A Brilliant Darkness

On that morning, the traffic in Rome is the habitual nightmare. Having failed to foresee this, I arrive late. Not too late, but I’m striding when I reach the university complex just past the Scuola di Guerra Aerea (the “aerial war” school), a reminder of Italy’s bellicose recent past. All around me there’s Mussolinic grandeur, imposing marbles, some fake, others not, emulating the style of imperial Rome in a Disneyland of Neros, Caligulas, and bad taste. It feels like I’ve dropped into a wormhole and been shoveled into the past. Sending an e-mail to Ettore, then, does make some sense.

I rush past the Dipartamento di Igiene (Department of Hygiene) before finally finding the physics building, named after Guglielmo Marconi. Two doors permit entrance into the world of Roman physics: one with Experimental Physics engraved above it, the other with Superior Physics. I smile, considering just how to break the news to my experimentalist friends that they do “inferior” physics. It was here that the Via Panisperna Institute moved in 1937.

A sharp left at the entrance takes me to the Aula (“classroom”) Ettore Majorana, where a bunch of young things are making a racket while they wait for a lecture. A door to its side opens into a long corridor. At the end of the corridor, a couple of labyrinthine turns finally lead to his office. Ettore Majorana’s office. It says so on the door.

I knock and a middle-aged man appears. He has sharp eyes, dark olive skin, and gray hair. He’s polite and very shy. We chat for a while about the state of the art. The experimental detection of gravitational waves is his current interest. As a theorist, I’m always amazed by the ingenuity of experimentalists, as they push technology to the point where it still doesn’t properly exist, trying to measure what can’t even be detected yet. This is no inferior physics.

We talk at length about the vicissitudes of gravitational-wave detection, but I must eventually fail to disguise that I’m not there to discuss physics. I want to talk human tragedy, the revulsions of the soul, the whys and hows of Ettore’s fugue. He lowers his voice, having already shut the door to ensure that no one overhears us.

“So, you want to talk about Ettore Majo . . .”

He breaks the phrase midflow.

“ . . . you want to talk about the other Ettore Majorana,” a gesture emphasizes this detail, “the other, the important one?”

He’s smiling: It’s a joke, and he’s enjoying it. There’s no bitterness in his voice. So we talk about his eponymous uncle. In English, fortunately! For once the Italian language is spared my usual slaughter.

It must have been tough for Ettore Majorana Jr. to become a physicist. Einstein had a son—Hans—who was a scientist. Imagine what it must have been like for him to go to conferences and write papers. Hans Einstein was a professor of hydraulics at Berkeley University. He was brilliant. But he was no Einstein.

Ettore Majorana Jr. is no Ettore Majorana Sr., but he’s an excellent experimentalist. How annoying it must be to have your colleagues expect you to be an outstanding neutrino theorist when you’re not even trying to be one. But I feel Ettore Jr. has overcome all that and that he’s happy to scorn superior physics to instead play a major role in what could be the next big discovery.

Ettore’s English is excellent, but it’s obvious that he’s mainly used it in a scientific setting. Now—talking about the inner troubles of his uncle—he transplants his technical vocabulary into the alien context of feelings and emotions. The result is exquisite when it’s not outright poetic: We do an “inverse reconstruction” of Ettore’s soul, discuss a “computer program called suicide,” and other such extravagances. Occasionally—when referring to people out of his favor—he can’t help slipping into Italian: “Va fan culo!” I’d have labeled him sad, from his manner, were it not for these outbursts, which are as hilarious as they are unexpected. I wonder if his uncle’s reputation for sadness resulted from a similar misunderstanding.

