Enrico Fermi and I,
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we overlapped briefly in Chicago. Enrico's house was just east of the University while I was living on Chicago's west side. Enrico was born in an apartment building near Roma Termini very near the restaurant which is now operated by some relatives of mine in Rome. In Chicago Enrico and his students were manipulating large graphite blocks for shielding from the world's first nuclear reactor while I was totally preoccupied with much smaller blocks. We never met however. He had only recently been called from New York to head the top secret Manhatten Project when, shortly afterward, my family was called to Washington as part of the same war effort. It was almost two decades later that I returned to Chicago for graduate work in theoretical physics.
Bob Dicke had sent a letter strongly urging me to study at Princeton but Enrico's aura at the University of Chicago could not be resisted. Princeton had had Albert Einstein during the years that Chicago had Enrico Fermi and they died within half a year of each other. Most people consider Einstein the greatest physicist of the twentieth century but a strong minority including me felt that Enrico deserved that title. In addition to inventing the Fermi statistics for spin 1/2 particles, Enrico had the great insight to see a connection between electromagnetism and weak interactions. Einstein, on the other hand, stubbornly resisted the quantum revolution and did not recognize that his presupposition of a static universe was an assumption that needed to be tested. All through the 1920's, Einstein refused to accept the growing evidence for an expanding universe. Although Enrico had died some years before I arrived at the University of Chicago, some of his students and colleagues, notably Herbert Anderson, were still teaching there. Among the physicists of the Manhattan Project was Leona Wood Marshall Libby, a vivacious woman who ultimately married in succession two well-known physicists. Leona later wrote her personal memoirs of those years, "The Uranium People". In addition, Enrico's widow, Laura Fermi, had continued to live in their Hyde Park house and could sometimes be seen in the Fermi Institute library. When this happened the grad students would lean over and whisper to each other in awe. On one occasion, Laura agreed to speak informally in Ida Noyes Hall about her life with Enrico. She spoke at length about the cultural differences between Italy and the US that they had to deal with. Their children were excited about the American notion of Santa Claus whereas, in Italy, the more important holiday for children was the sixth of January celebrating the bringing of gifts by the three magi to Bethlehem. The feast was personified in a witch who rode a broomstick to bring Torrone and other delicacies to children. Among Italian American children whose families had immigrated some generations earlier, the witch was, in the oral tradition, known as "La Befana". It was only in adulthood that they might have made the connection with "l'epiphane". Towards the end of the evening, one of my fellow students, Giovanni Venturi, was bold enough to ask her whether Enrico had been a good husband. This took her aback and she tried to dodge the question but the answer was clear. Enrico was obsessed with physics. |
Enrico Fermi
Enrico's Birthplace
Family Restaurant
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Although Laura was Jewish, their two children were raised as Catholic. Enrico however, like many physicists, was agnostic. He was too honest to label himself atheist which to him would imply that he could disprove the existence of a God. Leona records in her book that Enrico did accept a visit by a priest before he died.
In Chicago, I signed on to work under Yoichiro Nambu who was most incisively continuing Enrico's work on weak interactions. Yoichiro and Enrico had met only once but that was enough to pass the torch to a new generation of theorists. Yoichiro was making great strides in current algebra based on the partial conservation of the axial current and Enrico's current-current theory. His Nobel Prize followed that of Enrico by exactly seventy years. In my PhD work I applied these ideas to the K meson decays and was rewarded by a post-doc position at Yale. During those same years in Chicago, Yoichiro was also doing ground-breaking work in strong interactions. He was the first to propose that this force was an SU(3) gauge interaction. He told me privately about this idea but I could only see the obstacles since the required octet of massless gluons seemed experimentally ruled out. The inability to see beyond obstacles to possibilities was a long-standing shortcoming of mine. Yoichiro's style was to promote maximum self-reliance among his students but, whenever they called for an appointment to discuss problems, he would invariably tell them to come right up. In addition to his normal teaching assignment, he would sometimes give special lectures to his students. I remember one such series on infinite component wave equations.
