The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age

by David N. Schwartz

Late in the year, a Viennese physicist named Erwin Schrödinger, closeted away in a ski chalet with one of his numerous lovers, came up with a differential “wave” equation that did much the same thing, using techniques more familiar to the average physicist.

Incapable of not teaching—it was perhaps his principal mode of communication—Fermi resolved to use the honeymoon to teach his new wife Maxwell’s famous equations on the electromagnetic field.

Fermi explained—truthfully, he would later recount with a smile—that he was the driver of His Excellency, Enrico Fermi. The guard waved him through.

he assigned the patent rights over to the British Admiralty, who, not knowing what to do with it, promptly shelved and forgot it.

The image of a carload of Hungarian geniuses, chauffeured by a New York investment banker friend of Szilard, hunting for Einstein’s house in the wilds of Long Island’s North Fork is one of the more vivid of this entire period.

Eager to prove his loyalty to his new country, Fermi was in an awkward position. He was an enemy alien working at the heart of the US government’s most sensitive and secret military project. Change was afoot.

As an added precaution there would be a small group of intrepid souls standing on top of the pile with buckets of a cadmium solution, prepared to douse the whole pile if for some reason SCRAM did not work. That would surely stop the reaction instantly but would also render the entire apparatus useless for further research.

Compton rang up Conant and, in a burst of uncharacteristic lyricism, reported, “The Italian navigator has just landed in the new world. The earth was not as large as he had estimated,” Compton continued, “and he arrived at the new world sooner than he had expected.” Conant picked up the reference immediately. “Is that so? And were the natives friendly?” he asked. “Very friendly,” replied Compton. The message had been passed.

When Leona suggested they might have to stop the car and sleep there overnight, Fermi objected, saying that it might harm his reputation. The young woman, by now married to John Marshall and pregnant with his child, suggested that perhaps she should be worried about her reputation and because she wasn’t, why should he be?

“Annuncio vobis gaudium maximum, papam habemus.” To the bewildered group, John von Neumann, Ulam’s brilliant Hungarian colleague who played a central role at Los Alamos over the next few years, translated the Latin used by the church to announce the election of a new pope: “I announce to you with greatest joy that we have a new Pope.” The group knew of Fermi’s nickname in Rome and burst into applause. They had been looking forward to Fermi’s arrival and loved Ulam’s allusion.

He had stopped reading professional journals sometime before the war, relying instead almost exclusively on gossip with colleagues and institute visitors about interesting results and discoveries, challenging himself to figure out how the results were obtained.

Staff members knew and visiting speakers were informed that they needed to finish by six o’clock. That is when Fermi would excuse himself and, irrespective of where the discussion stood, return home for the evening.

If Fermi raised his hand and said, “There is something here I do not understand,” the speaker was in for trouble and, if he had seen Fermi in action before, knew it.

He recounts a harrowing moment when Fermi raced successfully to get across a railroad track before being blocked by an oncoming train. What Fermi did not realize was that there was a second track, obscured by the first train, and on that track was a second train going in the other direction. They missed the second train by a matter of a few feet. Pulling off to the side of the road so that the two of them could recover from what must have been a heart-stopping near miss, Fermi turned to his young colleague to reassure him. “This is why it is very important for you to be with me; my time may be up. But yours isn’t.”

“I remember,” Fermi replied, “my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”

Szilard once berated members of the team for planning to take a weekend off, reminding them that the Germans were hard at work on their own nuclear weapons. When they canceled their weekend plans, Szilard then announced that he was leaving town for the weekend.