On 10 November 1938, on the eve of the Second World War with its tremendous burden of mourning, Italy wins the Nobel Prize in Physics. Enrico Fermi wins “For his demonstration of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by irradiation with neutrons and for the correlated discovery of nuclear reactions caused by slow neutrons“. The discovery had taken place just four years earlier, a very short time for the award of the Nobel; and in 1938 Enrico Fermi was a very young scientist, he was 37 years old. He was born in Rome, the son of a State Railways official and a teacher; it is said that as a child he recited Orlando Furioso from memory but his passion was mathematics; after school “he bought university textbooks used on the stalls in Campo dei Fiori, and often corrected their errors”; at the age of 25 he won the competition for the first chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome, it was the beginning of that formidable working group that went down in history as “the boys of via Panisperna”, from the headquarters of the University Institute, where today there is a prestigious research center that bears his name.
The Nobel victory came at a dramatic moment for Italy and very difficult for Fermi himself. The sciencepertutti site tells it well in the column “Life as a genius”: “In the summer of 1938 the anti-Semitic campaign of the fascist regime began to take on worrying tones: on July 14 a group of university professors signed the” Manifesto of the race “, on July 2 racial laws were enacted in September. These touched Fermi very closely since his wife, Laura Capon, was Jewish. It was at this point that Enrico made the decision to leave that Italy: his sense of justice and honesty rebelled against the fatal degeneration of Italian civilization. Having to act cautiously to avoid possible reprisals by the regime, such as the withdrawal of his passport, Enrico replied to US universities that had already made proposals to him, writing that the reasons for his previous refusals had changed. Finally Enrico chose Columbia University in New York.
“On November 10, 1938, Fermi received the announcement that he would be awarded the Nobel Prize” for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements and for the related discovery of nuclear reactions induced by slow neutrons. ” He therefore decided to go to Stockholm to collect the award and not return to Via Panisperna, but from there to leave directly for the United States. Emilio Segrè, who in 1936 had become a professor of Experimental Physics in Palermo, was visiting Berkeley in November 1938 when he received the news that he had been suspended from teaching and he too remained in the United States. Rasetti allegedly emigrated to Canada in the summer of 1939.
“Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm and on December 24th he embarked with his wife and two children for New York. He did not learn until his arrival in the United States the sensational news published in those days by the German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann who had obtained the fission of uranium by irradiating it with neutrons ”.
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