Enrico Fermi,

Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist, best known for his work on Chicago Pi-1, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He is one of the men referred to as the father of the atomic bomb. Fermi held several patents related to the use of nuclear power, and was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment and the discovery of transuranic elements. He was widely regarded as one of the very few physicists to excel both theoretically and experimentally. Fermi's first major contribution was to statistical mechanics. After Wolfgang Pauli announced his exclusion principle in 1925, Fermi followed with a paper in which he applied the principle to an ideal gas, employing a statistical formulation now known as Fermi–Eurodirac statistics. Today, particles that obey the exclusion principle are called fermions. Later Pauli postulated the existence of an uncharged invisible particle emitted along with an electron during beta decay, to satisfy the law of conservation of energy. Fermi took up this idea, developing a model that incorporated the postulated particle, which he named the neutrino. His theory, later referred to as Fermi's interaction and still later as weak interaction, described one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Through experiments inducing radioactivity with recently discovered neutrons, Fermi discovered that slow neutrons were more easily captured than fast ones, and developed the Fermi age equation to describe this. After bombarding thorium and uranium with slow neutrons, he concluded that he had created new elements. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery, the new elements were subsequently revealed to be fission products. Fermi left Italy in 1938 to escape new Italian racial laws that affected his Jewish wife Laura. He emigrated to the United States where he worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Fermi led the team that designed and built Chicago Pi-1, which went critical on December 2, 1942, demonstrating the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. He was on hand when the X-10 graphite reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee went critical in 1943, and when the B Reactor at the Hanford site did so the next year. At Los Alamos he headed F Division, part of which worked on Edward Teller's thermonuclear super bomb. He was present at the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945, where he used his Fermi method to estimate the bomb's yield. After the war, Fermi served under Oppenheimer on the influential General Advisory Committee, which advised the Atomic Energy Commission on Nuclear Matters and Policy. Following the detonation of the first Soviet fission bomb in August 1949, he strongly opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb on both moral and technical grounds. He was among the scientists who testified on Oppenheimer's behalf at the 1954 hearing that resulted in the denial of the latter's security clearance. Fermi did important work in particle physics, especially related to pions and muons, and he speculated that cosmic rays arose through material being accelerated by magnetic fields in interstellar space. Many awards, concepts, and institutions are named after Fermi, including the Enrico Fermi Award, the Enrico Fermi Institute, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, and the Synthetic Element Fermium. Early life – Enrico Fermi was born in Rome on September 29, 1901. He was the third child of Alberto Fermi, a division head in the Ministry of Railways, and Ida de Gattis, an elementary school teacher. His only sister, Maria, was two years older than he, and his brother, Giulio, was a year older. After the two boys were sent to a rural community to be wet-nursed, Enrico rejoined his family in Rome when he was two and a half. While he came from a Roman Catholic family and was baptized in accord with his grandparents' wishes, the family was not religious, and Fermi was an agnostic throughout his adult life. As a young boy he shared his interests with his brother Giulio. They built electric motors and played with electrical and mechanical toys. Giulio died during the administration of anesthesia for an operation on a throat abscess in 1915. One of Fermi's first sources for the study of physics was a book found at the local market of Campo de' Fiori in Rome. The 900-page book from 1840, Elementorum Physicae Mathematicae, was written in Latin by Jesuit Father Andrea Caraffa, a professor at the Collegio Romano. It covered mathematics, classical mechanics, astronomy, optics, and acoustics, to the extent that they were understood when it was written. Fermi befriended another scientifically inclined student, Enrico Persico, and the two worked together on scientific projects such as building gyroscopes and measuring the Earth's magnetic field. Fermi's interest in physics was further encouraged by his father's colleague Adolfo Amidae, who gave him several books on physics and mathematics that he read and assimilated quickly. Schola Normale Superior in Pisa. Fermi graduated from high school in July 1918 and, at Amidae's urging, applied to the Schola Normale Superior in Pisa. Having lost one son, his parents were reluctant to let him move away from home for four years while attending the Sapienza University of Rome, but in the end they acquiesced. The school provided free lodging for students, but candidates had to take a difficult entrance exam that included an essay. The given theme