Word: fermi
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...Attack. Among those who have attacked the book since publication are former AEC Chairman Gordon Dean and many leading atomic scientists, including Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe. The comment of Dr. I. I. Rabi, present chairman of the AEC's General Advisory Committee, is a sample: "A sophomoric science-fiction tale, to be taken seriously only by a psychiatrist...
Neutrons with Goldfish. There was much to appreciate. Fermi emerges from the book as alte'rnately serious and gay, abstracted but practical. He is modest about major accomplishments (his dis coveries in physics), vain about minor ones (his physical endurance in mountain climbing). His wife plainly worships him, but laughs at him just enough to keep him human. She tells how one of his crucial experiments on slow neutrons was carried on in a fountain among unsuspecting gold fish. She giggles gently at his troubles with unruly shirtfronts. She pokes friendly fun at his brilliant friends (who called Fermi...
...Italy of Fermi's youth was Mus solini's Italy. At first Fascism was merely silly, but as it grew, Fermi began to con sider leaving Italy forever. He made up his mind when Hitler's anti-Semitism flooded over the Alps. The Nobel Prize made escape easy. In 1938 Fermi took his Jewish wife and his two children to Stockholm to receive the prize. After the ceremony, they continued...
Retreat into Mystery. Two weeks after Fermi reached New York, he heard about the famous telegram telling Niels Bohr that uranium fission had been discovered in Germany. Fermi knew what it meant: that enormous energy might be extracted from the uranium atom. Soon he was part of the vast U.S. attempt to release that energy in an atomic bomb...
...Laura Fermi knew nothing of his work -only that her famous husband was receding day by day into deeper mystery. He made long trips to Chicago for no announced reason. The friends whom he brought to her house were as silent about their work as he. When the Fermis moved to Chicago, all that she knew was that he worked at a "metallurgical laboratory" (where no metallurgists worked). She asked no questions. She brought up her children, kept her overworked husband comfortable, laughed at him affectionately when laughter was in order (once he buried a "treasure" of currency...