The World of Enrico Fermi pt1 (1970)

was one of the leading Lights of the Revolution which came about in atomic physics very very common man in fact he was common as an old Shu you stood in awe of him and yet you felt relaxed with him he wanted to do something really exciting and outstanding and out of the ordinary either buy a car or get a wife among his students three have since received a Nobel Prize he could often be mistaken for a janitor one of the major purposes of his life was to make things clear and he made them clear to himself and he made them clear to others at age 45 a distinguished American scientist at age five the youngest of three children in the family of a state Railway official in Rome at age nine a school boy with an enormous appetite for books at age 17 ready to begin an extraordinary career [Music] [Applause] fmy attended the skola normale in Pisa a famous school for gifted [Music] students quantum physics was new then and had not yet reached the classroom fairy had to study on his own to combat The Frigid cold of the ancient buildings during the winter he studied with a Croc of burning charcoal on his lap they still tell a story about him there one day the problem in chemistry lab was to analyze a mixture of salts fairy thought of a shortcut he organized his friends and they found a catalog of school supplies and with a microscope from the physics department they quickly identified the separate ingredients of the mixture by their color their crystal structure and so on somehow fa's whole life work is summarized in this story his Ingenuity his Simplicity his ability to organize teams his High Spirit and his habit of getting the right answer by some straightforward [Music] shortcut the time had come to leave piser and his friends to study quantum physics at a university where active work in the field was going on the University at gingan in Germany was a center of brilliant activity and fmy felt discouraged by the formal and cold atmosphere he moved on to Liden in Holland and there found a warm and enthusiastic teacher Paul Arin Fest who instantly recognized fa's potentials and restored his [Music] self-confidence a distinguished physicist himself Aaron fest's great ability as a teacher was to prove an example for familyy they became good friends [Music] in 1925 famy moved to Florence he became a lecturer at the University where Galileo had worked 300 years before here famy followed a pattern which was to be lifelong unlike many scientists who specialize in either experiment or theory he worked with equal zest in [Music] both in 1926 he worked out a new mathematical model for the behavior of gases his findings now known as fairy statistics brought him International attention and a professorship at the University of Rome Rome shared some of the mood of the 20s and fairy enjoyed himself in play as in work he was more interested in results than in formal niceties of style with his primitive dog paddle he could swim from Miles his knowledge of cars was slight but defective he was very much aware of girls one in particular Laura Keon uh I was a student at University and he was teaching already when somehow we started meeting at a certain corner to get on the street car nobody said let's meet you see but we started meeting more and more often I remember trying to teach him to dance uh somehow I always had the poorest dancer in those times so it didn't matter very much if enrio didn't feel rym FY had always said that he wanted to do something really exciting and outstanding either buy a car or get a wife so when he bought a car I was a little disappointed although I really didn't have any ideas of getting married but then he was more extravagant than he thought himself he could be and so he got both a car and the wife I remember a sense of being completely dazed not even knowing whether he had asked me to marry him or whether he was posing the theoretical question of what would happen if I got married to somebody and he at the same time would get married to somebody else they married each other in July 1928 an honored guest was corbino prominent physicist at the University of Rome corbino had decided to bring together a lively group of young scientists with fairy the Cornerstone of a new school of physics the group became known in time as corbino's boys for the next 12 years they were to join an extraordinary accomplishment as well as simple camaraderie they invented elaborate jokes fairy the ever reliable Authority on all matters of physics was dubbed the pope Rosetti was the Cardinal Vicor and Emelio s who it is said once drove his fist through a desk in a fit of temper was named after the mythical creature with eyes of fire the basil [Music] and there was the outdoor life always a passion of fairies he wasn't a particularly good skier but he was strong and very competitive and whether it was skiing or hiking or any game or physics itself he liked to be [Music] first at 27 fairy was made a member of the Italian Academy he now had the official title of Excellency but he didn't care much for Ceremony or for the Robes of office which had cost him 3 and A2 months salary in the world of physics rather than here he valued recognition physics was undergoing a sudden exciting growth the bases had been laid by Max plunk who in 1900 had proposed that the energy of atoms could change only indefinite lumps or Quant Albert Einstein had extended Plank's ideas and claimed that the energy