A Brilliant Darkness

In my early twenties, when I was still an apprentice scientist, I regularly worked as a scientific secretary at the Ettore Majorana Center in Sicily. This was always at the height of summer, when a brutal sun scorches the land, when you can’t help but fall in love with the exuberant beauty of Sicily, a splendor full of superlatives, be it in the landscape, the people, or the food: Beautiful is never “bello” in Sicily, it’s “bellíssimo”; dangerous is never “pericoloso,” it’s “pericolosíssimo.”

It was hardly surprising that Ettore’s story came up during so many nighttime chats under starry skies: After all, we worked at a center named after him. For our efforts, we would be handsomely rewarded—in cash—by Il Centro Ettore Majorana. That bottle of wine, we wouldn’t be paying for it: The center would settle the matter gracefully. Just as it took care of restaurant meals, nightclub fees, even the beach umbrellas at the nearby lido. If you’re on the right side in Sicily, you don’t offer payment: It might cause grave offense. And you certainly wouldn’t want that.¹

So Ettore was with us, at least in spirit, and I wasn’t surprised to hear that he was not only a talented physicist but a Sicilian, born in the town of Catania. He’d been a nuclear physicist in Enrico Fermi’s famous research group, the “Via Panisperna Boys,” a whiz kid who could outdo even Fermi at the hardest calculations. In fact, Fermi compared Ettore to Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei on a scale on which he considered himself second class—and on which he embarrassingly forgot to include Albert Einstein in the first rank.

However, this is not the end of the story. In fact, it’s not even the beginning. Nowadays, Ettore is best known for something else: his final stunt. Without it, no one would want to know about his life. He’d be yet another victim of the myth that scientists are rational and emotionless—not real human beings. He’d be known for his theories about the neutrino and his contributions to nuclear physics and quantum mechanics, but nothing more.

On the night of March 26, 1938, when Ettore was thirty-one years old, he boarded a ship in Palermo, Sicily, and was never seen again. He left behind a series of suicide notes and was known to have been depressed for at least five years; but what prevents the case from being closed is that his body was never recovered, and over the next few decades, he was allegedly sighted on numerous occasions. He also took with him the equivalent of $70,000, as well as his passport. It’s hard to deny him human status after that.

Over the years, many theories have been proposed to explain what happened to him. Some claim he joined a monastery in Calabria; others that he may have run away to Argentina; still others say (or, rather, whisper) that he might have got into trouble with the Mafia. Conspiracy theorists consider him kidnapped by another political power eager for his nuclear knowledge. The lunatic fringe prefers him abducted by aliens, or perhaps still in flight in the extra dimensions. The fact is that no one really knows.

But in all seriousness, Ettore’s story still fascinated me the next morning—and has fascinated me ever since. The more I found out about him, the more relevant I found the issues raised by the story of his life. Over time, I became interested in more than just what happened to him; I became hooked on the question, what drove him to disappear? As my career progressed and I felt more acutely the many conflicts affecting scientists, the more I understood Ettore. Back in 1991, I was a raving idiot, too happy to be knowledgeable, too keen to be true. My feelings about Ettore grew with me as I matured and started to question the sanity of scientists myself. Until I began referring to him by his first name.

Ettore Majorana was born in Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily, on August 5, 1906, at 8:15 pm. His early days were those of a child genius, a prodigy, a “gift from God.” Having revealed a precocious ability with numbers, little Ettore was often paraded before visitors, doing cubic roots in his head, while the other kids were out playing marbles. He was never allowed to play and bore the corresponding solitude along with his brilliance.

In 1928, he abandoned conventional studies in civil engineering to become a theoretical physicist, at that time regarded as an unhinged pursuit. It was an impulsive act, never fully sanctioned by his family, but the poisonous bait was laid out for him by Enrico Fermi and his friends. Ettore at this time is described as Moorish looking, with intensely black hair and extremely bright eyes; disheveled and shy, constantly pondering, unable to chat—the caricature of a genius.

Now it just so happened that on Via Panisperna in Rome, there was a kindergarten for geniuses: a group of young, extremely bright physicists led by Fermi. They worked at an institute where they were given free rein: They held wagers as to who could solve differential equations the fastest, disputed audacious solutions to the riddle of the atomic nucleus, and dared each other to come up with the craziest theories of the universe. How they shouted . . . what a racket they made, even considering they were Italians. One day, one of them became so excited he threw a chair at another during an argument on the nature of solar fuel. Deep in their hearts, they were barely adults. In a sense, they were playing with marbles.

