The Last Man Who Knew Everything

by David N. Schwartz

  Patiently I learned the mathematical instruments needed to follow each passage. Faithfully I went over Enrico’s explanations, trying to keep my eyes from the window and the inviting meadow that I saw through it, until I had digested my lesson and made it material of my own brain. Thus we arrived at the end of the long demonstration: the velocity of light and of electromagnetic waves were expressed by the same number.

  “Therefore,” Enrico said, “light is nothing else but electromagnetic waves.”

  “How can you say so?”

  “We have just demonstrated it.”

  “I don’t think so. You proved only that through some mathematical abstractions you can obtain two equal numbers. But now you talk about the equality of two things. You can’t do that. Besides, two equal things need not be the same thing.”

  “I would not be persuaded,” she concludes, “and that was the end of my training in physics.”

  BACK IN ROME, THE MATERIAL FRUITS OF FERMI’S MARRIAGE TO Laura became quickly apparent. Laura’s parents settled a dowry with which the couple bought a relatively spacious apartment in Rome at Via Belluno 28, a short walk from her childhood home. At the penthouse level of a mustard-colored six-story building, the apartment was airy and gave the newlyweds an expansive view of the attractive neighborhood.

  Laura also could afford domestic help, something her parents had enjoyed and to which she had become accustomed. By the time of their move to the United States, she managed a staff of three maids, who helped take care of her two children and maintained the household to her standards. By all accounts she was a good cook but left the rest of the household chores to her staff.

  Fermi, in the midst of building up one of the most important centers for physics research and education in the world, had but one domestic responsibility when they started out. He was, by Italian tradition, the person to furnish the family home. He provided the money, but showed no interest in actually purchasing the furnishings, a task he left to Laura and her mother. His only instructions were that the tables and chairs should have straight legs, in keeping with his penchant for simplicity. Laura reports that she and her mother decided on pieces with some curves, but these were sufficiently gentle not to bother her demanding husband, who furnished his own study in the apartment with extreme simplicity—a chair, a large table that served as a desk, and a small bookcase. Laura was not the only one to comment with surprise that her husband had few books by his side as he worked. Fermi never amassed much of a collection of physics texts, shunning all but the most essential reference books in favor of working out material on his own.

  He settled in to a routine that rarely if ever varied. He would rise at five thirty in the morning, don a blue flannel bathrobe, disappear into his study for two hours, work at whatever physics problem he was trying to solve, emerge at exactly seven thirty—he never used an alarm clock, but had a precise sense of time embedded in his brain—and prepare for the day. After a quick breakfast, he would leave the apartment at exactly eight o’clock. He would return from Via Panisperna at one in the afternoon for what the Italians call “dinner” and spend the next two hours reading or playing tennis until three, when he would promptly return to Via Panisperna to pick up where he had left off, and then return home at eight in the evening for “supper.” By nine thirty, he would be dozing off and never went to bed later than ten o’clock. At five thirty the next morning, the routine started all over again. It would take some major development at Via Panisperna to make him vary this rigid routine. In at least two cases we know of—the discovery of slow neutrons in October 1934 and the operation of the first atomic reactor in Chicago in December 1942—he refused to work through lunch and broke off experiments so he and his colleagues could enjoy a civilized meal.

  All who knew him observed this habitual regularity, leading Segrè, in an unkind moment, to describe Fermi as someone with the personality of an Italian bureaucrat. Segrè may have been right, but organizing his daily life as he did merely reflected the tidy layout of Fermi’s thinking. Though such orderly habits might have been mistaken for a lack of creativity or imagination by some colleagues, it is difficult to picture Fermi living any other way, or achieving what he did in any other fashion.

  LAURA FERMI WAS NOT QUITE TELLING THE TRUTH WHEN SHE stated, in her description of her honeymoon encounter with Maxwell’s equations, that this was the end of her learning about physics. Throughout her life she generally gave her husband a wide berth when it came to work and usually did not interest herself in the various projects he was working on. She was fond of describing some of his more important contributions as “obscure.” Though she must have understood the importance of the work her husband was involved with during the Manhattan Project, she never asked questions about the work and only discovered at the end of the war just how central was her husband’s role in it. However, there was one scientific project on which the two of them truly collaborated.

  When they were married, Fermi was determined to supplement his somewhat meager academic income. Eventually, he would find a variety of sources that would keep him and his family quite comfortable by any standard, but in 1928 he decided that the most effective way to earn more income was to write a physics textbook for liceo students. He invited Laura to join him as a collaborator. He would dictate and she would transcribe and prepare clean copy. Given her level of intelligence and her refusal to be intimidated by her illustrious husband, however, it should surprise no one that she ventured criticism when she felt it was appropriate. Points that seemed obvious to Fermi did not always seem obvious to her, and she told him so. A back-and-forth would ensue, the result of which was, presumably, of great benefit to the students who would use the text.

  It took several years for the two-volume set to make it from Fermi’s mind through Laura’s pen and typewriter to published volumes. Much of the work took place during weekends and summer holidays at her uncle’s Tuscan villa, where they took advantage of the quiet solitude to make progress. When Fisica came out, it was adopted nationwide as the main physics textbook for high school students. After the war, Edoardo Amaldi assumed responsibility for preparing revisions.