was specific characteristics of sounds. The seventeen-year-old Fermi chose to derive and solve the partial differential equation for a vibrating rod, applying Fourier analysis in the solution. The examiner, Professor Giuseppe Pitarelli from the Sapienza University of Rome, interviewed Fermi and concluded that his entry would have been commendable even for a doctoral degree. Fermi achieved first place in the classification of the entrance exam. During his years at the Schola Normale Superior, Fermi teamed up with a fellow student named Franco Rossetti with whom he would indulge in lighthearted pranks and who would later become Fermi's close friend and collaborator. In Pisa, Fermi was advised by the director of the physics laboratory, Luigi Puccianti, who acknowledged that there was little that he could teach Fermi, and frequently asked Fermi to teach him something instead. Fermi's knowledge of quantum physics reached such a high level that Puccianti asked him to organize seminars on the topic. During this time Fermi learned tensor calculus, a mathematical technique invented by Gregorio Ricci and Tullio Levi-Civita that was needed to demonstrate the principles of general relativity. Fermi initially chose mathematics as his major, but soon switched to physics. He remained largely self-taught, studying general relativity, quantum mechanics, and atomic physics. In September 1920, Fermi was admitted to the physics department. Since there were only three students in the department a euro Fermi, Rossetti, and Nullo Carrera a euro Puccianti let them freely use the laboratory for whatever purposes they chose. Fermi decided that they should research X-ray crystallography, and the three worked to produce a law photograph a euro an X-ray photograph of a crystal. During 1921, his third year at the university, Fermi published his first scientific works in the Italian journal Novo Cemento. The first was entitled On the Dynamics of a Rigid System of Electrical Charges in Translational Motion. A sign of things to come was that the mass was expressed as a tensor a euro a mathematical construct commonly used to describe something moving and changing in three-dimensional space. In classical mechanics, mass is a scalar quantity, but in relativity it changes with velocity. The second paper was On the Electrostatics of a Uniform Gravitational Field of Electromagnetic Charges and on the Weight of Electromagnetic Charges. Using general relativity, Fermi showed that a charge has a weight equal to Uc2, where U is the electrostatic energy of the system, and c is the speed of light. The first paper seemed to point out a contradiction between the electrodynamic theory and the relativistic one concerning the calculation of the electromagnetic masses, as the former predicted a value of 4 × 3 Uc2. Fermi addressed this the next year in a paper concerning a contradiction between electrodynamic and the relativistic theory of electromagnetic mass in which he showed that the apparent contradiction was a consequence of relativity. This paper was sufficiently well regarded that it was translated into German and published in the German scientific journal Physikalische Zeitschrift in 1922. That year, Fermi submitted his article on the phenomena occurring near a world line to the Italian journal Irrende Conti dell'Accademia dei Lincei. In this article he examined the principle of equivalence, and introduced the so-called Fermi coordinates. He proved that on a world line close to the timeline, space behaves as if it were a Euclidean space. Fermi submitted his thesis, A Theorem on Probability and Some of Its Applications, to the Scala Normale Superior in July 1922, and received his laurea at the unusually young age of 21. The thesis was on X-ray diffraction images. Theoretical physics was not yet considered a discipline in Italy, and the only thesis that would have been accepted was one on experimental physics. For this reason, Italian physicists were slow in embracing the new ideas like relativity coming from Germany. Since Fermi was quite at home in the lab doing experimental work, this did not pose insurmountable problems for him. While writing the appendix for the Italian edition of the book The Mathematical Theory of Relativity by August Kopff in 1923, Fermi was the first to point out that hidden inside the famous Einstein equation was an enormous amount of nuclear potential energy to be exploited. It does not seem possible, at least in the near future, he wrote, to find a way to release these dreadful amounts of energia euro, which is all to the good because the first effect of an explosion of such a dreadful amount of energy would be to smash into smithereens the physicist who had the misfortune to find a way to do it. Fermi decided to travel abroad, and spent a semester studying under Max Born at the University of Gare-Paragraf-Tingen, where he met Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan. Fermi then studied in Leiden with Paul Arenfest from September to December 1924 on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation obtained through the intercession of the mathematician Vito Volterra. Here Fermi met Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein, and became good friends with Samuel Goudsmit and Jan Tinbergen. From January 1925 to late 1926, Fermi taught mathematical physics and theoretical mechanics at the University of Florence, where he teamed up with Rossetti to conduct a series of experiments on the effects of magnetic fields on mercury vapour. He also