of light itself exists only in Quant Ernest Rutherford had found the nucleus of the atom Neil's bore had shown how to bring all these findings together to build models of atoms that began to explain their emission of light and their chemical behavior now in the late 19 19 20s the physicists felt that the remaining puzzles in quantum physics were at last yielding Solutions a series of conferences were organized each was a sort of Family Affair everyone knew everyone else all the important physicists of that period could still have been gathered in one large room or on one small Excursion [Music] boat in this atmosphere the latest theories and experiments and speculations were discussed and debated fa's growing scientific achievements and his gift for simple and clear communication of ideas had already won him a secure place in this Lively family of physicists I first met him in Zurich it must have been early 1929 alimer was there at the same time I first met him that was eight International Conference which was arranged very significant one at that time and family came and I first really got to talk to him all this readily and um and uh one liked him immediately and he had just then done a paper in which in a few pages had uh done independently something which was a very great and large paper by Heisenberg and poy his was simpler and many people thought greater elegance and this was on Quantum [Music] electrodynamics in Rome fairy and his group worked in the University Physics building as always fairy combined teaching with his work in both Theory and experiment but perhaps his most widely noted contribution in the early 30s was fairy's theory of beta Decay the puzzle was that in the emission from radioactive materials most beta r came out with far less energy than predicted if the energy is conserved something must carry the missing energy fam's Theory included a suggestion made several years earlier by poy that the missing energy was carried off by a chargeless particle which had not yet been observed he called this hypothetical particle the neutrino little neutral one fy's ideas attracted a good deal of interest and visitors of the stat of Neil's bore began to take note of him in 1931 fairy's group helped organize an international physics meeting in Rome to it came a group of notable scientists [Music] in this University lab building fy's team had decided that the most interesting new work would be the physics of the nucleus but their resources were limited a Geer counter was a rare instrument then so they had to learn to build one they had to borrow a radium source and so without thrills or Fanfare they began on a road that led directly to the atomic age galdi fy's first student and later his collaborator recalls at the beginning of 1934 we received from Paris the information that theolo had succeeded very recently to produce a few radioactive bodies artificial radioactive bodies by bombarding Light Elements with alpha particles and thy thought immediately that the neutrons should be a much more efficient agent to produce new radioactive bodies than the alpha particles since they don't have an electric charge it started immediately to bombard all light elements with the Neons produced by this Source we found the particle that we our piece of silver with the source inside or outside a certain lead protection protection for ourself for the radiation emitted from The Source the result was different we found also that the the activation of this piece of silver was different according whether the uh sample was irradiated on a marble table or on a Ood table that was nearby so we were rather puzzled about this result and our friend retti he was very critical towards us he treated us as a young phys not very uh uh careful in doing measurement and they start to say well you do something wrong and we were very offended and we protested say no we do measurement very well but retti insisted on that at a certain point fairb understood that probably the effect was true in this sense that the presence of lead or maybe of other material in the vicinity of the source and the detector detector could change the conditions of activation how could neutrons produced with the aid of radium sources such as those contained in the long glass tubes here produce such puzzling effects fairy had guessed that it was due to those neutrons that had been scattered back from the table and from other objects that happened to be on it these neutrons would be slowed down in the process of scattering and it was these slow neutrons which could make the silver nucleus radioactive to test the idea fairy let neutrons from the same Source go through paraffin before reaching the silver with a well shielded Geer counter such as this one fairy tested whether the radioactivity caused in the silver was much increased sure enough this is what happened now paraffin of course contains hydrogen why not then try whether water also moderates the Neutron's speed and what better place than the little fountain outside the lab FM's prediction proved to be correct water also helped the neutrons to activate the silver much more effectively in high excitement the group wrote up the results for publication that that very night a whole promising new field of physics had been opened up outside the laboratory however the world was becoming darker under musolini all Italy was being pressed into a political mold which had a new name fascism Franco retti tells