  Laura found that she loved writing so much that she and her close friend Ginestra Amaldi collaborated on another book. Published in 1936 and aimed at a general audience, Alchimia del Tempo Nostro (Alchemy of Our Time) told the story of modern physics, including the discovery of radioactivity and the work of their respective husbands in furthering the understanding of the atomic nucleus. Its success was helped by the fame of their husbands and the fulsome praise it received in the preface by none other than Orso Mario Corbino.

  THE WORLD OF PHYSICS IS INTERNATIONAL, AND ANY PHYSICIST WHO wishes to keep abreast of the field needs to travel the globe to conferences, colloquia, summer schools, laboratories, and universities—indeed, to any place where physicists discuss and analyze ongoing developments. It is true even today, but in Fermi’s time before the advent of the Internet and instantaneous electronic communication, it was not only important—it was vital.

  Prior to moving permanently to the United States, Fermi traveled to the United States at least five times, for summer sessions at Ann Arbor, Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, and elsewhere. These were opportunities for him to develop a strong network of like-minded scientists eager to share new discoveries and new ideas. He also grew to love the United States, its wide-open spaces, its gregarious people, its optimism, and its openness, all in contrast to the tradition-bound culture of his native Italy. Only on the first trip did he bring Laura along with him. In following years, Laura usually stayed home during his summer travels, partly because she had young children to care for but also because she did not like the United States, at least not at first.

  As the summer of 1930 approached, Fermi was invited to attend the international summer symposium for theoretical physics at the University of Michigan. His Dutch friends Sam Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck came to Ann Arbor in the late 1920s and took over the coordinati
on of the symposium, bringing the first European speakers to the campus and using summers to establish a major center in theoretical physics. The effort worked and by 1941, when the war ended the project, many of the world’s greatest physicists had lectured there, including Heisenberg, Pauli, Bohr, Lawrence, and Wigner. The two Dutchmen invited Fermi to the 1930 session, the first of five he would attend. Fermi chose to present a major paper interpreting Dirac’s quantum electrodynamics in a strikingly clear, accessible fashion.

  At that time, Fermi’s command of English was tenuous. Over the years he had learned just enough to be able to read papers published by American and English scientists, but he realized he would need some extra education, so he did what to him seemed the natural thing: he borrowed ten Jack London novels from the library and read them with an Italian-English dictionary by his side. For her part, Laura had learned English in her formal education and decided she knew it well enough not to review it before the trip.

  Not surprisingly, they both found out just how little English they really knew the moment they arrived in New York, on the first leg of their voyage to Ann Arbor.

  The language impediment was quite upsetting to Laura, but more upsetting was the impression that New York City made on her. The overwhelming size of the city; its verticality; its noise; the hodgepodge of nationalities, races, languages, cultures; the grime and filth on the streets; the summer thunder-and-lightning storms; even the difficulty of getting wine (the Fermis were never big drinkers, but America was in the grip of Prohibition, and the only way they could get a little wine to drink was at speakeasies)—all of these provoked a profoundly negative impression. She was born and raised in genteel circumstances in one of the world’s oldest, most beautiful cities. She may have been an urban person, but she was certainly not yet cosmopolitan and was blind to New York’s gregarious culture and noisy charm.

  Ann Arbor was an entirely different experience. The classic American campus of the university, already one of the finest research institutions in the country, was set in the middle of a charming, quiet, Midwestern town, adjacent to extensive parks and forests. At the summer school she found Europeans she enjoyed being around—both Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck had young wives, and though they were in the process of being “Americanized,” as Laura put it, they were still European enough for Laura to relate to them easily and comfortably. The two Dutchmen, for their part, couldn’t help but have some fun at Fermi’s expense. They promised to sit in the back of the lecture hall when he spoke, take careful notes, and correct his grammar and pronunciation as the summer progressed. What they didn’t tell him, though, was that he mispronounced a few words in such a wonderful way they decided they wouldn’t correct him.

  Fermi loved his time there and returned several times before the outbreak of the war. Laura, though, still found herself out of place. She brooded on what she considered defects of American culture, its “primeval” instincts, exemplified for her in the American tradition of the bounty hunter. She continued:

  There seemed to be a total incomprehension of some instinctive human feelings in the Americans’ insistence on separation of the sexes, asking husbands to stag dinner parties, leaving poor young wives to mope at home, or planning wives lunches, where the same poor wives were to find their way among strangers speaking an idiom strange in words and meanings, without the much-needed support of those pillars of strength, their husbands.

  It wasn’t an antipathy to travel or to foreign cultures. In 1934 the couple spent the summer in Argentina and Brazil, where Fermi gave lectures to standing-room-only crowds. She loved it there. There was something specific about American culture that did not appeal to her. She would change, of course. The decision to stay in the United States after the war may have been her husband’s, but the decision to remain in Chicago after his death in 1954, until her own death in 1978, was hers alone and shows that over time she felt at home.