participated in seminars at the Sapienza University of Rome, giving lectures on quantum mechanics and solid-state physics. While giving lectures of new quantum mechanics based on remarkable accuracy of predictions of Schreiber-Paragraf-Dinger equation, the Italian physicist would often say, it has no business to fit so well. After Wolfgang Pauli announced his exclusion principle in 1925, Fermi responded with a paper on the quantization of the perfect monoatomic gas, in which he applied the exclusion principle to an ideal gas. The paper was especially notable for Fermi's statistical formulation, which describes the distribution of particles in systems of many identical particles that obey the exclusion principle. This was independently developed soon after by the British physicist Paul Dirac, who also showed how it was related to the Boussinesq–Einstein statistics. Accordingly, it is now known as Fermi–Euro–Dirac statistics. Following Dirac, particles that obey the exclusion principle are today called fermions, while those that do not are called bosons. Professor in Rome, professorships in Italy were granted by competition for a vacant chair, the applicants being rated on their publications by a committee of professors. Fermi applied for a chair of mathematical physics at the University of Cagliari on Sardinia, but was narrowly passed over in favor of Giovanni Giorgi. In 1926, at the age of 24, he applied for a professorship at the Sapienza University of Rome. This was a new chair, one of the first three in theoretical physics in Italy, that had been created by the Minister of Education at the urging of Professor Orso Mario Corbino, who was the university's professor of experimental physics, the director of the Institute of Physics, and a member of Benito Mussolini's cabinet. Corbino, who also chaired the selection committee, hoped that the new chair would raise the standard and reputation of physics in Italy. The committee chose Fermi ahead of Enrico Persico and Aldo Pontremoli, and Corbino helped Fermi recruit his team, which was soon joined by notable students such as Eduardo Amaldi, Bruno Pontecorvo, Ettore Majorana and Emilio Segre, and by Franco Rossetti, whom Fermi had appointed as his assistant. They were soon nicknamed the Via Panisberna Boys after the street where the Institute of Physics was located. Fermi married Laura Capon, a science student at the university, on July 19, 1928. They had two children, Nella, born in January 1931, and Giulio, born in February 1936. On March 18, 1929, Fermi was appointed a member of the Royal Academy of Italy by Mussolini, and on April 27 he joined the Fascist Party. He later opposed fascism when the 1938 racial laws were promulgated by Mussolini in order to bring Italian fascism ideologically closer to German National Socialism. These laws threatened Laura, who was Jewish, and put many of Fermi's research assistants out of work. During their time in Rome, Fermi and his group made important contributions to many practical and theoretical aspects of physics. In 1928, he published his Introduction to Atomic Physics, which provided Italian university students with an up-to-date and accessible text. Fermi also conducted public lectures and wrote popular articles for scientists and teachers in order to spread knowledge of the new physics as widely as possible. Part of his teaching method was to gather his colleagues and graduate students together at the end of the day and go over a problem, often from his own research. A sign of success was that foreign students now began to come to Italy. The most notable of these was the German physicist Hans Beth, who came to Rome as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow, and collaborated with Fermi on a 1932 paper on the interaction between two electrons. At this time, physicists were puzzled by beta decay, in which an electron was emitted from the atomic nucleus. To satisfy the law of conservation of energy, Pauli postulated the existence of an invisible particle with no charge and little or no mass that was also emitted at the same time. Fermi took up this idea, which he developed in a tentative paper in 1933, and then a longer paper the next year that incorporated the postulated particle, which Fermi called a neutrino. His theory, later referred to as Fermi's interaction, and still later as the theory of the weak interaction, described one of the four fundamental forces of nature. The neutrino was detected after his death, and his interaction theory showed why it was so difficult to detect. When he submitted his paper to the British journal Nature, that journal's editor turned it down because it contained speculations which were too remote from physical reality to be of interest to readers. Thus Fermi saw the theory published in Italian and German before it was published in English. In the introduction to the 1968 English translation, physicist Frederick L. Wilson noted that Fermi's theory, aside from bolstering Pauli's proposal of the neutrino, has a special significance in the history of modern physics. One must remember that only the naturally occurring I-squared emitters were known at the time the theory was proposed. Later when positron decay was discovered, the process was easily incorporated within Fermi's original framework. On the basis of his theory, the capture of an orbital electron by a nucleus was predicted and eventually observed. With time much experimental data has accumulated. Although peculiarities have been observed many times in I-squared