Book review: The Fermi Age

A review of Fermi Remembered, James W. Cronin, editor; The University of Chicago Press; August 2004; 296 pp.

Fermi age, Fermi constant, Fermi-Dirac gas, Fermi energy, Fermi hole, fermion, Fermi selection rules, Fermi statistics, fermium…

“No serious student can enter physics without finding the name Fermi everywhere.” These are the words of James W. Cronin — editor of Fermi Remembered, a collection of essays recently published by the University of Chicago Press.

Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, 1901. To commemorate the centennial of his birth in 2001, the University of Chicago sponsored a symposium emphasizing 1945-54, the postwar years when he was a physics professor there. Speakers included Fermi's faculty colleagues, students, and friends. Such a stellar group who knew Fermi will likely never be assembled again. Fermi Remembered is the permanent record of that historic occasion, along with some new material added by Cronin.

Cronin himself was a graduate student in physics during the Fermi years at Chicago and is now professor emeritus and a Nobel Prize laureate. Reflecting on the preparation of this volume, Cronin said, “We all knew Fermi and his civility towards all he interacted with. I put the material together to get a more complete picture of the man. What may stand out is his deep concern that civilization would be able to handle the menace of nuclear weapons without disaster.”

Contributors of personal reminiscences to Fermi Remembered include seven Nobel laureates in physics, as well as a former Argonne Associate Division Director -- Roger Hildebrand. Along with essays on Fermi's life and scientific legacy are historic photographs of Fermi with famous colleagues. Also reproduced are some manually typed letters and handwritten notes that give a heightened sense of Fermi's life and times.

Regarding Fermi's work day, the reader learns that it routinely began at 7:30 am and ended no later than 6:00 pm. Within those hours Fermi inspired many physics students by his clear explanations of complex problems, wrote a steady stream of important scientific papers, helped establish the University of Chicago as the place for the study of high-energy physics, and -- as infrequently as possible -- served on committees. After hours he liked to swim, ski and throw parties in which his one strict rule was “No shop talk.”

According to Cronin, Fermi has a special connection to Argonne because his “development of the self-sustained fission reaction is what created Argonne. And after the war he and colleagues made great use of the neutron beams from the lab's reactors while waiting for the Chicago cyclotron.”

Fermi died from stomach cancer in 1954. He faced death with the same courage and dignity he displayed during the course of his too-short life. In a biographical essay that opens Fermi Remembered, Emilio Segrè summed up his scientific life in the following words: “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.” Anyone curious about why Segrè's compliment rings true will want to read this excellent collection. — Joseph E. Harmon