Publisher's Weekly Review
By placing stunning scientific advances into historical context, this engaging biography of Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) captures the life and times of one of the 20th century's most creative and hard-working scientists. Husband-and-wife authors Segrè (Ordinary Geniuses), emeritus professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Hoerlin (Steps of Courage), a former Philadelphia health commissioner, quickly construct a captivating image of Fermi, addressing such elements as his love of hands-on work and his long friendship with fellow student and practical joker Franco Rasetti. Drawn to theoretical physics, Fermi helped advance quantum mechanics from mathematical abstraction to experiment, yielding a clearer picture of the atom and explaining beta decay-the Nobel-winning work that laid the foundations for nuclear physics and the modern device-dependent world. The authors describe how Fermi and Laura, his Jewish wife, sought refuge from European fascism and anti-Semitism in the U.S., where Fermi's efforts produced the first nuclear chain reaction and fueled the Manhattan Project. Segrè and Hoerlin draw an engaging portrait of a man with boundless curiosity who delighted in his work; fans of pop science and history will thoroughly enjoy this entertaining and accessible biography of a scientist who deserves to be better understood. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Suspected of Fascist sympathies, the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi looked like a bad security risk to the FBI in 1940. That judgment lends piquant irony to Segrè and Hoerlin's illuminating biography of the immigrant genius who earned a prime place among the elite scientists who watched the planet's first mushroom cloud rise above New Mexico sands. Sparing readers the technical details, the authors recount how this genius brought cutting-edge science to his native land, uniting a team of talented countrymen the Boys of Via Panisperna intent on assaulting the mysteries of the atom. After many of these mysteries yielded to Fermi's revolutionary slow-neutron probing, Fermi parlayed his Nobel Prize into a ticket out of Mussolini's dictatorship and into America, where he constructed the world's first atomic-fission pile on a University of Chicago squash court. As a man of pure scientific devotion, reputedly sharing with the Pontiff a magisterial infallibility, Fermi established himself (despite the FBI's misgivings) as a leading spirit of his new country's Manhattan Project. By exploring Fermi's friendships, his marriage and family life, and his postwar concerns about morality in an atomic age, the authors also give readers glimpses into some of Fermi's personal, nonscientific attributes. A balanced portrait, rich in revealing anecdotes.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN A CONTROVERSIAL lecture more than 50 years ago, the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow suggested that natural scientists had "the future in their bones." Snow was speaking in 1959, when the public still held scientists - particularly physicists - in a kind of awe, because of their role in the invention of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. But Snow might well have had in mind the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi, the subject of a new scientific biography by the husband-and-wife team of Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin. Fermi's "intuito fenomenale" - phenomenal intuition - and his near infallibility in predicting the results of experiments were characteristics that prompted colleagues at the University of Rome to designate him "the Pope." One of his graduate students marveled: "Fermi had an inside track to God." The title stuck, for a different reason, when Fermi; his wife, Laura; and their two small children emigrated to America in December 1938, a move hastened by the racial purity laws of Mussolini's ally, Nazi Germany. (Laura's parents were Jewish; both would perish in the Holocaust.) In contrast to other scientists who fled European fascism, Fermi exuded an almost ethereal calm, and he remained unflappable in the face of both triumph and disaster. Lacking Einstein's nimbus of white hair, Oppenheimer's tortured introspection or Teller's mercurial temperament, Fermi - "small, dark and fraillooking" as a child, according to his sister - more closely resembled a middle-aged Fiat mechanic than a mover of the universe. (His daughter Nella, growing up in the family, had a different perspective on her father: "It wasn't that he lacked emotions, but that he lacked the ability to express them.") By being equally adept at experimental work and theoretical physics, Fermi also differed from his contemporaries. "I could never learn to stay in bed late enough in the morning to be a theoretical physicist," he joked. Ironically, the one time that Fermi's intuition failed him was the experiment for which he would win, in 1938, the Nobel Prize in Physics: the discovery of induced radiation from slow neutrons, a necessary first step toward unlocking the secrets of nuclear fission. But Fermi and his colleagues in Rome mistakenly believed that they had created the first transuranics, elements with an atomic number greater than that of uranium, element 92. (Some Italian journalists proposed that element 93 be called Mussolinium.) Had Fermi turned his intuition to the problem it is likely that fission would have been discovered in Italy in early 1935, and not nearly four years later in Germany. Were that the case, Segrè and Hoerlin point out, it is possible that Hitler would have had an atomic bomb to use during the Second World War. "Perhaps Fermi's not discovering fission is one of the world's greatest gifts of good fortune," they write. Nonetheless, Fermi was one of the first scientists to appreciate the world-changing potential of fission's discovery. Looking out at downtown Manhattan from a Columbia University high-rise in the spring of 1939, he cupped his hands and quietly told colleagues there: "A little bomb like that and it would all disappear." Fermi will always be best remembered for overseeing the creation of the world's first nuclear reactor, on a squash court under the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago late in 1942. He and his fellow scientists elected not to tell the university's president, Robert Hutchins, about their dangerous experiment, lest Hutchins put an end to it. (The only safeguards against an uncontrolled atomic chain reaction that would have irradiated a significant part of Chicago was a scientist wielding an ax to cut the rope that held an emergency control rod suspended from the balcony, and a few other brave volunteers, whose job was to douse the runaway reactor with buckets of neutron-absorbing cadmium sulfate.) Fermi was either confident - or cavalier - enough to jest that, if things went drastically wrong, one should "run quick-like behind a big hill many miles away." At the climactic moment, when the atomic chain reaction was about