When Ettore first arrived at Via Panisperna to meet Fermi, the institute was struggling to solve what is now known as the universal Fermi potential, an essential tool for doing calculations in atomic physics. Fermi had managed to tabulate some regions of the potential, doing a giant number of sums essentially by hand (this was before computers), and although the results looked promising, they were still inconclusive. Fermi explained to Ettore why there were still such gaping holes in his table and why no one had been able to fill them. Ettore asked a few short questions, then left in the enigmatic style that would become his trademark.

The next day he returned and asked Fermi to show him the table again. Ettore then produced a piece of paper, did a few quick calculations, and congratulated Fermi on having made no mistakes. When Fermi looked surprised, Ettore went to the blackboard and wrote out a simple mathematical transformation converting the impenetrable problem into a well-known textbook equation. The picture of the full potential sprang into focus. Jaws duly dropped. Young Ettore was much given to theatricality.

The Via Panisperna Boys provided Ettore with an audience for his beloved magic tricks, which multiplied and became mythical, miraculous even, over time. Ettore’s mathematical deftness created an aura of God-given talent, beyond human sweat; turned Ettore into the superhuman who simply “encountered” answers where others had to seek them with hard work—if they found them at all. And this is where his drama unfolded, until his dark side prevailed and he boarded that ship. As a scientist, I know the milieu well; I’ve seen the chairs fly during scientific arguments. And the thing that puzzles me most is not what happened to Ettore, but what made him so different from other physicists. Why did he alone feel so acutely the limitations of science?

“The moral of the scientist will always be unstable,” said J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, during a McCarthy-era hearing in which he was accused of being a risk to national security. Ettore was good friends with Werner Heisenberg, who later became head of the Nazi atomic project. Fermi (whose wife was Jewish) emigrated to the United States in 1939, where he led a line of research aiming toward the creation of the atomic bomb. Bruno Pontecorvo, another of the Via Panisperna Boys, assisted Fermi, but in 1950, smack in the middle of the cold war, he changed sides and absconded to the Soviet Union.

Ettore stands apart. His mental instability owes nothing to Hitler, McCarthy, or Stalin. There was always a major fault line that divided him from the Via Panisperna Boys. He particularly antagonized Fermi, who would be given the Nobel Prize in 1938, the year of Ettore’s disappearance. Ettore didn’t care for prizes, was critical of academia, and always refused to be one of the boys. What made him play Il Grande Inquisitore (the Grand Inquisitor), as the Boys dubbed him?

There are so many holes in the story that we’ll have to deal with it obliquely. But despite the labyrinth of question marks he left us, I’ve always seen Ettore as a role model. I firmly believe that he was endowed with a powerfully healthy soul, well kept and groomed despite trying times, in a world far less than perfect. The outcome was that he felt the need to vanish, leaving behind an impenetrable mystery. Shall we start with the scene of the crime?

On Friday, March 25, 1938, Ettore is at the end of his rope, filled with the kind of despair that invariably drives people to extremes. Holed up in his room at the Albergo Bologna in Naples, he pens two very strange notes, one to his boss and the other to his family. He’s recently taken up a professorship at the University of Naples and is supposed to deliver a lecture on quantum mechanics the next morning. He’s even spoken to one of his students about this lecture. But he never delivers it.

Naples, 25 March 1938-XVI

Dear Carrelli,

I have made a decision that was by now inevitable. It doesn’t contain a single speck of selfishness; but I do realize the inconvenience that my unanticipated disappearance may cause to the students and yourself. For this, too, I beg you to forgive me; but above all for having betrayed the trust, the sincere friendship and the sympathy you have so kindly offered me over the past few months. I beg you also to remember me to all those I’ve come to know and appreciate at your Institute, in particular Sciuti, of all I shall preserve the dearest memories at least until eleven o’clock this evening, and possibly beyond.

Ettore Majorana

His other note is addressed to his family and left on the desk in his room at Albergo Bologna. It’s more laconic and reads:

(To my family)

Naples, 25 March 1938-XVI

I’ve got a single wish: that you do not wear black for me. If you want to bow to custom, then bear some sign of mourning, but for no more than three days. After that remember me, if you can, in your hearts, and forgive me.

