ROMA – All the roads of the Nobel Prize (for physics) lead to Rome. In particular, they lead to an alley that goes up and down between Santa Maria Maggiore and the Trajan’s Markets. Why also Giorgio Parisi after all, he is a nephew of those “Boys of Via Panisperna” who have now entered the collective imagination. The building at number 90a at the end of the 1920s housed the Institute of Physics and became a Nobel forge. In 1926 the 25 year old Enrico Fermi he obtained the first Italian chair of theoretical physics and surrounded himself with even younger talents: Franco Rasetti, Emilio Segrè, Edoardo Amaldi, Bruno Pontecorvo, in addition to the chemist Oscar D’Agostino. There is no physics department that does not display the black and white photo of that group of scientists in shirt sleeves today. Because it is there that the excellence of the Italian school of modern physics originates, leading up to the Nobel Prize of Parisi.
The Italian scientist Giorgio Parisi wins the Nobel Prize for physics: “There is nothing more fascinating than putting order in chaos”
by Elena Dusi
The discoveries of that group of genes
Fermi was awarded the prize in 1938, for having discovered, with his “boys”, slow neutrons and nuclear fission (actually understood only a few months later). In 1959 it was the turn of Emilio Segrè for the discovery of the antiproton. And there are those who are convinced that another of the boys of Via Panisperna would have won a Nobel, if only he had not estranged himself from that group, from that photo and from the whole world: Ettore Majorana, who died under mysterious circumstances in March 1938 .
The diaspora and the birth of the National Institute
Among those young physicists, there are those who do not win the Nobel or disappear: on the contrary, they decide to stay in Italy, even when the racial laws and the Second World War lead the group to the diaspora: Fermi and Segrè in the USA, Rasetti in Canada , Pontecorvo in Russia. Amaldi stays in Italy and rebuilds national physics on the rubble. One of his creatures, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn), has just celebrated its seventieth birthday: Amaldi imagines it as the research center that must continue the studies of the boys of Via Panisperna. Over the years the first particle accelerators would have been built, in the Infn laboratories of Frascati, and the National Laboratories of Gran Sasso, dug in the heart of the Abruzzo mountains. But there is also Amaldi’s decisive touch in the birth of the largest high-energy laboratory in the world: CERN in Geneva.
Rubbia’s recognition from the Cern tunnel
It is precisely from the underground tunnels excavated on the border between Switzerland and France that a new Nobel Prize for Italian physics arrives in 1984: Carlo Rubbia wins it for having discovered two arctic particles of the electroweak force, one of the four fundamental interactions of nature, together with gravitation, electromagnetism and strong nuclear force. Cern is still the setting for an “indirectly” Italian Nobel. In 2012 two parallel experiments reveal the passage of the Higgs boson: the two teams are leading Guido Tonelli e Fabiola Gianotti. The following year the Nobel Prize will go to the theoretical physicists who in the 1960s had hypothesized the existence of the ghost particle: Peter Higgs e Francois Englert. Gianotti becomes the first woman to be appointed director general of CERN and the first person to be reconfirmed for a second term. Before her, Amaldi, Rubbia e Luciano Maiani: 5 out of 16 mandates, confirming how much Italian physics is internationally appreciated. Excellence of which one of the greatest exponents was Nicola Cabibbo, teacher of Parisi and president of the Infn from 1985 to 1993.
Physicist Giorgio Parisi: “The Nobel? I hope so. But science has lost value in our age “
by Elena Dusi
Gravitational waves
But the latest great Nobel discovery to which Italian physicists made a fundamental contribution can also be traced back to Amaldi: gravitational waves. It was thanks to him that, starting from the seventies, a small patrol of Infn researchers specialized in hunting the vibrations of space-time predicted by Einstein: decades later, in the countryside of Siena, Virgo, the laser interferometer, would be born. collects data in symbiosis with the two American laboratories Virgo. For this reason, dozens of Italian physicists have signed the publications that in 2017 earned the Nobel Prize Kip Thorne, Barry e Rainer Weiss. Now it’s Giorgio Parisi’s turn: Via Panisperna has brought him to Stockholm too.
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