decay, Fermi's theory always has been equal to the challenge. The consequences of the Fermi theory are vast. For example, I-squared spectroscopy was established as a powerful tool for the study of nuclear structure. But perhaps the most influential aspect of this work of Fermi is that his particular form of the I-squared interaction established a pattern which has been appropriate for the study of other types of interactions. It was the first successful theory of the creation and annihilation of material particles. Previously, only photons had been known to be created and destroyed. In January 1934, Irénée Joliot-Curie and FRA copyrighted RIC Joliot announced that they had bombarded elements with alpha particles and induced radioactivity in them. By March, Fermi's assistant Giancarlo Wick had provided a theoretical explanation using Fermi's theory of beta decay. Fermi decided to switch to experimental physics, using the neutron, which James Chadwick had discovered in 1932. In March 1934, Fermi wanted to see if he could induce radioactivity with Rossetti's polonium-beryllium neutron source. Neutrons had no electric charge, and so would not be deflected by the positively charged nucleus. This meant that they needed much less energy to penetrate the nucleus than charged particles, and so would not require a particle accelerator, which the Viapanis-Berner boys did not have. Fermi had the idea to resort to replacing the polonium-beryllium neutron source with a radon-beryllium one, which he created by filling a glass bulb with beryllium powder, evacuating the air, and then adding 50 marci of radon gas, supplied by Giulio Sertrabacchi. This created a much stronger neutron source, the effectiveness of which declined with a 3.8-day half-life of radon. He knew that this source would also emit gamma rays, but, on the basis of his theory, he believed that this would not affect the results of the experiment. He started by bombarding platinum, an element with a high atomic number that was readily available, without success. He turned to aluminium, which emitted an alpha particle and produced sodium, which then decayed into magnesium by beta particle emission. He tried lead, without success, and then fluorine in the form of calcium fluoride, which emitted an alpha particle and produced nitrogen, decaying into oxygen by beta particle emission. In all, he induced radioactivity in 22 different elements. Fermi rapidly reported the discovery of neutron-induced radioactivity in the Italian journal La Ricerca Scientifica on 25 March 1934. The natural radioactivity of thorium and uranium made it hard to determine what was happening when these elements were bombarded with neutrons but, after correctly eliminating the presence of elements lighter than uranium but heavier than lead, Fermi concluded that they had created new elements, which he called hasperium and orsonium. The chemist Ida Lodac criticised this work, suggesting that some of the experiments could have produced lighter elements than lead rather than new, heavier elements. Her suggestion was not taken seriously at the time because her team had not carried out any experiments with uranium, and its claim to have discovered mesorium was disputed. At that time, fission was thought to be improbable if not impossible on theoretical grounds. While physicists expected elements with higher atomic numbers to form from neutron bombardment of lighter elements, nobody expected neutrons to have enough energy to split a heavier atom into two light element fragments in the manner that Lodac suggested. The viaduct painis burner boys also noticed some unexplained effects. The experiment seemed to work better on a wooden table than a marble tabletop. Fermi remembered that Joliot-Curie and Chadwick had noted that paraffin wax was effective at slowing neutrons, so he decided to try that. When neutrons were passed through paraffin wax, they induced a hundred times as much radioactivity in silver compared with when it was bombarded without the paraffin. Fermi guessed that this was due to the hydrogen atoms in the paraffin. Those in wood similarly explained the difference between the wooden and the marble tabletops. This was confirmed by repeating the effect with water. He concluded that collisions with hydrogen atoms slowed the neutrons. The lower the atomic number of the nucleus it collides with, the more energy a neutron loses per collision, and therefore the less collisions that are required to slow a neutron down by a given amount. Fermi realized that this induced more radioactivity because slow neutrons were more easily captured than fast ones. He developed a diffusion equation to describe this, which became known as the Fermi age equation. In 1938 Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of 37 for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons. After Fermi received the prize in Stockholm, he did not return home to Italy, but rather continued on to New York City along with his family, where they applied for permanent residency. The decision to move to America and become U.S. citizens was primarily a result of the racial laws in Italy. Manhattan Project Soon after Fermi's arrival in New York City on January 2, 1939, he was offered five different chairs, and chose to work at Columbia University, where he had already given summer lectures in 1936. He received the news that in December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons, which Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch correctly