Ettore

Neither of these missives is a clear-cut suicide note. He uses the verb scomparire, which in Italian can mean either to die or to disappear. And then there’s the handwriting: confident, secure, unwavering. Writer Leonardo Sciascia comments, “I’ve seen other suicide notes. In all of them there is more or less obvious alteration—even if only in the handwriting. Always. Some irregularity. Some confusion. Majorana’s two notes reveal, on the contrary, composure, awareness, self-possession, a way of skirting ambiguity which, knowing him as I do now, cannot have been unintentional.”

No one questions the peculiarity of these messages; but each person finds a different element particularly strange. Ettore’s nephew Fabio, for example, tells me he attaches great importance to the odd grammar in the last phrase of the letter to the family. Ettore wrote very meticulously—mathematically even—and Italian grammar is considerably more structured than the English. And Ettore doesn’t say, “Remember me and forgive me, if you can”; rather, he chooses to construct the phrase as “remember me, if you can, in your hearts, and forgive me.” He is considering the possibility that the family might forget him. The emphasis is not on forgiveness, but on memory.

With or without intending suicide, Ettore boards the ferry in Naples that evening, but then the story takes an unexpected twist. Instead of “disappearing” as announced, Ettore disembarks in Palermo the next morning. He takes a room at the Albergo Sole and composes the following letter on the hotel’s letterhead:

Palermo, 26 March 1938-XVI

Dear Carrelli,

I hope that my letter and telegram have reached you together. The sea has rejected me and tomorrow I’ll return to the Hotel Bologna, perhaps traveling together with this same letter. I have, however, decided to give up teaching. Don’t take me for an Ibsen heroine, because the case is quite different. I’m at your disposal for further details.

Ettore Majorana

On Saturday evening, the piroscafo leaves Palermo on its return trip to Naples. There is some confusion about the details of this trip (even its exact date), but Ettore apparently bought a ticket, which was later recovered from the offices of Tirrenia, the shipping company. He’s expected to arrive in Naples at 5:45 am on Sunday. There are two other people sharing the cabin in which he’s supposed to be traveling, and later, one vouches that upon arrival in Naples, Ettore was still asleep in the cabin.

I want to make the case that the Nobel Prize for Physics should be given to Ettore Majorana. His science is easily in the same league as that of Einstein or Dirac. His disappearance may reek of defeat, but he’s the real winner, the seer who could predict physics that is only now being tested. To this day I’m amazed that back in 1937, he succeeded in predicting the awkward behavior of a mysterious particle—the neutrino—in terms that are only now being probed.

It’s almost a miracle that we ever discovered the existence of the neutrino, yet the universe is teeming with them. There are as many neutrinos out there as there are particles of light, and there are many, many more neutrinos than atoms or any other regular matter. Zooming around in all directions, journeying close to the speed of light, they’re everywhere: swarming through everything, thousands of trillions hitting your body every second, coming from the skies, from below, from the horizon, from everywhere. If you’ve driven through the streets of Palermo, you may have noticed that a comparable number of scooters zip around your car in every conceivable direction, also flying past you at close to the speed of light, or so it seems. Driving in Palermo provides a perfect metaphor for neutrinos whooshing around us.

The analogy, however, ends there. Palermo’s scooters occasionally embellish local cars with the end products of spectacular crashes; but neutrinos are way too shy for such exuberances. In fact, they’re so modest and introverted that even though trillions hit your body every second, they pass through it as if you were a phantom. Hours pass before a single neutrino interacts with the atoms of your body. For neutrinos, the matter in the universe is perfectly transparent, diaphanous, immaterial; conversely, we fail to feel the effects of the colossal sea of neutrinos that envelops us.

Most of the neutrino hordes arriving on Earth come from the sun, yet the Earth is so transparent to them that at night we’re showered by solar neutrinos from below, and the brightness of the sun in the “neutrino channel” is roughly the same night and day. The situation is so ridiculous that when we finally built the first neutrino telescope, we had to place it at the South Pole—to look at the northern sky! Using the whole of the Earth as a “lens” or filter, before miles of ice can act as the film in this peculiar neutrino camera.

