The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Both Fermi’s biographers—his wife Laura and his protégé and fellow Nobel laureate Emilio Segrè—assign the beginning of his commitment to physics to the period of psychological trauma following the death of his older brother Giulio when Fermi was fourteen years old, in the winter of 1915.764 Only a year apart in age, the two boys had been inseparable; Giulio’s death during minor surgery for a throat abscess left Enrico suddenly bereft. That same winter young Enrico browsed on market day among the stalls of Rome’s Campo dei Fiori, where a statue commemorates the philosopher Giordano Bruno, Copernicus’ defender, who was burned at the stake there in 1600 by the Inquisition. Fermi found two used volumes in Latin, Elementorum physicae mathematicae, the work of a Jesuit physicist, published in 1840. The desolate boy used his allowance to buy the physics textbooks and carried them home. They excited him enough that he read them straight through. When he was finished he told his older sister Maria he had not even noticed they were written in Latin. “Fermi must have studied the treatise very thoroughly,” Segrè would decide, looking through the old volumes many years later, “because it contains marginal notes, corrections of errors, and several scraps of paper with notes in Fermi’s handwriting.”765