Enrico Fermi

1840

Written in Latin by Jesuit Father , a professor at the Collegio Romano, it presented mathematics, classical mechanics, astronomy, optics, and acoustics as they were understood at the time of its 1840 publication.

1901

Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 - 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1.

Fermi tutored or directly influenced no fewer than 8 young researchers who went on to win Nobel Prizes. == Early life == Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Italy, on 29 September 1901.

1915

Giulio died during an operation on a throat abscess in 1915 and Maria died in an airplane crash near Milan in 1959. At a local market Fermi found a physics book, the 900-page Elementorum physicae mathematicae.

1918

A colleague of Fermi's father gave him books on physics and mathematics which he assimilated quickly. == Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa == Fermi graduated from high school in July 1918, and at Amidei's urging applied to the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

1920

He remained largely self-taught, studying general relativity, quantum mechanics, and atomic physics. In September 1920, Fermi was admitted to the Physics department.

1921

During 1921, his third year at the university, Fermi published his first scientific works in the Italian journal Nuovo Cimento.

1922

This paper was sufficiently well-regarded that it was translated into German and published in the German scientific journal Physikalische Zeitschrift in 1922.

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" (Un teorema di calcolo delle probabilità ed alcune sue applicazioni), to the Scuola Normale Superiore in July 1922, and received his laurea at the unusually young age of 20.

1923

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 Fundamentals of Einstein 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.

1924

Fermi then studied in Leiden with Paul Ehrenfest from September to December 1924 on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation obtained through the intercession of the mathematician Vito Volterra.

1925

After Wolfgang Pauli formulated 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–Dirac statistics.

From January 1925 to late 1926, Fermi taught mathematical physics and theoretical mechanics at the University of Florence, where he teamed up with Rasetti to conduct a series of experiments on the effects of magnetic fields on mercury vapor.

While giving lectures on the new quantum mechanics based on the remarkable accuracy of predictions of the Schrödinger equation, Fermi 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" (Sulla quantizzazione del gas perfetto monoatomico), in which he applied the exclusion principle to an ideal gas.

1926

From January 1925 to late 1926, Fermi taught mathematical physics and theoretical mechanics at the University of Florence, where he teamed up with Rasetti to conduct a series of experiments on the effects of magnetic fields on mercury vapor.

In 1926, at the age of 24, he applied for a professorship at the Sapienza University of Rome.

1928

They soon nicknamed the "Via Panisperna boys" after the street where the Institute of Physics was located. Fermi married Laura Capon, a science student at the university, on 19 July 1928.

In 1928, he published his Introduction to Atomic Physics (Introduzione alla fisica atomica), which provided Italian university students with an up-to-date and accessible text.

1929

On 18 March 1929, Fermi was appointed a member of the Royal Academy of Italy by Mussolini, and on 27 April he joined the Fascist Party.

1931

They had two children: Nella, born in January 1931, and Giulio, born in February 1936.

1932

The most notable of these was the German physicist Hans Bethe, who came to Rome as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow, and collaborated with Fermi on a 1932 paper "On the Interaction between Two Electrons" (Über die Wechselwirkung von Zwei Elektronen). At this time, physicists were puzzled by beta decay, in which an electron was emitted from the atomic nucleus.

Fermi decided to switch to experimental physics, using the neutron, which James Chadwick had discovered in 1932.

1933

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".

1934

Wilson noted that: In January 1934, Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot announced that they had bombarded elements with alpha particles and induced radioactivity in them.

In March 1934, Fermi wanted to see if he could induce radioactivity with Rasetti's polonium-beryllium neutron source.

1936

They had two children: Nella, born in January 1931, and Giulio, born in February 1936.

1938

Fermi was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment and for the discovery of transuranium elements.

Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery, the new elements were later revealed to be nuclear fission products. Fermi left Italy in 1938 to escape new Italian racial laws that affected his Jewish wife, Laura Capon.

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.

1942

Fermi led the team that designed and built Chicago Pile-1, which went critical on 2 December 1942, demonstrating the first human-created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

1943

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.

1945

He was present at the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, where he used his Fermi method to estimate the bomb's yield. After the war, Fermi served under J.

1949

After 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.

1954

Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 - 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1.

He was among the scientists who testified on Oppenheimer's behalf at the 1954 hearing that resulted in the denial of Oppenheimer's security clearance.

1959

Giulio died during an operation on a throat abscess in 1915 and Maria died in an airplane crash near Milan in 1959. At a local market Fermi found a physics book, the 900-page Elementorum physicae mathematicae.

1968

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 Fred L.




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