 1950s and a close friend of my father. One of the things he had sent my father was a paper he wrote about Fermi’s years at the University of Chicago after the war. Telegdi’s paper on Fermi, subsequently published in a collection of essays on great professors at Chicago edited by Edward Shils, was an eye-opener. I read with fascination about a physicist of astonishing breadth and depth, someone as adept in experiment as in theory, and a world-class teacher, to boot. Finishing the paper, I decided to get a good recent biography of the great man.

  To my amazement, the most recent biography in English (as of summer 2013) was the one written by his first graduate student and later close colleague and friend, Emilio Segrè. It was published in 1970. In the forty-odd years since then, an enormous amount of Nobel Prize–caliber research has extended Fermi’s legacy in the physics world. In addition, much has been published in the way of memoirs and historical studies to enhance our understanding of Fermi and his place in the world of physics. It seemed unjust to me that Fermi—one of the most dominant and most interesting figures in twentieth-century physics—was not as well known to the general public as Einstein or Feynman or Oppenheimer, about whom the public seems to have an insatiable interest.

  By the late fall of 2013, I decided to write a full-length, general reader biography of the man, encompassing his scientific achievements, his personal life, and his legacy in a way that would bring him to life for a new generation of readers. Basic Books was willing to give me the opportunity to do so. It has been quite a journey.

  I am not a physicist and this is not a physics book. This is a book about a man who happened to be an extraordinary physicist a
nd who also led an eventful, dramatic life. The physics is important, of course, but you will not find equations, Feynman diagrams, or the like in this book. You will find what I hope to be straightforward descriptions of his science, accessible to the lay person. For anyone interested in a deeper level of understanding of his achievements, the best source by far is Fermi’s own writings, lovingly collected by his colleagues in two volumes published in the early 1960s by University of Chicago Press, Enrico Fermi: The Collected Papers. This two-volume set stands as his scientific biography and is accessible to anyone who majored in physics in college. The clarity and simplicity of Fermi’s style of science writing are hallmarks of his unique approach.

  What you will find in this book, I hope, is a narrative that brings the whole person into focus. It is tempting to say, as did many of his colleagues, that he was “all physics, all the time,” and there is an element of truth to this. But he was also a husband, a father, a colleague, and a friend. He played a central role in some of the most important events of the twentieth century. The drama of his life can only be appreciated through an examination of all of these aspects.

  Unfortunately, the story cannot be told as directly as a biographer would like. Fermi was prolific in his professional publications but revealed very little of himself or his inner life. Diaries simply do not exist, and personal letters are few and far between and provide little, if any, personal insight. His numerous pocket diaries are filled with physics doodles and brief accounts of his expenditures on various trips. One searches in vain for anything intimate. The biographer is left triangulating among the various source materials available: the memoir written by his wife of their life together, published in 1954, the year he died; the 1970 Segrè biography mentioned above; memoirs and reminiscences of those who studied with him and those who worked with him, both in his native Rome and in his adopted country, the United States. Fortunately, the results of such triangulation provide a fairly consistent portrait. Still, some mysteries about what he did, and why, will probably never be resolved. I have tried to illuminate where I can and note carefully where such illumination is impossible.

  Strangely, although my father and I discussed the contribution of many physicists over the years, I cannot recall ever discussing Enrico Fermi with him. To my regret, he did not live to see me undertake this project. In retrospect, he might well have been inspired by Fermi. My father was also a fine experimentalist and an outstanding teacher, able to convey complex ideas in simple, compelling ways. Whenever I asked him to explain something to me, his first words were invariably “David, that’s trivial!” And he would make it seem so to me. I am sure he would be surprised that I chose to embark on this project and I hope he would be pleased.

  INTRODUCTION

  HE WAS BORN IN ROME, ITALY, ON SEPTEMBER 29, 1901, AND died in Chicago, Illinois, on November 28, 1954. His life spanned two world wars, and though he was too young to participate in the first, his contribution to the outcome of the second was pivotal and made him world famous. His life also spanned the two major intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century—relativity and quantum theory—and though his contributions to the first were notable, his contributions to the second established him as one of the greatest scientists of his day, indeed, one of the greatest scientists of all time.

  To no one’s surprise he won a Nobel Prize in 1938.

  He made friends easily and inspired passionate loyalty. Those who knew him wept openly when they learned of his premature death at the age of fifty-three. Newspapers around the world carried his death on their front pages, befitting his status as one of the most famous scientists of his day.

  His name was Enrico Fermi.

  THE ARC OF HIS LIFE IS QUICKLY SUMMARIZED. BORN IN ROME AT the turn of the century, he was a child prodigy, and by the time he arrived at university he had mastered all of classical physics. Because no one in Italy was teaching relativity or quantum theory, Fermi spent his university education teaching himself these subjects; when he graduated he had already published in professional journals. After graduation he studied briefly in Germany and in Holland, returned to the University of Rome for a period as a lecturer, and then won a position at the University of Florence, where he made his first, and some say most important contribution—a method to bring quantum mechanical rules into the field of statistical mechanics. Two years later he won a competition for a professorship in theoretical physics at the University of Rome under his powerful mentor, Orso Mario Corbino. He built one of the major international schools of modern physics and made several extraordinary contributions: a theory that explains a puzzling type of radioactive process called “beta decay”; the discovery that certain elements, when bombarded with neutrons, become radioactive; and the discovery that the intensity of this induced radioactivity increases when the neutrons are slowed down prior to hitting these elements.

