The book, titled Fermi Remembered, has just been published by the University of Chicago Press with contributions from seven Nobel Prize winners and many other scientists who studied under or worked with Fermi at the University of Chicago from 1946 until his death in 1954.
Albert Einstein's relativity theory and the quantum mechanics developed by Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger are often cited as milestones in 20th-century physics. But for sheer breadth of achievement, Fermi left a unique signature on modern physics.
"He gave to science all he had and with him disappeared the last universal physicist in the tradition of the great men of the 19th century, when it was still possible for a single person to reach the highest summits, both in theory and experiment, and to dominate all fields of physics," wrote the late Nobel laureate Emilio Segré of Fermi in 1962.
Although not a biography, the book contains reminiscences of Fermi from 25 scientists who knew him, as well as material from his research notebooks, correspondence, speech outlines and teaching.
Among Fermi's early accomplishments was to apply quantum mechanics, which explains the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles, to the physics of solids and gases, Cronin said. In the 1920s he built on quantum theory by formulating concepts called Fermi energy and, with Paul Dirac, Fermi-Dirac statistics. These concepts later became vital to the development of semiconductors and other electronic devices.
Fermi went on to earn the Nobel Prize in 1938 for his discovery of new radioactive elements produced by the addition of neutrons to the cores of other atoms, and for the discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slowly moving neutrons. He also directed construction of the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago during World War II as part of the effort to develop the atomic bomb. But he turned his attention to an entirely new topic after the war.
While researching the book, Cronin discovered a 1945 letter from Fermi outlining his vision for the newly formed research institute that now bears his name at the University of Chicago. "That was to do high-energy physics, not nuclear physics, not following up what he had done with the bomb," Cronin said. "He was looking far, far ahead of that."
Fermi's papers also reveal a man of humanity as well as science, Cronin said. In 1945 Fermi wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes expressing his concern over the fate and repatriation of Italian Jews deported to Germany during the war. In 1952 he co-signed another letter to Secretary of State Dean Acheson vouching for the integrity of chemist Linus Pauling, who had been denied a passport for travel to England. Many other letters show his continuing worries about the control of nuclear weapons.
The reminiscences convey a sense of Fermi's personality. For example, Harold Agnew, who witnessed the initiation of the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942, told the story of Fermi's wife attempting to buy a General Electric dishwasher. This was after the war-appliances were scarce-and there was a waiting list of several months. Agnew suggested that Fermi take advantage of his professional relationship with the president of GE to get a dishwater immediately. But Fermi declined, saying that wouldn't be fair. "This was classic Fermi," Agnew wrote.
In the book's last chapter, Cronin analyzes a forward-looking talk Fermi gave in January 1954 as the retiring president of the American Physical Society. Fermi's outlines and slides for the talk survive today in the Special Collections of the University of Chicago Library.
In his talk Fermi undertook a difficult task-to predict how the power of particle accelerators would grow over the next 40 years. His chart began with the first low-powered accelerator in 1930, and topped out in 1994 with what Cronin dubbed "the Globatron," an accelerator that girdled the Earth at the equator. Fermi was wrong about the size and cost of the Globatron, but its projected energy has already been achieved because of technological advances.
Unfortunately, stomach cancer cut Fermi's career short in 1954, just as the growing power of particle accelerators ushered in a golden age of discovery. Cronin thus ends his book wistfully: "One wonders what his contributions might have been."
For more information about Fermi Remembered, see http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/16342.ctl.