60 Fun Facts About Enrico Fermi

On which date did Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 achieve the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction?

Compton phoned Harvard in code: 'the Italian navigator has just landed in the new world'.

In which year did Fermi win the Nobel Prize in Physics, at the age of 37?

He collected it in Stockholm and sailed straight on to New York rather than return to Fascist Italy.

Fermi's Nobel citation mentioned nuclear reactions brought about by what?

He had found that neutrons slowed by paraffin or water were far more easily captured by nuclei.

In which city was Fermi born in 1901?

His father was a division head in the Ministry of Railways and his mother a schoolteacher.

Fermi's father Alberto was a division head in which government ministry?

It was through a colleague of his father's, Adolfo Amidei, that the boy found his first mentor.

The 900-page physics book the young Fermi found at a Rome market was written in which language?

The Jesuit author's 1840 text covered mechanics, astronomy, optics and acoustics.

Fermi's mentor Adolfo Amidei first tested the boy with a book on which branch of mathematics?

He returned it two months later having solved every problem, and Amidei declared him a prodigy.

Fermi attended the Scuola Normale Superiore in which Italian city?

He came first in the entrance exam with an essay on the characteristics of sound.

In his entrance essay, the 17-year-old Fermi used Fourier analysis on a vibrating what?

The examiner declared afterwards that he would become an outstanding physicist.

Which fellow student became Fermi's prank partner at Pisa and lifelong collaborator?

The two were later joined in Rome by Segre, Amaldi, Majorana and Pontecorvo.

At what unusually young age did Fermi receive his doctorate in 1922?

The thesis had to be experimental, on X-ray diffraction, because theoretical physics was not yet a discipline in Italy.

In 1923 Fermi first pointed out that which equation concealed enormous nuclear energy?

He added that releasing it would probably 'smash into smithereens the physicist who had the misfortune to find a way to do it'.

After a semester with Max Born in Gottingen, Fermi studied under Paul Ehrenfest in which Dutch city?

There he met Lorentz and Einstein and befriended Samuel Goudsmit and the future economist Jan Tinbergen.

Particles that obey the Pauli exclusion principle are named after Fermi. What are they called?

Dirac derived the same statistics independently, hence Fermi-Dirac statistics.

Which Mussolini cabinet member engineered a new chair of theoretical physics in Rome for Fermi in 1926?

He also chaired the selection committee and helped Fermi recruit his team.

Fermi's Rome group were nicknamed the 'Via Panisperna boys'. What was Via Panisperna?

The team included Amaldi, Pontecorvo, Majorana and Segre.

Weeks after Mussolini named him to the Royal Academy in 1929, Fermi joined which movement?

He turned against Fascism when the 1938 racial laws threatened his Jewish wife.

What name did Fermi give to the uncharged particle Pauli had postulated to explain beta decay?

It was not detected until after his death; his own theory explained why it was so elusive.

The journal Nature rejected Fermi's beta-decay paper as containing speculations that were what?

The theory appeared in Italian and German before it was ever published in English.

Which German physicist came to Rome on a Rockefeller fellowship and co-wrote a 1932 paper with Fermi?

Foreign students arriving in Rome were a sign that Corbino's plan to raise Italian physics was working.

In how many different elements had Fermi induced radioactivity by March 1934?

He started with platinum and failed, then succeeded with aluminium and fluorine.

The Rome neutron experiments mysteriously worked better on a table made of what?

The hydrogen in the wood was slowing the neutrons, the clue that led to the paraffin discovery.

Passing neutrons through paraffin wax increased the radioactivity induced in silver by roughly how much?

Fermi guessed the hydrogen atoms in the wax were slowing the neutrons, and confirmed it with water.

Fermi concluded that neutrons were slowed by collisions with atoms of which element?

The lighter the nucleus struck, the more energy a neutron loses per collision.

Fermi named the two 'new elements' he believed he had made from uranium ausenium and what?

They turned out to be fission products, an embarrassment he footnoted in his Nobel speech.

Which chemist suggested in 1934 that Fermi's uranium experiments made lighter, not heavier, elements?

Nobody took the idea seriously; five years later fission proved her right.

After collecting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm in December 1938, where did Fermi go instead of home?

The family applied for permanent residency; five universities offered him jobs on arrival.

Italy's 1938 racial laws drove Fermi abroad because his wife Laura was what?

The laws also put many of his research assistants out of work.

Which university did Fermi join on arriving in America in January 1939?

He had already given summer lectures there in 1936.

Fermi credited which colleague with rushing in to say Bohr had 'leaked out great news' about fission?

Rabi always said he had told Fermi himself.

Fermi's supposed transuranic elements, part of his Nobel citation, turned out to be what?

