New Internet-First book sheds light on Fermi and his work in the U.S.

Fermi

By Bill Steele

Was Enrico Fermi the greatest scientist of all time? Jay Orear, Cornell professor emeritus of physics and one-time graduate student under Fermi, says "yes," and he has set out to throw more light on the life of the legendary physicist by authoring a new book, Enrico Fermi: The Master Scientist.

Orear's book will be one of the first published by a new venture at Cornell known as Internet-First University Press. The full text of the book will be available on the Internet at http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/62, but readers can purchase a professionally printed and bound version through Cornell Business Services at digital@cornell.edu.

The book gathers material from a symposium on Fermi that Orear organized at Cornell in 1991 and from several reunions of Fermi students, along with Orear's own recollections and those of other students and co-workers and Fermi's wife, Laura.

"I hope to show that if these various firsthand contacts come to common conclusions about Fermi's characteristics and history, then it is likely that those conclusions are correct," Orear says in his introduction.

There are two other biographies of Fermi -- one by Emilio Segré, another student of Fermi's, and one by Laura Fermi. These focus on Fermi's life and work in Italy, Orear says, while the new book emphasizes his work in the United States. The book is meant to be accessible and useful to both scientists and nonscientists, Orear adds.

Enrico Fermi, born in 1901 in Rome, had a distinguished career in European academic circles before emigrating to the United States in 1938 to escape the Mussolini regime. He developed Fermi statistics, the mathematical laws governing a class of subatomic particles that obey the Pauli exclusion principle, named fermions in his honor. He received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1938 for the discovery that neutrons could alter the atomic nucleus to create artificial radioactive elements. This work eventually led him to the idea that neutrons released during atomic fission could in turn induce fission in other atoms, producing a chain reaction. On Dec. 2, 1942, under the bleachers of a Chicago stadium, he demonstrated the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. After working on the Manhattan Project during World War II, he went on to research in high-energy physics and the origin of cosmic rays. He died in 1954.

How you decide who is the "greatest scientist" of course depends on the criteria you use, Orear admits, but he claims he has set up criteria that are objective. Among others, he points out that not only did Fermi win a Nobel Prize, but 12 of Fermi's students have won Nobels. So far.

Orear graduated from the University of Chicago in 1943, and after service in the navy during World War II returned to earn his Ph.D. there in 1953, working under Fermi. He taught for four years at Columbia University before joining the Cornell faculty as associate professor in 1958. He became a full professor in 1964.

While pursuing a long and distinguished career in high-energy physics, he also became involved in the politics of science. In the 1960s he led a movement to persuade Cornell to refuse to do classified research. Later, as chair of the Federation of American Scientists, he worked to persuade other universities to adopt similar policies and to dissuade the government from classifying basic research in physics. He published a textbook, Fundamental Physics, and co-authored, with two other former students of Fermi's, Nuclear Physics, based on the course Fermi taught in Chicago.