interpreted as the result of nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on January 13, 1939. The news of Meitner and Frisch's interpretation of Hahn and Strassmann's discovery crossed the Atlantic with Niels Bohr, who was to lecture at Princeton University. Isidor Isaac Rabi and Willis Lamb, two Columbia University physicists working at Princeton, found out about it and carried it back to Columbia. Rabi said he told Enrico Fermi, but Fermi later gave the credit to Lamb. I remember very vividly the first month, January, 1939, that I started working at the Pupin Laboratories because things began happening very fast. In that period, Niels Bohr was on a lecture engagement at the Princeton University and I remember one afternoon Willis Lamb came back very excited and said that Bohr had leaked out great news. The great news that had leaked out was the discovery of fission and at least the outline of its interpretation. Then, somewhat later that same month, there was a meeting in Washington where the possible importance of the newly discovered phenomenon of fission was first discussed in semi-jocular earnest as a possible source of nuclear power. Nodak was proven right after all. Fermi had dismissed the possibility of fission on the basis of his calculations, but he had not taken into account the binding energy that would appear when a nuclide with an odd number of neutrons absorbed an extra neutron. For Fermi, the news came as a profound embarrassment, as the transuranic elements that he had partly been awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering had not been transuranic elements at all, but fission products. He added a footnote to this effect to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The scientists at Columbia decided that they should try to detect the energy released in the nuclear fission of uranium when bombarded by neutrons. On January 25, 1939, Fermi was a member of the experimental team at Columbia University which conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States, in the basement of Pupin Hall. The other members of the team were Herbert L. Anderson, Eugene T. Booth, John R. Dunning, G. Norris Glasso, and Francis G. Slack. The next day, the fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics began in Washington, D.C. under the joint auspices of the George Washington University and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. There, the news on nuclear fission was spread even further, which fostered many more experimental demonstrations. Few weeks after French scientists Hans von Hoban, Lew Kowalski and FRA copyrighted RIC Joliot-Curie, Fermi and Anderson demonstrated that uranium bombarded by neutrons emitted more neutrons than it absorbed. Li3Si2Rd obtained 200 kg of uranium oxide from Canadian radium producer Eldorado Gold Mines Ltd., allowing Fermi and Anderson to conduct experiments with fission on a much larger scale. Fermi and Si3Si2Rd collaborated on a design of a device to achieve a self-sustaining nuclear reaction a euro-a nuclear reactor. Due to the rate of absorption of neutrons by the hydrogen in water, it was unlikely that a self-sustaining reaction could be achieved with natural uranium and water as a neutron moderator. Fermi suggested, based on his work with neutrons, that uranium oxide could be used in the form of blocks, with graphite as a moderator instead of water. This would reduce the rate of capture of the neutrons, and make it theoretically possible to achieve a self-sustaining chain reaction. Si3Si2Rd then came up with what proved to be a workable design, a pile of uranium oxide blocks surrounded by graphite bricks. Si3Si2Rd, Anderson and Fermi jointly published a paper on neutron production in Uranium but their work habits and personalities were different, and Fermi had trouble working with Si3Si2Rd. Fermi was the first to warn military leaders about the potential impact of nuclear energy, giving a lecture on the subject at the Navy Department on 18 March 1939. The response fell short of what he had hoped for, although the Navy agreed to provide $1,500 towards further research at Columbia. In August 1939, three Hungarian physicists Si3Si2Rd, Eugène Wiener and Edward Teller Auro prepared the Einstein Si3Si2Rd letter, which they persuaded Einstein to sign, warning President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the probability that Germany was planning to build an atomic bomb. Because of the German invasion of Poland on September 1, it was October before they could arrange for the letter to be personally delivered. Roosevelt was sufficiently concerned that he assemble the S-I Uranium Committee to investigate the matter. The S-I Uranium Committee provided money for Fermi to buy graphite, and he built a pile of graphite bricks on the seventh floor of the Pupin Laboratory. By August 1941, he had six tons of uranium oxide and 30 tons of graphite, which he used to build a still larger pile in the Schema Horn Hall at Columbia. When the S-I Uranium Committee next met on December 18, 1941, there was a heightened sense of urgency in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor and a subsequent United States entry into World War II. While most of the effort thus far had been directed at three different processes for producing enriched uranium, S-I Uranium Committee member Arthur Compton determined that plutonium was a feasible alternative which could be mass-produced in nuclear reactors by the end of 1944. To achieve this, he decided to concentrate the