how it reached into the lab family was certainly a a conservative person his interest was so concentrated in physics uh that that he had no strong feeling for politics at that time of course in order to have position in Italian universities one practically had to be a member of the fascist party in the United States starting around the turn of the century physics had emerged from its adolescence with the achievements of Roland Gibbs milikin and of course Michaelson America's first first Nobel Prize physicist at the University of California Lawrence along with his student Livingston built the first cyclotrons there were also outstanding theoreticians and teachers and their work was attracting Europeans who came on visits to learn and to teach among them enrio FY happy to discover America University of Michigan in the middle 20s started the summer schools for theoretical physics a few permanent physicist were invited two maybe three from abroad or from the United States the lectures were few fortunately there was an enormous amount of time for getting together [Music] informally famy was also a marvelous teacher in those days his lectures were perfect he made it all simple he always knew what the essence was he was never pompous he never tried to make it more learned than was [Music] necessary among other visitors to Michigan Paul Arin Fest fa's friend and teacher from the days of lden Europeans greatly enjoyed the holiday atmosphere of the summer school even Neil's bore allowed himself to be jostled into position for a group photograph [Music] after a lecture or a seminar the work tables became picnic tables and people could eat or watch the flamingos or watch someone imitating the flamingos or the boor [Music] lion but in Europe a cancer was spreading over mankind the fascism of Germany starting from hoodlumism Rose steadily to the murderous persecution of Jews and intellectuals the luckiest ones escaped to America 1935 musolini and his generals embroiled Italy in a war against [Music] Ethiopia while Italy became absorbed with guns and troops fairy's group tried to keep going with its basic research work they built a High Vol generator for accelerating subatomic particles as everywhere else the apparatus of the physics lab was now growing bigger and began to lose some of its homemade [Music] look by late 1938 Italian policy had become almost as fanatically racist as was Germany and Laura FY was Jewish there were uh a set of laws were past in the summer that affected uh the Jews but also that affected other people they would have made the uh living in that country and raising our children in that country so bad that we decided to immigrate the right occasion suddenly presented itself in December enrio familyy was called to an impressive ceremony in Stockholm Sweden he had won the Nobel Prize in physics for 1938 for his discovery of new radioactive substances produced by Neutron bombardment the great work he and his group had begun in 1934 seated next to fairy the Nobel Prize winner in literature Pearl [Music] Buck as he was receiving his prize from King gusta f suspected that fairy had quietly arranged to begin a new life he had his family with him and they would all go on to the United [Music] [Music] States the fames arrived in New York in January 1939 he would be welcomed by I I Robie and other leading American scientists Arthur Compton and Harold Yuri Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer the Americans had good young physicists and equipment and above all a Happy optimism now they were being joined by the best minds of Europe it was an exciting combination what I think we had in this country we had produced a large number of people who' been brought up to a certain level and then needed some help some leadership to get over the hump and once they were over the hump they were tremendous people of my generation more or less that uh brought in our respective institution brought this over the hump and we brought over the hump the largely from attitudes and tastes and developments which we had learned in Europe not knowledge so much as attitudes the scientific culture so to speak also early in 1939 bore arrived in New York to attend a physics conference in Washington to his friends he brought startling news which literally changed their lives in the course of world history bore had learned that two German scientists had discovered that the nucleus of a uranium atom could be split into two or more fragments releasing a great amount of energy further the splitting later called fishing could be provoked by neutrons striking the nucleus fairy then at Columbia immediately saw the possibility of a chain reaction building up as he explained it himself in a lecture given later if there is fishion with a very serious upset of the nuclear structure is not improbable that some neutrons will be evaporated and if some neutrons are evaporated then they might be more than one let's say for the sake of argument two and if they are more than one it may be that uh the two of them for example May each one cause eff fish and from that one SE of course the beginning of the Chain Reaction efficient Chain Reaction could release enormous amounts of energy uncontrolled it might produce a tremendous explosion with the clouds of War Gathering the terrible thought arose that the Germans would try to make such a fish and bomb a race with this Spectre began a race without parallel in human history [Music]