Gino Segrè

The Pope of Physics, is an outstanding cradle to grave full life biography of Enrico Fermi. This is a wonderfully easy read which tries to take the reader on Enrico’s life journey of a child of a poor family who went on to become in 1938 The Nobel Prize Winner for physics.

A genius among geniuses Fermi bridged the gap between between experimental and theoretical physicists by being both. He brought Italy for a time back among leaders of the world wide physics community.

Fermi escaped Italy with his wife Laura who was racially Jewish before it fully embraced the Anti Semitic lead of Nazi Germany and emigrated to the United States where along with Ernest Rutherford, I.I. Rabi, Edward Teller, Luis Alvarez and Robert Oppenheimer to name just a few he helped in the successful completion of the Manhattan Project.

From the self sustaining pile at the University of Chicago, to the distant Oakridge Uranium Plant in Tennessee to Plutonium Reactor in Hanford Washington to end up at Los Alamos and present for the Trinity Test. Fermi was one of the intellectual fireballs that led the project to completion of the atomic bomb, but who sadly died young of stomach cancer November 28th, 1954.

A fantastic quick 5 star read on a familiar name to many of the persons who I knew little about.… (mais)