  He chose the opportunity of his Nobel Prize in 1938 to leave fascist Italy via Stockholm for a faculty position at Columbia University. Shortly thereafter he learned, to his astonishment and embarrassment, that German scientists replicating his 1934 experiments bombarding uranium with neutrons concluded Fermi had been splitting uranium atoms without knowing it. With this knowledge, he and Hungarian émigré Leo Szilard began to explore the possibility of creating a sustained nuclear chain reaction with uranium. After moving the project to the University of Chicago at the request of the US government, Fermi and a large team of fellow physicists and others succeeded in doing so on December 2, 1942, officially ushering in the nuclear age. He was a central figure in the design of plutonium production reactors for the Manhattan Project and in the summer of 1944 moved to Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were designed and built. He played a key role in solving the many theoretical and practical problems involved in this final phase of the Manhattan Project. He witnessed the first detonation of an atomic bomb, known as the Trinity test, at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945.

  After the war, Fermi returned to the University of Chicago, where he continued research in nuclear physics and pioneered high-energy physics experiments on Chicago’s new particle accelerator. He spent summers at Los Alamos working on the hydrogen bomb, known as “the Super,” and pioneering the use of computers for simulating complex physics problems. He also studied cosmic rays and astrophysics and took on a full teaching load at the University of Chicago, eventually advising a string of future Nobel laureates and many others who went on to brilliant, high-profile careers. During this period, he advised the US government on all aspects of nuclear technology policy and came to the defense of his Manhattan Project colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer during 1954 hearings on the latter’s security clearance. Fermi died of stomach cancer in November 1954 at the age of fifty-three, leaving behind an indelible mark on virtually every aspect of physics.

  THESE ARE THE FACTS ON WHICH ALL AGREE. SEARCHING FOR A richer portrait, one comes across the inevitable outliers. One author portrays him as a “puerile” prankster consumed by jealousy of his more brilliant student Ettore Majorana. Another paints the picture of the greatest scientist in Western history. The consensus not surprisingly lies somewhere in between.

  In his youth he was fond of the occasional juvenile prank, but he matured out of this well before he left Rome for the United States. Far from impeding Majorana’s career, Fermi strongly promoted the brilliant introvert’s groundbreaking work.

  Fermi was certainly an extraordinary physicist, one of his generation’s greatest, but to argue that he was history’s greatest reflects more the passion he could inspire in those who worked with him than it does his actual place in history.

  He had a formidable power of physical intuition and a disciplined, methodical technique that allowed him to crush physics problems in ways that amazed and awed his colleagues. He had a charisma that defies easy analysis—modest, yet fully aware of his superiority over most of the physicists with whom he worked, personally reticent and yet highly gregarious, able to discern the object
ive and lead others relentlessly toward it, blunt but never nasty, and capable of a self-deprecating wit that immediately put people at ease. No other physicist has ever received such affectionate postdeath tributes. One looks in vain for tributes to other physicists that compare to To Fermi with Love, a two-record set of reminiscences by those who worked with him at Argonne Labs outside Chicago, or The World of Enrico Fermi, the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s lovingly produced documentary of his life and times. Those who worked with him often jostled with each other to secure the mantle of Fermi’s legacy.

  He could be collegial but was also highly competitive. Reminiscences from his students paint an inconsistent picture. Those from the early days in Rome speak of a man insensitive to the career difficulties of those around him and completely disinterested in their personal travails. Those who studied with him in Chicago universally comment on his generosity of spirit and ability to connect with those around him and attribute their future successes to his fortuitous interventions.

  In other words, the picture is a complex one, hardly surprising given that he was a complex individual in a highly complex world.

  SOME WOULD ARGUE, AS DID HIS OLD FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE ISIDOR Isaac (I. I.) Rabi during an interview for the CBC documentary, that the only thing interesting about Fermi was his science, that beyond the science the details of his life are trivial and not worth exploring. Although this is a common view among scientists, who tend to view scientific achievement as distinct from the individual who achieved it, it misses the point. The circumstances of Fermi’s life determined much of what he achieved, and had the chips fallen some other way, his career—and our world—would be different. If Laura had agreed to move to the United States when Fermi first wanted to in 1930, how different would have been the trajectory of his science? We can imagine his coming to the same conclusions regarding beta decay, but would his work on slow neutrons have proceeded the same way with a different, American team? Would that team have discovered fission in 1934, with the benefit of better (or luckier) radiochemists? One can imagine the arc of Fermi’s research altering considerably with an earlier immigration to the States, with unpredictable results. Perhaps he would have delved into high-energy particle physics earlier, although the accelerators available in the 1930s did not have the energy to explore the subatomic world that became the focus of Fermi’s postwar research in Chicago. Even as late as 1939, much of his research agenda seems accidental, particularly the odd set of circumstances that threw Fermi and Szilard together in an historic partnership beginning in early 1939. If in January 1939 Fermi had shown up in Ann Arbor instead of Manhattan, would Szilard have sought him out? Would Fermi have been a central player in the experiments leading to the first chain reaction?