How, then, could Ettore possibly already know about the neutrino back in the 1930s? The answer may very well have something to do with his disappearance. The neutrino may be shy, but it holds the key to humankind’s nastiest weapon. Without the secret of the neutrino, nuclear weapons would not be possible. A massive burst of neutrinos spills out every time an atomic bomb goes off. These neutrinos are too soft and shy to cause any direct damage, yet they are instrumental to the conflagration.

The neutrino was first theorized by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to explain the mysterious properties of a type of nuclear radioactivity called beta decay. At Via Panisperna in the 1930s, no one doubted that the neutrino existed: Indeed, it was Fermi who christened it. The neutrino’s name had to convey that it was electrically neutral, just like the neutron. “Neutron” phonetically becomes “neutrone” in Italian, and the suffix one is an augmentative. Thus, “neutrone” sounds like the “neutral big one.” The suffix ino forms the diminutive³: Fermi thus dubbed the mysterious and very light extra particle the “neutrino”—the neutron’s little brother. The neutrino formed a central part of the research at Via Panisperna.

And so it was that twenty-five years before the neutrino was even detected and proven to exist, Ettore discovered something extraordinary. Before “jumping ship” and disappearing from the face of the Earth, he left us a major piece of information about a particle that would play a leading role in the nuclear age. To use modern scientific parlance, he discovered that the neutrino could be Majorana. That’s right, nothing less: Ettore has a neutrino named after him. Pending one small detail, an extant little mystery, he does indeed deserve the Nobel Prize.

Sightings of Ettore began almost at once after his disappearance. As early as the end of March, start of April of 1938, Ettore reportedly approached a Jesuit priest, Father de Francesco, who peddled his trade at the church of Gesú Nuovo in Naples. Upon being shown a photograph of Ettore, the Father recognized him as the rather upset (“agitadíssimo”) young man who had inquired about the procedures for joining a monastery, in order to make an “experiment of religious life.” Presented with the bureaucratic complexities of donating one’s life to the Catholic God, however, the young man had left in a great hurry.

Then, in early April, Ettore’s nurse, who’d helped him with a painful ulcer, claimed she saw him in Naples “on the street, between the Royal Palace and the Gallery”—hardly a secluded location. She recognized him by his face as well by his suit, indicating that he hadn’t changed clothes since the day he disappeared.⁴ If this story is true, it shows that Ettore made no great effort to vanish. Or else he was intelligent enough to know that often the best hiding spot is the most exposed location.

On April 12, 1938, Ettore supposedly appeared at another monastery, San Pasquale a Portici, as reported by the local monks. This event was recorded in a letter from the questore (head of police) to the rector, showing that it must have formed part of the official inquiry into the disappearance that meanwhile had been opened. Unfortunately, this letter is one of the few official documents to have survived , and then only because the rector communicated it to the minister of education. All other documents pertaining to the police inquiry were destroyed, either as a matter of procedure or during World War II.

Encouraged by these early sightings, Ettore’s brothers, Luciano and Salvatore, spent weeks scouring the countryside near Naples, trudging from monastery to monastery, showing Ettore’s photo to the monks. But to no avail. From the religious they received replies such as, “But why do you search for him? Isn’t the important thing that he’s happy?” Still, they continued to seek. By then, however, sightings of Ettore had dried up.

Until some twenty years later. Suddenly, Ettore sightings became eerily frequent—a bit like sightings of Elvis Presley. He was seen in Argentina, at a convent in Basilicata, Italy, and in several less believable locations (Germany, western Sicily, even California). Ettore fanatics (Ettorologists) fall into three categories: Argentine theorists, suicide theorists, and monastery theorists. Were it not for Ettore’s brilliant discovery, the Majorana neutrino, these conspiracy theorists would be the only force keeping his memory alive.

These days in Italy, everyone and his dog has written about Ettore Majorana. Ettore is even featured as the hero in several cartoon series. In one comic, he breaks into hyperspace and is visible only to cats (beasts allegedly well acquainted with extra dimensions). In another of his comic-book appearances, he discovers a quick and dirty way to make a fusion bomb.