He had dismissed fission because he had not accounted for the binding energy released when a nuclide with an odd number of neutrons absorbs one more.

Fermi proposed using which material as the neutron moderator in a reactor, instead of water?

Szilard turned the idea into a workable design: uranium oxide blocks interspersed with graphite bricks.

After Fermi's March 1939 lecture on nuclear energy, how much did the Navy give for research?

It fell well short of what he had hoped for.

Where on the University of Chicago campus was Chicago Pile-1 built?

The planned site in the Argonne Woods was held up by an industrial dispute, so Fermi talked Compton into using Stagg Field.

Arthur Compton's coded call said 'the Italian navigator has just landed in the' what?

James Conant played along: 'Were the natives friendly?' 'Everyone landed safe and happy.'

The Hanford B Reactor's mysterious shutdown in 1944 was traced to neutron poisoning by which isotope?

Fermi and John Wheeler both deduced it; loading all 2,004 tubes overcame the problem.

In 1943 Fermi raised with Oppenheimer the idea of using radioactive byproducts to contaminate what?

Oppenheimer would only proceed if enough could be poisoned to kill half a million people; Teller suggested strontium-90.

At Los Alamos, Fermi headed a division named after him. Which letter?

One of its branches, under Edward Teller, investigated the thermonuclear 'Super'.

How did Fermi estimate the yield of the Trinity test?

He paced off how far they were blown and got ten kilotons; the true figure was about 18.6.

Fermi's back-of-the-envelope estimate of the Trinity yield was how many kilotons?

The actual yield was around 18.6 kilotons.

After the 1949 Soviet nuclear test, Fermi and Isidor Rabi wrote a report opposing what?

They objected on both moral and technical grounds, though Fermi kept consulting on the project.

At whose 1954 security hearing did Fermi testify for the defence?

The hearing ended with the loss of the security clearance.

The 'Fermi paradox' concerns the apparent absence of what?

If aliens are probable, he mused, why has nobody got in touch?

The element fermium was isolated from the debris of which 1952 nuclear test?

That makes Fermi one of only 16 scientists with an element named after them.

Fermi's self-assurance and infallible pronouncements earned him what nickname among colleagues?

He once took the bread knife from a colleague's wife because his own method of slicing was superior.

Fermi died in Chicago in 1954, aged 53, of what?

He had suspected that working near the pile was dangerous; two of his assistants also died of cancer.

Emilio Segre said Fermi 'was the last person who knew all of' what?

He called him 'the last universal physicist in the tradition of great men of the 19th century'.

Fermi confessed that his interest in music was restricted to what?

He had very few interests outside physics, though he played tennis 'with considerable ferocity'.

Which of these was one of Fermi's postwar PhD students at Chicago?

Owen Chamberlain, Jerome Friedman and Jack Steinberger also passed through his group.

Fermi helped Maria Mayer develop insights into what, which led to her Nobel Prize?

The nuclear shell model followed.

Fermi proposed that cosmic rays arise when material is accelerated by what?

The idea led to a disagreement with Teller and, decades later, to a space telescope bearing his name.

In a paper with Chen Ning Yang, Fermi speculated that pions might be what?

The quark model later completed the idea and vindicated his approach.

In which year did Fermi become an American citizen, the earliest date the law allowed?

Two months later he personally inserted the first uranium fuel slug into the B Reactor at Hanford, the plant built to breed plutonium in bulk.

What were the names of Fermi's two children, born in 1931 and 1936?

He had married Laura Capon, a science student at the university, in July 1928.

The Fermilab accelerator complex in Batavia, Illinois, was renamed in Fermi's honour in which year?

NASA followed in 2008 by naming its Gamma-ray Space Telescope after him, a nod to his work on cosmic rays.

Fermi is one of how many scientists to have a chemical element named after them?

Fermium joins names like einsteinium, curium and mendelevium on the periodic table.

Which of these honours did Fermi receive first, in 1926?

The Hughes Medal came in 1942, the Franklin Medal in 1947 and the Rumford Prize in 1953, plus a Medal for Merit in 1946 for his Manhattan Project work.

Which Florentine basilica, the 'Temple of Italian Glories', carries a plaque commemorating Fermi?

The basilica holds the tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli, so the plaque places Fermi among Italy's most celebrated figures.

What professorship title did Fermi take up at the University of Chicago on 1 July 1945?

He did not actually leave Los Alamos with his family until the last day of 1945, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences that same year.

Which Oak Ridge pile went critical on 4 November 1943, with technicians waking Fermi early to watch?

The air-cooled reactor produced the first small quantities of reactor-bred plutonium and trained DuPont's staff for the far larger Hanford plant.