Thread by @dschwa8059

Tomorrow will be the 120th birthday of Enrico Fermi, an extraordinary physicist whose impact can still be felt throughout the field, and in many aspects of our daily lives. Born in Rome, he was a child prodigy who had mastered

all of classical physics by age 18. He taught himself relativity and quantum theory at university in Pisa, since none of his professors knew enough to teach these subjects. He went on to a lectureship at Florence, where he developed what are now known as Fermi-Dirac statistics,

which describe the behavior of ensembles of spin 1/2 particles. He then took a position as professor of theoretical physics in Rome, where he worked from 1927 till 1938. In Rome he developed his theory of beta decay, and led experiments bombarding elements with neutrons,

creating artificial radioactivity and - without realizing it - splitting the uranium atom. In 1938 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, and decided to leave Rome to settle in America with his Jewish wife, Laura. At Columbia in Jan 1939, he teamed up with Leo Szilard in a

series of experiments which resulted, in December 1942, in the first controlled, sustained nuclear fission reaction at the University of Chicago. He went on to participate in the final year of work at Los Alamos in the development of the first atomic weapons. Returning

Chicago after the war, he continued making contributions in high energy particle physics, neutron physics, astro-physics, and computational physics. He died in November 1954 at age 53, of stomach cancer.

I have only listed his major contributions. A thorough and complete listing would take a very long time.

He was an intensely competitive individual who loved the outdoors and enjoyed being with colleagues who were also good friends. He had a gregarious personality and loved joked and pranks, but was also a very private man who rarely let even close friends know his innermost

thoughts. He was an indifferent family man - his wife Laura adored him but put up with years of neglect as Fermi devoted his life to physics - and his children found him distant and cold. But among his colleagues he inspired unusual affection and devotion. In the aftermath of his

early death, colleagues put together a two-record set of reminiscences and tributes, called "To Fermi With Love." He was perhaps the last great universal physicist, equally at ease in theory and experiment, and fluent in every aspect of physics.

[Shameless advertisement here] There are a number of good biographies of the great man, but one you might enjoy is my own, "The Last Man Who Knew Everything" published by Basic Books in 2017.