Like Fabio, Ettore Jr. is the son of Ettore’s brother Luciano and Signora Nunni Cirino. In fact, he’s the second Ettore the signora gave birth to: The first was born on March 30, 1960 (for those who like coincidences), but unfortunately died the next day. Unlike Fabio, Ettore Jr. lived in Rome for most of his life, lodging with Ettore’s younger sister, Maria. His emotional attachment to Maria is obvious: “She was a mother to me. A second mother, since she could never be the first one. But she was a mother for my feelings.” He provides unique insights on Maria: “She was very sensitive and affectionate. She translated French poetry in her sleep.” And he paints a horrifying picture of the plight of an intelligent woman in the Italy of her time: “When Maria was eighteen, she told the family that she wanted to go to university and do a degree. At once they all started laughing, as if it was a good joke.” Was it a nasty put down? “No, no, they laughed with love. But still they laughed. And so she never raised the subject again.”²⁴

I’ve been asked if I would have liked Ettore Majorana had I met him personally. All I can say is that I certainly liked meeting Ettore Majorana Jr; and in time, we became friends. I also liked his opinions:

“We live in a world that needs myths onto which we project our hopes, sometimes simply our self-importance. Majorana is a perfect target for mythmongers because we don’t know what happened to him. More than not knowing, we cannot know what happened to him. Why don’t we just accept indeterminacy when we find it? We do it in mathematics, why don’t we do it with people? An inverse reconstruction is impossible, and the answer to the puzzle is not a solution, but the space of all possible solutions. Just like in mathematics.”

Despite the technical language, he couldn’t have put it better. His views on Ettore are “nihilistic.” It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t care—quite the contrary. But he’s prepared to take an “indeterminate problem” for what it is, and let Ettore’s mystery be.

Although Ettore Jr. never voices a theory, he performs a strange translation of something he’d heard Maria say many years ago (she died in 1997):

“Consider a computer program called Suicide. You press return, and it runs. But something happens during the flow of commands and the program finds an ‘interrupt.’ Something we don’t know caused it, maybe it was raining on that night. The program goes to another line of commands, and it never executes its original purpose, other routines are executed instead; suicide as initially planned is forgone. But then these routines find themselves, quite by accident, at the same point in phase-space that triggered the suicide program to start running. He was on a boat again the next night and perhaps it wasn’t raining. So the suicide program is rerun. And this time it does it.”

Odd metaphor. But I’ve often wondered whether it was circumstantial that Ettore didn’t jump ship from Naples to Palermo—and then possibly did on the way back. But we simply don’t know, as Ettore Jr. emphasizes. And this isn’t his theory: He refuses to have one. It’s a rendition, in his scientific English, of Maria’s theory which I had already heard voiced in a TV documentary, in which she talked about “the power of the alba [dawn], that terrible time of day for suicidal people.”

“One thing is for sure,” Ettore Jr. says, “Suicide or not, he wanted to disappear. To break away from us, the normal ones. And we have to respect that, whatever he did. But now everyone wants to have his own Ettore Majorana. Everyone wants to use him for his own purposes, to further his cause. Why don’t we just leave him alone? We should not only respect that he broke away from us, but that he didn’t want us to use him.”

Our chat gradually moves to Ettore’s relations with his family and colleagues. What everyone tries to hide is that he couldn’t stand the Via Panisperna Boys, who in turn feared and hated him. Why was he so convoluted? Ettore Jr. suggests a possibility:

“Life on a practical level is a compromise between complementary sets of parameters. Colleagues, family, the self. They all pull in different directions, and you have to maximize some optimization function combining them all. And he was very bad at that: at the business of life.

“His mind was very strong, full of tools. But only tools that allowed him to solve mathematical problems, not the problems of life. In that respect, he was incapable of handling the world. To find a family, to deal with colleagues, to have a career: in all that, Majorana was handicapped. And eventually life on a practical level caught up with him.”

But surely the family must have realized something was badly wrong when Ettore locked himself in his room in 1933 and stayed there for four years. Again, Ettore Jr. voices Maria’s views: Of course they knew something was wrong, but no one mentioned it. They just let him be. In the Majorana family (then, as now, he adds sotto voce) no one asks deep questions.

At one stage in the conversation, he stops abruptly, dismisses with a gesture everything we’ve been considering, and very slowly says the following:

“There is only one thing that I’m sure would have made all the difference in the Majorana affair.”

He pauses for dramatic effect.

“Love! Love would have changed everything. The extremes in his personality would have been capped. They’d be low-pass filtered, wouldn’t ever manifest themselves. But he never found love. He never found a woman.