The ‘Pope’ must answer to God

Enrico Fermi may not be a name as familiar as Einstein, Feynman or Hawking, but he was one of the greatest figures of 20th-century physics, with a reputation for infallibility. In Rome, pioneering atomic science under Mussolini, he was nicknamed ‘the Pope’. Escaping to America where he created the world’s first nuclear reactor, he was dubbed ‘the last man who knew everything’. Yet he was no Renaissance man: he knew everything about physics, and didn’t care much about anything else. It is testimony to David N. Schwartz’s excellence as a biographer that he can reveal the workaholic Fermi to have been such a fascinatingly complex figure.

He was, we are told, a gifted teacher and natural leader. Fermi generously let younger colleagues publish joint work without his name, so that he would not overshadow them. His insistence on personally carrying radioactive samples for his team may have led to the stomach cancer that killed him in 1954 at the age of only 53. Few physicists get memorialised as he was, in a double album of recorded reminiscences by colleagues, To Fermi with Love.

Yet beneath the charm there may have been a troubled inner life. As a child, Fermi idolised his older and apparently more gifted brother, who died in his teens, causing their mother to retreat into incurable depression. Schwartz’s speculation that this random catastrophe helped inspire Fermi’s later interest in statistics seems far-fetched, but the event does give an insight into a recurring pattern, which Schwartz highlights.

As a student, Fermi became part of a group who engaged in childish, sometimes nasty pranks. His next gang consisted of the fellow researchers who called him ‘Pope’, and who themselves adopted ecclesiastical nicknames of lower rank. The American Manhattan Project was Fermi’s biggest and most powerful gang, though he seems to have harboured doubts about the enterprise, at times almost willing it to fail.