Some years later, while I was a professor at the University of Alabama, I found myself in Chicago and decided to visit the grave of Enrico. He is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery only a mile or so south of the University. In my graduate student days we were advised to venture north of 53rd street only in daylight or in groups and never to venture south of 61st Street. Driving south on Cottage Grove Avenue I was prepared, if necessary, to make a quick U turn but the drive was uneventful. I walked into the cemetery office and asked where Enrico Fermi was buried. "Is he one of the famous ones?" they asked. "Well, he is probably the greatest scientist ever to work in America" I answered. It turns out that Oak Woods is the final resting place of a long list of famous people from all walks of life. One of them is Jesse Owens, the Alabama track star who galled Adolf Hitler by winning while black the gold medal at the 1936 Berlin olympics. One of the cemetery staff offered to escort me to Enrico's gravesite. There was a light snow cover and when we reached the gravesite, he kicked the snow from a simple stone lying flush with the ground. The inscription read "Enrico Fermi, Physicist". At some time since then, however, a small vertical tombstone with the same inscription has been placed at the gravesite.
Val Telegdi, one of the leading particle experimentalists at Chicago during my student days, had expended much effort to secure the approval of the Italian government for re-interring the body of Enrico in the Santa Croce church in Florence beside those of Galileo, Dante, and other giants of Italian science and literature. Although he was ultimately successful in securing this approval, Enrico's family declined to permit the transfer.
Yoichiro presently divides his time between Chicago and Japan. We last met in 2003 in Gainesville Florida. Enrico's personal contributions are complete but his legacy lives on in the work of those who are privileged to be able to follow his equations to their consequences in today's theoretical physics and beyond. And so, physics moves on.
In Chicago, I signed on to work under Yoichiro Nambu who was most incisively continuing Enrico's work on weak interactions. Yoichiro and Enrico had met only once but that was enough to pass the torch to a new generation of theorists. Yoichiro was making great strides in current algebra based on the partial conservation of the axial current and Enrico's current-current theory. His Nobel Prize followed that of Enrico by exactly seventy years. In my PhD work I applied these ideas to the K meson decays and was rewarded by a post-doc position at Yale. During those same years in Chicago, Yoichiro was also doing ground-breaking work in strong interactions. He was the first to propose that this force was an SU(3) gauge interaction. He told me privately about this idea but I could only see the obstacles since the required octet of massless gluons seemed experimentally ruled out. The inability to see beyond obstacles to possibilities was a long-standing shortcoming of mine. Yoichiro's style was to promote maximum self-reliance among his students but, whenever they called for an appointment to discuss problems, he would invariably tell them to come right up. In addition to his normal teaching assignment, he would sometimes give special lectures to his students. I remember one such series on infinite component wave equations.
Some years later, while I was a professor at the University of Alabama, I found myself in Chicago and decided to visit the grave of Enrico. He is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery only a mile or so south of the University. In my graduate student days we were advised to venture north of 53rd street only in daylight or in groups and never to venture south of 61st Street. Driving south on Cottage Grove Avenue I was prepared, if necessary, to make a quick U turn but the drive was uneventful. I walked into the cemetery office and asked where Enrico Fermi was buried. "Is he one of the famous ones?" they asked. "Well, he is probably the greatest scientist ever to work in America" I answered. It turns out that Oak Woods is the final resting place of a long list of famous people from all walks of life. One of them is Jesse Owens, the Alabama track star who galled Adolf Hitler by winning while black the gold medal at the 1936 Berlin olympics. One of the cemetery staff offered to escort me to Enrico's gravesite. There was a light snow cover and when we reached the gravesite, he kicked the snow from a simple stone lying flush with the ground. The inscription read "Enrico Fermi, Physicist". At some time since then, however, a small vertical tombstone with the same inscription has been placed at the gravesite.
Val Telegdi, one of the leading particle experimentalists at Chicago during my student days, had expended much effort to secure the approval of the Italian government for re-interring the body of Enrico in the Santa Croce church in Florence beside those of Galileo, Dante, and other giants of Italian science and literature. Although he was ultimately successful in securing this approval, Enrico's family declined to permit the transfer.
Yoichiro presently divides his time between Chicago and Japan. We last met in 2003 in Gainesville Florida. Enrico's personal contributions are complete but his legacy lives on in the work of those who are privileged to be able to follow his equations to their consequences in today's theoretical physics and beyond. And so, physics moves on.
