![]() This work proved to have great scientific and technological value and led to Fermi's 1938 Nobel Prize. His next triumph was experimental: the generation of beams of "slow" neutrons that were able to penetrate into the nuclei of a target material and create new radioactive isotopes. However, it fit so well with experimental results that physicists soon accepted it. Because the neutrino was undetectable at the time, the theory met with considerable resistance. Fermi postulated that a previously unknown subatomic particle that he named the neutrino ("little neutral one" in Italian) accounts for the rest. neutrino Etymology, origin and meaning of neutrino by etymonline neutrino (n.) 'neutral particle smaller than a neutron,' 1934, from Italian neutrino, coined 1933 by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi from neutro 'neuter' (see neuter (adj.)) + -ino, diminutive suffix. In the type of radioactivity known as beta decay, a nucleus emits an an electron that does not carry off as much energy as physicists initially expected. (Department of Energy)įermi's first major accomplishment was theoretical. Physicist Enrico Fermi in a photograph probably taken between 19. He assembles a group of students and colleagues who became known as The Boys of Villa Panisperna for their relative youth and adventurous spirits as well as their scientific prowess. At that time, Italy was a backwater in physics, but Fermi's appointment to a professorship soon changes the dynamic. Readers first meet the young Fermi as an exceptional student whose intuitive grasp of physics quickly leaves his professors far behind. One of the most important yet not fully appreciated of those is Enrico Fermi (1901-54), whose near infallibility in both the theoretical and experimental realms led his Italian colleagues to give him the nickname The Pope of Physics - the title of a new biography by University of Pennsylvania physics professor Gino Segrè and his wife, former Philadelphia health commissioner Bettina Hoerlin. But to a biographer's delight, behind those discoveries is a rich cast of characters. Stories of the science and technology of that period have produced a vast body of literature. ![]() Then in 1938, while the world was being shaken by the rise of Fascism in Europe - most notably Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy - came the momentous discovery of nuclear fission and the rapid realization that the phenomenon could be used to build a bomb with previously unimaginable destructive power. The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age, by Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin. New subatomic discoveries and the groundbreaking theories of relativity and quantum mechanics challenged and reshaped scientific understanding about the nature of matter and energy, space and time. Authors looking to mine science history can find no richer lode than physics in the early- to mid-20th century.
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