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September 27 - October 4, 2020
On these walks, the two Enricos would sometimes go hunting for books to satisfy their hunger for science, a quest that brought them from the grid streets of new Rome to the ancient, meandering alleys and passageways of the historic center of the city, off the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II.
He lent Enrico the book. Two months later Enrico revealed he had mastered the material, having worked through all of the theorems and solved all the problems at the back of the book. Amidei was understandably skeptical because the book had been difficult for him as a university student and, as a result, he had never completed the proofs himself. When Fermi gave Amidei the proofs for the theorems, the older man’s doubts vanished.
The teacher shook hands enthusiastically with mother and aunt, proclaiming the young Enrico a “second Galileo.” He may have been the first, but would not be the last, to do so.
He mastered Poincaré’s classic work on the hydrodynamics of whirlpools and absorbed two other classic books, Appel’s Mechanics and Planck’s Thermodynamics, so well that he could recall proofs from them years later. His knowledge of relativity and quantum theory was soon greater than that of his teachers, and he frequently gave lectures on relativity. Puccianti, a generous, very old-fashioned physicist, would ask Fermi to lecture him on theoretical subjects that puzzled the older man. In these sessions Fermi honed his pedagogical skills, skills that would play a central role in his subsequent
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IT WAS MAX PLANCK IN THE 1890S WHO FIRST PROPOSED THAT ENERGY was not “continuous” but came in discrete, tiny “packets,” or “quanta.”
Electrons could, though, “leap” from one orbit to another, stimulated by the absorption or emission of a particle of light, that is, Einstein’s photon. The leap from one orbit to another would correspond to the emission or absorption of a specific frequency of light, depending on the frequency of the electron’s orbit around the nucleus.
In his famous paper, “On the Quantization of a Perfect Monatomic Gas,” Fermi laid out the statistical approach required to account for the energy level of such gases, incorporating Pauli’s exclusion principle.
“Therefore,” Enrico said, “light is nothing else but electromagnetic waves.”
In these seminars Fermi was teaching more than physics. He was teaching his students to think the way he thought, to address problems the way he did, by cutting away all irrelevant factors and focusing on the heart of the matter in order to arrive at the simplest solution.
Fermi eased into the subject matter by comparing an atom and the electromagnetic field to a pendulum and a vibrating string connected by a thin elastic thread, which represented the coupling of the two. If the pendulum is at rest and the string starts to vibrate only slightly, the elastic thread will perturb the pendulum only slightly. But when the string vibrates in tune with the amplitude of the pendulum, the elastic thread carries that energy to the pendulum and causes the pendulum to swing in time with the vibrating string, creating a resonance between the pendulum and the string.
Very occasionally, Mother Nature decides to give us a peek behind the curtain at what is really happening.
The greatest Italian scientist since Galileo was on his way into self-imposed exile.
“Oh what idiots we have all been! Oh but this is wonderful!”
Actually, the Institute is his Institute, for he was its outstanding source of intellectual stimulation. It was Enrico who attended every seminar and with incredible brilliance critically assayed every new idea or discovery. It was Enrico who arrived first in the morning and left last at night, filling each day with his outpouring of mental and physical energy.… We may have seen his physical energy before, or his basic balance, simplicity, and sincerity in life before, but who in his lifetime has ever seen such qualities combined in one individual?
He left a distinctive legacy, one that continues to unfold as we explore and clarify our understanding of nature and its innermost workings.
(Galileo and the Scientific Revolution, 1961, with Gilberto Bernardini);
FERMI’S PATH TO GREATNESS DIFFERED FROM THAT OF EINSTEIN, Bohr, Planck, or any of the others who created modern physics. It started from a profound confidence that he could solve any problem thrown his way and that nature would ultimately disclose her most precious secrets to his probing mind. That confidence was based on an incredibly solid foundation of knowledge laid down early in his life through intense and disciplined effort, under the guidance of mentors and professors who understood and cultivated his greatness. He understood that there were no shortcuts to deep understanding and was
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In the world of quantum theory all physicists must understand probability, but Fermi placed it front and center in his research, returning to it time and again—in the Fermi-Dirac statistics, in the Thomas-Fermi model of the atom, in his pen-and-paper analysis of neutron diffusion, and in his pioneering use of Monte Carlo methods to simulate physics problems.
The Fermi Paradox—the conclusion that if life existed elsewhere in the universe, they should have visited us by now—is a classic example of how he could break down almost any problem into a series of probabilistic assumptions.
Confidence born of innate ability and a strong foundation, a firm belief in his ability to solve any problem, an instinct for important research, an unshakeable faith in his ability to make others understand, a fascination with the role of probability and chance at the core of how the world works, the willingness to make enormous sacrifices for science—all these made Fermi who he was and contributed to his ability to make a lasting impact.
Like all of us, however, scientists are prisoners of the era into which they are born. To have had the impact of Einstein, it helped to be born during a period when some of the deepest problems of physics had come to the fore.
Fermi was certainly the last man who knew everything about physics, the study of matter, energy, time, and their relationships—the way the physical world works. He knew everything about how the physical world worked across subdisciplines and across theory and experiment as far as physicists were able to know these things during his lifetime. Our knowledge has evolved since he died, shaped by theory and experiment in ways that would have delighted Fermi had he lived. Even so, for one person to master all the physics of his day was a unique achievement. We may never see another like him.