plutonium work at the University of Chicago. Fermi reluctantly moved, and his team became part of the new Metallurgical Laboratory there. Given the number of unknown factors involved in creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction, it seemed inadvisable to do so in a densely populated area. Compton arranged with Colonel Kenneth Nichols, the head of the Army's Manhattan district, for land to be acquired in the Argonne Forest about 20 miles from Chicago, and Stone and Webster was contracted to develop the site. This work was halted by an industrial dispute. Fermi then persuaded Compton that he could build a reactor in the squash court under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. Construction of the pile began on November 6, 1942, and Chicago Pile 1 went critical on December 2. The shape of the pile was intended to be roughly spherical, but as work proceeded Fermi calculated that criticality could be achieved without finishing the entire pile as planned. This experiment was a landmark in the quest for energy, and it was typical of Fermi's approach. Every step was carefully planned, every calculation meticulously done. When the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction was achieved, Compton made a coded phone call to James B. Conant, the chairman of the National Defense Research Committee. I picked up the phone and called Conant. He was reached at the president's office at Harvard University. Jim, I said, you'll be interested to know that the Italian Navigator has just landed in the New World. Then, half apologetically, because I had led the SL Committee to believe that it would be another week or more before the pile could be completed, I added, the Earth was not as large as he had estimated, and he arrived at the New World sooner than he had expected. Is that so, was Conant's excited response. Were the natives friendly? Everyone landed safe and happy. To continue the research where it would not pose a public health hazard, the reactor was disassembled and moved to the Argonne site, where Fermi directed research on reactors and other fundamental sciences, reveling in the myriad of research opportunities that the reactor provided by an abundance of neutrons. The laboratory soon branched out from physics and engineering into using the reactor for biological and medical research. Initially, Argonne was run by Fermi as part of the University of Chicago, but it became a separate entity with Fermi as its director in May 1944. Just in case something went wrong, Fermi was on hand at Oak Ridge to witness the air-cooled X-10 graphite reactor go critical on November 4, 1943. The technicians woke him early so that he could see it happen. Getting X-10 operational was another milestone in the plutonium project. It provided data on reactor design, training for DuPont staff in reactor operation, and produced the first small quantities of reactor-bred plutonium. Fermi became an American citizen in July 1944, the earliest date the law allowed. In September 1944, Fermi inserted the first uranium fuel slug into the B Reactor at the Hanford site, the production reactor designed to breed plutonium in large quantities. Like X-10, it had been designed by Fermi's team at the Metallurgical Laboratory, and built by DuPont, but it was much larger, and was water-cooled. Over the next few days, 838 tubes were loaded, and the reactor went critical. Shortly after midnight on September 27, the operators began to withdraw the control rods to initiate production. At first all appeared to be well, but around 0300, the power levels started to drop and by 0630 the reactor had shut down completely. The army in DuPont turned to Fermi's team for answers. The cooling water was investigated to see if there was a leak or contamination. The next day the reactor suddenly started up again, only to shut down once more a few hours later. The problem was traced to neutron poisoning from xenon-135, a fission product with a half-life of 9.2 hours. Fortunately, DuPont had deviated from the Metallurgical Laboratory's original design in which the reactor had 1,500 tubes arranged in a circle, and had added an additional 504 tubes to fill in the corners. The scientists had originally considered this over-engineering a waste of time and money, but Fermi realized that by loading all 2,004 tubes, the reactor could reach the required power level and efficiently produce plutonium. In mid-1944, Robert Oppenheimer persuaded Fermi to join his Project Y in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Arriving in September, Fermi was appointed an associate director of the laboratory, with broad responsibility for nuclear and theoretical physics, and was placed in charge of F-Division, which was named after him. F-Division consisted of four branches, the F-1 Super and General Theory Underteller, which was responsible for the development of a thermonuclear superbomb. The F-2 Water Boiler under L.D.P. King, which looked after the water boiler research reactor. F-3 Super Experimentation under Egon Bratcher. And the F-4 Fission Studies under Anderson. Fermi observed the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945, and conducted an experiment dropping strips of paper to estimate the bomb's yield. He simply measured how far they were blown by the explosion using his paces, and came up with the figure of 10 kilotons of TNT. The actual yield was about 18.6 kilotons. Along with Oppenheimer, Compton and Ernest Lawrence, Fermi was part of the scientific panel that