Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi built the first nuclear reactor and was the last physicist of the first rank to excel equally as a theorist and an experimenter. Born in Rome in 1901, the son of a railway official, he taught himself much of physics from a second-hand book bought at a market, and entered the Scuola Normale in Pisa at seventeen with an entrance essay so advanced the examiner asked to meet him. He became professor of theoretical physics in Rome at twenty-five and gathered a group known as the Via Panisperna boys. His 1934 theory of beta decay introduced what became the weak interaction, and was rejected by Nature as too speculative. He then began bombarding elements with slow neutrons, discovering that passing them through paraffin greatly increased the reaction. He won the 1938 Nobel Prize for it, having concluded he had produced new elements beyond uranium — in fact he had split the nucleus without realising, which Hahn, Strassmann and Meitner established months later. He used the Stockholm ceremony to leave Italy, since his wife Laura was Jewish and the racial laws had just been passed, and went directly to New York. On 2 December 1942, under the stands of a disused squash court at the University of Chicago, his team achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in Chicago Pile-1, built of graphite blocks and uranium with cadmium control rods withdrawn by hand. He worked at Los Alamos and witnessed Trinity, estimating the yield by dropping scraps of paper and measuring how far the blast carried them. He opposed the hydrogen bomb on moral grounds. He died of stomach cancer in 1954, aged fifty-three.

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