Usually the H-bomb uses hydrogen, but Ettore’s recipe calls for iron instead. This makes a devastating superweapon, one far more powerful than the H-bomb. He’s acutely aware that everyone around him is way off track: Fermi; the rest of the Via Panisperna lot; the Russian, American, and German scientists. Ettore gets cold feet. He’s scared to death of the Pandora’s box he’s unlocked: Think of such a lethal weapon in the hands of Mussolini or Hitler! But he talks to a friend, who convinces him that the Soviet Union—the “Land of the People”—is the only safe home for his invention. Ettore hesitates, but in the end goes along with his friend’s plan. A Russian secret agent is dispatched to impersonate him on the boat bound for Naples. But Ettore never actually leaves Palermo, where another agent is scheduled to take him to a Russian fishing vessel stationed in international waters near Sicily.

Except that all of this is being closely monitored by the secret services of the “Land of the Free” (archenemy of the “Land of the People”). They have followed Ettore’s activities and kept a close eye on the Russian agents. As soon as Ettore is safely aboard the trawler, they bring a submarine up to the surface. We see a commando platoon storming the defenseless craft, kidnapping for a second time the bewildered Ettore. They then torpedo the ship, sending all witnesses to the bottom of the ocean.

The kidnapped Ettore, however, refuses to participate in the American nuclear project, claiming that “they ’re all wrong; they’re all doomed.” He spends his time drawing diagrams no one understands and listening to long-wavelength radio transmissions that sound like static. They let him be, as long as he stays quietly in captivity. The bombs go off in Japan, the war is over, but nothing changes with Ettore. He continues to refuse to collaborate or beg for his freedom, indifferent to all around him.

Until July 24, 1947, when UFOs visit the Earth, targeting the military installation where Ettore is being kept. Earlier, guards had heard Ettore mumbling to the static on his radio, “The time has arrived, at last.” The installation’s defenses are activated, but the aliens discontinue the flow of time, freezing humans and animals in their tracks. The ground is littered with birds fallen from the sky. The flow of time has abandoned everyone—except Ettore.

Fifty years later, the CIA is using a special secret agent to communicate telepathically with alien worlds. In their midst, the telepathist sees Ettore. He’s unshaven and unkempt, but looks no older than when he disappeared. In a panic Ettore shouts to the telepathist: “The iron. They want to use iron, just like in my project. If they succeed in carrying out their plans, it will be the end!”

And yet, could this cartoon somehow have captured Ettore’s real inner turmoil? Could this lowbrow take on his tragedy contain the perfect image of his suffering? It is now known that the Via Panisperna Boys accomplished the fission of uranium without realizing it as early as 1934. From there to the atomic bomb, all conceptual obstacles had been overcome. Did Ettore have an overdose of clarity? Or is even that too simplistic?

(Very confidential)

Naples, 30 March 1938-XVI

Magnificent Rector,

With great sorrow I communicate the following:

Saturday, March 26 at eleven am, I received an urgent telegram from my colleague and friend Prof. Ettore Majorana, a Theoretical Physics Professor at this University, with a message composed in the following terms: “Don’t be alarmed. A letter follows. Majorana.” I found this missive incomprehensible, but made inquiries and discovered that he hadn’t turned up for his lecture that morning. The telegram came from Palermo.

With the two pm postal delivery I received a letter sent the day before, from Naples, where he expressed suicidal intentions. I understood then that the urgent telegram from Palermo, dated the following day, was intended to reassure me that nothing had happened. And indeed on Sunday morning I received an express letter from Palermo where he told me that his dark disposition was gone, and that he would soon return.

Unfortunately, however, he didn’t appear on Monday, either at the Institute or at the hotel where he had taken up lodgings. A bit alarmed by his absence, I sent news of all this to his family, resident in Rome. Yesterday morning his brother arrived, and together we went to see the questore of the City of Naples, to beg him to find out from the Palermo police whether Professor Majorana was still lodging at some hotel in that city.

But since this morning I still had no news I decided to inform Your Magnificence of these occurrences, in the hope that my colleague has merely decided to take a little rest, following perhaps a moment of fatigue or moral discomfort, and that he will be rejoining us very soon to grace us with the great contribution of his activity and intelligence.

Antonio Carrelli

For years after I first learned about Ettore, I wanted to write a book about his life. I collected documents and read nearly everything that had been written about him, but my research was slow and accretive, without much focus or purpose. I always deferred to an uncertain future the act of putting pen to paper. Then, one day, I read a newspaper clipping and realized that the mystery was about to come full circle. Ettore had just turned one hundred, and a major discovery had been made in the deep waters near Catania. The time had arrived for the final unveiling of the Majorana legacy.