advised the Interim Committee on Target Selection. The panel agreed with the committee that atomic bombs be used without warning against an industrial target. Like others at the Los Alamos Laboratory, Fermi found out about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the public address system in the technical area. Fermi did not believe that atomic bombs would scare people into not starting wars, nor did he think that the time was ripe for world government. He therefore did not join the Association of Los Alamos Scientists. Post-war work, Fermi became a professor at the University of Chicago on July 1, 1945, although he did not depart the Los Alamos Laboratory with his family until December 31, 1945. The Metallurgical Laboratory became the Argonne National Laboratory on July 1, 1946, the first of the national laboratories established by the Manhattan Project. The short distance between Chicago and Argonne allowed Fermi to work at both places. At Argonne he continued experimental physics, investigating neutron scattering with Leona Marshall. He also discussed theoretical physics with Maria Mayer, helping her develop insights into spinor-euro orbit coupling that would lead to her receiving the Nobel Prize. The Manhattan Project was replaced by Atomic Energy Commission on January 1, 1947. Fermi served on the AEC General Advisory Committee, an influential scientific committee chaired by Robert Oppenheimer. He also liked to spend a few weeks of each year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he collaborated with Nicholas Metropolis, and with John von Neumann on Rayleigh–Eurotaylor instability, the science of what occurs at the border between two fluids of different densities. Following the detonation of the first Soviet fission bomb in August 1949, Fermi, along with Isidore Rabi, wrote a strongly worded report for the committee, opposing the development of a hydrogen bomb on moral and technical grounds. Nonetheless, Fermi continued to participate in work on the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos as a consultant. Along with Stanislaw Ulam, he calculated that not only would the amount of tritium needed for Teller's model of a thermonuclear weapon be prohibitive, but a fusion reaction could still not be assured to propagate even with this large quantity of tritium. Fermi was among the scientists who testified on Oppenheimer's behalf at the Oppenheimer security hearing in 1954 that resulted in denial of Oppenheimer's security clearance. In his later years, Fermi continued teaching at the University of Chicago. His Ph.D. students in the postwar period included Owen Chamberlain, Geoffrey Chu, Jerome Friedman, Marvin Goldberger, Sang Tao Lee, Arthur Rosenfeld and Sam Treiman. Jack Steinberger was a graduate student. Fermi conducted important research in particle physics, especially related to pions and muons. He made the first predictions of pion-nucleon resonance, relying on statistical methods, since he reasoned that exact answers were not required when the theory was wrong anyway. In a paper co-authored with Chen Ning Yang, he speculated that pions might actually be composite particles. The idea was elaborated by Shoichi Sakata. It has since been supplanted by the quark model, in which the pion is made up of quarks, which completed Fermi's model, and vindicated his approach. Fermi wrote a paper on the origin of cosmic radiation in which he proposed that cosmic rays arose through material being accelerated by magnetic fields in interstellar space, which led to a difference of opinion with Teller. Fermi examined the issue surrounding magnetic fields in the arms of a spiral galaxy. He mused about what is now referred to as the Fermi paradox the contradiction between the presumed probability of the existence of extraterrestrial life and the fact that contact has not been made. Toward the end of his life, Fermi questioned his faith in society at large to make wise choices about nuclear technology. He said. Some of you may ask, what is the good of working so hard merely to collect a few facts which will bring no pleasure except to a few long-haired professors who love to collect such things and will be of no use to anybody because only few specialists at best will be able to understand them. In answer to such question, s, I may venture a fairly safe prediction. History of science and technology has consistently taught us that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or later led to technical and industrial applications that have revolutionized our way of life. It seems to me improbable that this effort to get at the structure of matter should be an exception to this rule. What is less certain, and what we all fervently hope, is that man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers that he acquires over nature. Fermi died at age 53 of stomach cancer in his home in Chicago, and was interred at Oakwood Cemetery. A commemorative plaque remembers him in the Basilica of Santa Cruz, Florence, a church also known as Temple of Italian Glories, for the many burials of artists, scientists and prominent figures in Italian history. Impact and legacy. Legacy. Fermi received numerous awards in recognition of his achievements, including the Matucci Medal in 1926, the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938, the Hughes Medal in 1942, the Franklin Medal in 1947, and the Rumford Prize in 1953. He was awarded the Medal for Merit in 1946 for his contribution to the Manhattan Project. In 1999, Time named Fermi on its