to become self-sustaining, Fermi announced a break for lunch, which also broke the tension mounting among his colleagues in the room. Afterward, a bottle of Chianti was produced and used to toast the achievement. A phone call to Washington announcing their success in code - "The Italian navigator has just landed in the new world" - ended with what was perhaps the last innocent, upbeat message to be associated with the dawn of the atomic age: "Everyone landed safe and happy." Perhaps understandably, the authors are most assured and informative when writing about Fermi's contributions to science. Gino Segrè is a physics professor at the University of Pennsylvania; his famous uncle, Emilio, was Fermi's first student in Rome. Hoerlin, a onetime professor at Penn, grew up in the "atomic city" of Los Alamos. But except for their account of the young Fermi as one of the precocious scientists known as the "Boys of Via Panisperna" - the location of the University of Rome's physics department - there is little in the book that is new, and that has not already been covered in other works, like Richard Rhodes's "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." This is too bad, because, arguably, Fermi's intuito fenomenale extended into other realms, including politics. As a member, in June 1945, of the Scientific Panel of the so-called Interim Committee - a group of policy makers asked to advise on the use of the atomic bomb - Fermi did not depart from the panel's recommendation that it saw "no acceptable alternative to direct military use." Like his colleagues, Fermi averred that scientists had "no proprietary rights" to their creation. After the bomb was successfully tested in the New Mexican desert a month later, Fermi would describe his work at Los Alamos, where the weapon had been built, as simply "a labor of considerable scientific interest." Just a few years later, however, while serving on another panel of experts asked to advise the United States government on whether to proceed with development of the hydrogen superbomb, Fermi joined with his longtime friend and fellow physics Nobel laureate, Isidor Rabi, in condemning the prospective H-bomb as a weapon "which in practical effect is almost one of genocide," and "necessarily an evil thing considered in any light." Having been determinedly apolitical throughout most of his career, Fermi on his deathbed confided to a young scientist, according to the authors, that he "lamented the relative lack of public policy involvement in his life." He died of stomach cancer in November 1954, at age 53. SINCE OUR EFFORTS today at stopping the further spread of the bomb is likely to be looked upon in years to come as largely futile, there is a haunting episode, not included in the book, where Fermi's phenomenal intuition may once again have come to the fore. In late April 1945 - more than two months before the test of the first atomic bomb - Secretary of War Henry Stimson, recently briefed by Los Alamos scientists, reported to President Truman on what the future held in store for the United States and the world. Having stood on the precipice and looked over the edge, Fermi and his fellow scientists judged it "extremely probable" that, in the future, nuclear weapons would "be constructed by smaller nations or even groups." None can say we were not warned. A scientist with intuition that made him seem as if he had 'an inside track to God.' GREGG HERKEN is an emeritus professor at the University of California and author of "The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington."
Kirkus Review
The first English-language biography of Nobel Prizewinning physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), a highly respected figure in both of the author's families.As Segr (Physics and Astronomy/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbruck, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology, 2011, etc.) and Hoerlin (Steps of Courage: My Parents' Journey from Nazi Germany to America, 2011) note, the title Pope of Physics was jokingly bestowed on Fermi at the start of his career by his colleagues because he was able to use the simplest of means [to] estimate the magnitude of any physical phenomena. Segrs uncle, Emilio, was Fermi's first physics student in Rome, and the families maintained their friendship in the United States after they were forced to flee Mussolinis increasingly anti-Semitic regime (the Segr family and Fermis wife, Laura, were Jewish). The authors use this biography of Fermi's lifebeginning with his university days, when he immersed himself in the new field of quantum physics, and culminating in his own groundbreaking accomplishmentsto engagingly chronicle the major developments in nuclear physics that were the focus of his life's work. Fermi played a key role in a revolution in physics that set the stage for the development of semiconductors, transistors, computers, MRIs, and more. In 1925, he extended the exclusion principle formulated by Wolfgang Paulithat no two electrons in an atom could have identical quantum numbersto the broader field of statistical mechanics. His most significant discoveries, made in the 1940s after his move to America, involved the possibility of using slow neutrons to induce fission reactions and create a chain reaction. Fermi's scientific work arguably played a key role in the rapid conclusion of World War II and the shaping of the subsequent Cold War. While he advocated for further efforts at international control of nuclear weapons, he did not join the anti-nuclear movement. A vivid retelling of events that still shape our lives today. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In this narrative biography of physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-54), creator of the first sustained nuclear reaction, husband-and-wife team Segré (physics, emeritus, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Faust in Copenhagen) and -Hoerlin (former health commissioner; Steps in Courage: My Parents' Journey from Nazi Germany to America) discuss Fermi's milieu-the rise of fascism in Europe and the rapid advances in understanding particle physics and universal forces-with clarity. The historical passages at times resort to well-worn phrases such as sheer happenstance, but the authors succeed in "approaching Fermi in terms of person and place." They rely upon Laura Fermi's book Atoms in the Family as well as Emilio Segré's short biography Fermi, and include their own research, which further illuminates their subject as a brilliant scientist at a time of great upheaval, a humble family man who worked with, learned from and taught a who's who of 20th-century physicists. VERDICT Readers of history and physics will enjoy learning about this theoretical and experimental physicist, whose name lives on in the fermion particles, the element fermium, and the national accelerator laboratory near Chicago.-Sara R. Tompson, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Lib., Archives & Records Section, Pasadena, CA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.