Fermium

   , FERMION

   Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), "the father of the atomic bomb," showed such intelligence and quickness of mind that he gained admission, in 1918, to the Scuola Normale in Pisa, a school for the intellectual elite of Italy. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Pisa in 1922. After spending some time abroad, he was appointed to a professorship of physics at the University of Rome in 1926. Such a high position was unheard of in Italy for someone only twenty-five years old. But Fermi had published some thirty substantial papers and had the support of O. M. Corbino, Italy's most distinguished physicist at that time. Fermi's reputation attracted the brightest of the younger Italian physicists.

   Fermi's period in Rome (3926-4938) turned out to be remarkably productive in both the theoretical and the experimental fields. When Fermi used uranium of atomic weight 92 as the target of slow neutron bombardment, he obtained radioactive substances he could not identify. Fermi was unaware that he was on the edge of a world-shaking discovery, that he had actually split the atom. This development later was to have a profound impact in the field of nuclear energy. He addressed himself to the task of investigating the properties of a large number of newly created radioactive isotopes. For this work, he was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize for physics. But the growing anti-Semitism alarmed him. He and his Jewish wife departed Italy for the United States, where he undertook the task of creating a controlled self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago. He worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and was present at the first atomic blast in July l945.

   Fermi, together with the members of his family, became an American citizen. He was a professor of physics at Columbia University in 1939 before moving on to the University of Chicago in 1942. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission gave him a special $25,000 award in 1954 for his work on the bomb.

   Fermi's name is applied to several discoveries: to a unit of length in nuclear physics, fermi; to a group of subatomic particles, fermioris; and to the element fermium (atomic number 100), named the year after Fermi's death.