  In the meantime, however, her attitude about America may have been a source of strain within the marriage. Fermi was an enthusiast of American culture. He wasn’t imbued with high European culture in the way so many of his northern European colleagues were. He had read classical literature as a liceo student, but his liberal education ended there. From the time he entered university, it was all physics, all the time. Many of his American colleagues had absorbed high culture, most famously J. Robert Oppenheimer, but it was possible to gain the respect of the American intellectual elite without ostentatious erudition. He enjoyed the openness, the relative lack of hierarchy and respect for tradition. In science he may not have been particularly inclined toward democracy—as his future colleague Luis Alvarez once put it, “There is no democracy in physics. We can’t say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi”—but the lack of deference to seniority appealed to him.

  In addition, as emphasized by Italian scholar Giovanni Battimelli, the United States was rich, far richer than Italy, and funds were available for projects that seemed impossible to get off the ground in Italy. Fermi would visit Berkeley, with its magnificent cyclotron accelerator, and feel more than a pang of envy. He always had confidence in his ability to lead the pack, even in the underfunded Italian scientific community. Yet he also knew that his research would be easier to pursue at any of a half dozen US universities.

  Finally, he loved the outdoors and, though Italy had much to offer, he was deeply attracted to the wide open spaces of the United States.

  It is clear that he wanted to move to the United States and any number of universities would have welcomed him onto their faculties. He broached the topic with Laura on numerous occasions—presumably every time he returned from a trip there without her—but she resisted. She found little to attract her in the United States, and she loved her native Rome. She knew it intimately, and her friends were there. Why should she move? True, the fascist regime was repugnant, but the regime never meddled with her husband’s work; indeed, it celebrated that work. Nor did it meddle with her, at least not until 1938. Her father was a distinguished military officer and was not an opponent of the regime. The anti-Semitic laws that Mussolini would pass under pressure from Hitler were well in the future, and cultural or political anti-Semitism was virtually unknown in Italy, although Mussolini’s 1929 Lateran Accords, regularizing the regime’s relationship with the Vatican, may have gradually served to cool the government’s relationship with Italy’s Jewish population. Certainly, what anti-Semitism there was did not yet extend to Laura’s set or to the Jewish members of the distinguished intellectual circles in which her husband traveled. Every time Enrico would bring up the subject of leaving Rome for the United States, Laura resisted. No, their place was in Rome.

  A DAUGHTER WAS BORN ON JANUARY 31, 1931. THEY NAMED HER Nella. Laura had plenty of help around the house to ease the burdens of new motherhood, but her husband was of little use. Laura may have envisioned the life of a professional woman for herself without the obligations of family, but she readily assumed the more traditional model of mother and housekeeper. Her husband was, however, awkward around the newborn. Laura confirms that he had no idea how to relate to this new person in his life, someone with whom he could not speak or engage in any of his favorite pursuits. At times he referred to her as the bestiolina, the little beast. Nella physically resembled Enrico more than she did Laura, and Laura, with a misplaced faith in genetics, assumed that Nella would inherit Enrico’s intellectual abilities, as well. She could not hide her disappointment that Nella seemed to be a normal, curious, happy child, with little inclination toward mathematics and science.

  Little brother Giulio was born just five years later, on February 16, 1936, at the height of Mussolini’s ill-fated adventure into Ethiopia. Laura was perhaps a bit kinder to him, having had half a decade of experience raising Nella. She describes him as a strong, loud baby, but there is little evidence that Enrico paid any more attention to him than he had to Nella, even though the boy’s name was chosen to honor the memory of Enrico’s dead brother.<
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  Neither Enrico nor Laura was an ideal parent. In her memoir Laura virtually concedes this in the self-deprecating title of the section describing the children’s arrival, “How Not to Raise Children.” There is, however, nothing to suggest that they were particularly bad parents, given the standards of the time. Mother and father both lived a life of the mind, and neither was naturally inclined toward the art of parenting. They were lucky in that they had the resources to hire help as the babies grew into young children. Much suggests they provided well for the children during these years and beyond, although their emotional and psychological distance, and Enrico’s fame after the war, eventually took a toll on the siblings.

  FERMI’S FAMILY LIFE WAS GOVERNED BY ROUTINE: HIS OWN DAILY schedule, the annual summer holidays, the regular trips to the Tuscan country home that Laura’s aunt and uncle owned, the winter sojourns in the mountains for skiing, and the academic cycle around which Fermi’s professional life revolved. As Fermi became more of a celebrity, as he won recognition from the physics community and the fascist regime under which he reluctantly labored, there were undoubtedly more distractions, but his was mainly a well-ordered, bourgeois lifestyle, with a marked absence of domestic or psychological drama. Any perturbations during this period were confined to Fermi’s professional life, to his efforts to build a world-class physics research institute, and to his major discoveries.

  FIGURE 6.3. Ski lodge lunch. From left: Antonio Rostagni, Gleb Wataghin, Persico, Fermi, and Maria Rostagni. Gressoney La Trinité, 1932. Courtesy of Amaldi Archives, Department of Physics, University of Rome, La Sapienza.