Enrico Fermi: a guiding light in a troubled century (Q949455)

The author starts with an outline of main achievements in physics in the first decades of the 20th century. He focuses his view on the new vision of the physical world which was established in the period from 1925 till 1935 and was connected with the emergence of quantum mechanics and general relativity. The main part of the article was formed by a short but thorough sketch of the life and work of Enrico Fermi. The author distinguishes several phases in Fermi's life. The first one describes the years after his graduation with his research stays in Göttingen and Leiden and the creation of a statistical theory of a gas of particles which obey Pauli's exclusion principle. It is followed by the years in Rome at the physical department where he discovered the weak interactions which where partly characterized as Fermi's most important contribution to the progress of theoretical physics. The third phase includes Fermi's emigration into the USA, the work on the atomic bomb and his achievements in the postwar decade, the experimental analysis of nucleon excitement levels, an original theory of the origins of cosmic radiations as well as an initial analysis of nuclear mesons. Finally, the author looks at Fermi's contributions to the reconstruction of Italian physics after World War II und gives some comments on the present shortage of energy resources in Italy.