list of the top 100 persons of the 20th century. Fermi was widely regarded as an unusual case of a 20th-century physicist who excelled both theoretically and experimentally. The historian of physics, C. P. Snow, wrote that if Fermi had been born a few years earlier, one could well imagine him discovering Rutherford's atomic nucleus, and then developing Bohr's theory of the hydrogen atom. If this sounds like hyperbole, anything about Fermi is likely to sound like hyperbole. Fermi was known as an inspiring teacher, and was noted for his attention to detail, simplicity, and careful preparation of his lectures. Later, his lecture notes were transcribed into books. His papers and notebooks are today in the University of Chicago. Victor Weizkopf noted how Fermi always managed to find the simplest and most direct approach, with the minimum of complication and sophistication. Fermi's ability and success stemmed as much from his appraisal of the art of the possible, as from his innate skill and intelligence. He disliked complicated theories, and while he had great mathematical ability, he would never use it when the job could be done much more simply. He was famous for getting quick and accurate answers to problems that would stump other people. Later on, his method of getting approximate and quick answers through back-of-the-envelope calculations became informally known as the Fermi method, and is widely taught. Fermi was fond of pointing out that Alessandro Volta, working in his laboratory, could have had no idea where the study of electricity would lead. Fermi is generally remembered for his work on nuclear power and nuclear weapons, especially the creation of the first nuclear reactor, and the development of the first atomic and hydrogen bombs. His scientific work has stood the test of time. This includes his theory of beta decay, his work with non-linear systems, his discovery of the effects of slow neutrons, his study of pion-nucleon collisions, and his Fermi–Eurodirac statistics. His speculation that a pion was not a fundamental particle pointed the way towards the study of quarks and leptons. Things named after Fermi Many things have been named in Fermi's honor. These include the Fermilab Particle Accelerator and Physics Lab in Batavia, Illinois, which was renamed in his honor in 1974, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which was named after him in 2008, in recognition of his work on cosmic rays. Three nuclear reactor installations have been named after him, the Fermi I and Fermi II nuclear power plants in Newport, Michigan, the Enrico Fermi nuclear power plant at Trino Viacellos in Italy, and the ERA-1 Enrico Fermi research reactor in Argentina. A synthetic element isolated from the debris of the 1952 IV Mike nuclear test was named Fermium, in honor of Fermi's contributions to the scientific community. It follows the element einsteinium, which was discovered with it. Since 1956, the United States Atomic Energy Commission has named its highest honor, the Fermi Award, after him. Recipients of the award include well-known scientists like Otto Hahn, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller and Hans Beth. Bibliography, Introduzione alla Fisica Atomica. Bologna, N. Zaniscelli. 1928. OCLCA 9653646a, Fisica Pari Lucei. Bologna, N. Zaniscelli. 1929. OCLCA 9653646a, Molecule E. Crystalli. Bologna, N. Zaniscelli. 1934. OCLCA 19918218a, Thermodynamics. New York, Prentice Hall. 1937. OCLCA 2379038a, Fisica Pari Istituti Tecnici. Bologna, N. Zaniscelli. 1938a, Fisica Pari Lucei Scientifici. Bologna, N. Zaniscelli. 1938a, Elementary Particles. New Haven, Yale University Press. 1951. OCLCA 362513a, for a full list of his papers See p. 75a Euro 78 in, Patents, U.S. Patent 2206634, Process for the Production of Radioactive Substances, issued July 1940a, U.S. Patent 2836554, Air-cooled Neutronic Reactor, issued April 1950a, U.S. Patent 2524379, Newton Velocity Selector, issued October 1950a, U.S. Patent 2852461, Neutronic Reactor, issued September 1953a, U.S. Patent 2708656, Neutronic Reactor, issued May 1955a, U.S. Patent 2768134, Testing Material in a Neutronic Reactor, issued October 1956a, U.S. Patent 2780595, Test Exponential Pile, issued February 1957a, U.S. Patent 2798847, Method of... Operating a Neutronic Reactor, issued July 1957a, U.S. Patent 2807581, Neutronic Reactor, issued September 1957a, U.S. Patent 2807727, Neutronic U.S. Patent 2837477, Method of... Sustaining a Neutronic Chain Reacting System, issued November 1957a, U.S. Patent 2837477, Chain Reacting System, issued June 1958a, U.S. Patent 2931762, Neutronic Reactor, issued April 1960a, U.S. Patent 2969307, Method of... Testing Thermal Neutron Fissionable Material for Purity, issued January 1961a, see also Italians in Chicago, notes. References. External links The First Reactor, 40th Anniversary Commemorative Edition, United States Department of Energy. Nobel Prize Page for the 1938 Physics Prize The Story of the First Pile Enrico Fermi's Case File at the Franklin Institute with information about his contributions to theoretical and experimental physics. Remembering Enrico Fermi. Session J1. APS April Meeting 2010, American Physical Society. Time 100, Enrico Fermi by Richard Rhoades March 29, 1999, The Woodrow Wilson Center's Nuclear Proliferation International History Project or NPIHP is a global network of individuals and institutions engaged in the study of international nuclear history through archival documents, oral history interviews and other empirical sources.