A Brilliant Darkness

Being “scooped” is every scientist’s worst nightmare. You find a good problem, discover how to solve it, and after some hard work an important result lies before your eyes. You get excited and write it up with glee. Then, halfway through, you have doubts—could it really be that good? Or have you done something tremendously stupid? You perform extra checks and sit on it for a while. Then one morning an article lands on your desk: Someone else has finished the same work and published it ahead of you. There are no prizes for runners-up; usually you just throw it all in the bin. And feel bitter about it for the rest of your life.

It’s an experience from which you never fully recover. You hate yourself for having been too insecure to brush aside your doubts and publish. It haunts you for the rest of your life, as if you’ve abandoned a child. No matter how much success you later achieve, you’ll always feel ashamed.

I’ve seen the effects of such a bad experience. Abdus Salam was for many years the head of the theoretical physics group where I work. His failure to father parity violation shaped him forever. He never forgave himself for listening to Pauli; being later awarded a Nobel Prize did nothing to soften his bitterness. The effect was predictable: “Publish all your ideas, good or bad,” he would say. “People will only remember the good ones.” He encouraged publishing even seemingly half-baked work on the off chance it might be fully baked after all—and just in case someone else was baking the same cake.

And herein lay the root of Fermi’s dark side, the side that surfaced in his clashes with Ettore, especially when Ettore refused to publish his work. Like Salam and many others, Fermi had been badly scooped. Right at the start of his career, while he was still in Florence, the twenty-something Enrico Fermi was maddeningly close to what could today have been called “Fermi’s exclusion principle.” For particles with certain spins (spin ½, say, electrons, for example) it’s impossible to fit more than one into each possible state of a system. It’s an essential tenet ultimately explaining the stability of matter, a problem that’s been with us since the Greek philosophers.

The young Fermi was very near publishing his important finding, but today we call it “Pauli’s exclusion principle.” He was beaten to it. That particles satisfying this principle have been given the generic name of fermions did little to ameliorate Fermi’s disappointment.³² Pontecorvo wrote, “Fermi was very upset for not having formulated the principle then discovered by Pauli, from which, as Fermi stressed to me, he had been extremely close.” He was forever a man full of complexes, and this was instrumental in his conflicts with Ettore. But to understand why he took it so badly, we should perhaps dig deeper into his personality. We can forgive anyone’s failings, if only we try to see what lies behind them.

Born from peasant stock, Enrico Fermi had a cheerful but Spartan upbringing, with cold baths at dawn and all the trimmings, but also with plenty of rustic joie de vivre. His father was the first of his ancestors not to make a living from cultivating the land, eventually rising to a senior position as a railway worker and settling in Rome. His mother was a housewife born at the wrong time: Given half a chance, she’d obviously have chosen a job employing her brain (for example, she constructed her own pressure cooker). Fermi had an elder sister, but it was his brother Giulio who carried the weight of family expectations. Giulio was a social leader, full of charisma and inventiveness, an intelligent kid that everyone liked. By contrast, Enrico was shy and often accused of being slow and lacking imagination.

In second grade, asked to write an essay on what could be made with iron he simply wrote, “With iron one makes some beds.” The teacher was furious, and his mother was called in. Little Enrico explained that on the way to school he passed a sign that announced, Factory of iron beds. He knew, however, that some beds were made of wood; thus, the precisely crafted phrase. Mrs. Fermi and the teacher let him off, feeling nonetheless that Enrico was not very bright. Quite unlike his brother, who, in addition to his pleasant personality, always got top marks in school.

All this changed when the family was hit by tragedy. During a minor surgery to remove an abscess, Giulio died, aged only fifteen. Fermi’s parents never recovered (his mother cried for hours each day until she died a few years later). Neither did Enrico, who many years later would still acknowledge feelings of guilt for being alive, when, in his view, his brother deserved it so much more. The trauma made him perform better at school and changed his outlook on life. Fermi’s emulation of his brother may explain his later insufferable ways.

Because the adult Fermi could be truly oleaginous. His wife Laura wrote an unctuous biography, which accidentally reveals what an overbearing person he was. He shouted orders at everyone around him like a Fascist, expecting strict obedience. He displayed a childish pride in always being the winner of games. He continually lectured all within earshot on scientific matters (whether or not they were interested) choosing a particularly patronizing tone with women. All made worse by his outbursts about the merits of eugenics (far from unusual for the period,³³ but still utterly inexcusable).

Fermi’s childhood trauma may also explain why he was so haunted by that early scoop, eventually leading to the rash publication policies at Via Panisperna. His dead brother, whom he meant to vindicate and replace, must always have looked over his shoulder: He’d failed Giulio again, or so he felt. And this may be why Ettore infuriated Fermi so much. Fermi published every fish that fell into the net; his publication sprees were an exorcism. Ettore must have been impossible to fathom. Because being scooped simply didn’t affect him. In his short career, Ettore was beaten to the press at least three times, in every case wholly his own fault. And each time, well . . . he couldn’t have cared less.

As early as 1931, at an international conference in Rome, the German physicist Walter Heitler was so impressed by Ettore’s work that he asked for an interpreter in order to talk to him. Ettore told him one of his pet theories, applicable to particles with charge but no spin. According to Wick, who acted as interpreter, Heitler was so excited that he shouted, “But why don’t you publish it? Now?” Characteristically, Ettore retorted, “Of course not . . . it’s incomplete. And even if it were complete, it wouldn’t be worth it.” And when, three years later, Pauli and Weisskopf independently published the same work, Ettore, upon hearing the news, was simply relieved: “Great! Now I don’t have to bother writing it up!”

The confusion this caused Fermi can hardly be put into words. It reached a climax with Ettore’s discovery of the neutron and of strong forces, described earlier. Upon being “beaten” by Heisenberg, Ettore genuinely failed to be upset; worse, he developed sympathy and admiration for Heisenberg. When they met later, they quickly became friends. Rather than resentment, Ettore developed esteem for the man who’d scooped him, as if Heisenberg had done him a great favor.

If you like Stendhal, as does Sciascia, you may argue that Ettore was just deliberately wasting talent, following a well-worn pattern for some geniuses. But for someone as simple-minded as Fermi, Ettore’s attitude was downright psychopathic. For Fermi, so results driven and competitive but also so guilt-ridden and traumatized by his early experiences, Ettore must have looked irresponsible, lazy, neurotic, lunatic. Under his reins at Via Panisperna, no scoops were to be allowed! But of course Ettore was not under his reins. And so Fermi had to endure Ettore’s attitude and the shame it evoked. Little did Fermi know that his own worst scooping experience was yet to come.

Were it not for the specter of uranium, the clash between Fermi and Ettore would have been no more than a difference of personalities. But history intervened, and the tragic nuclear events of 1945 blur everything, throwing all classifications into confusion. Maybe, after all, Ettore was the pulse of life, and Fermi that of darkness, contrary to appearances. Perhaps Ettore’s broader philosophical outlook was the actual focus in his differences with Fermi.

Fermi did lack imagination, as is obvious from the fact that he contributed nothing to the foundations of quantum mechanics. He couldn’t stand philosophy and didn’t like abstract physics problems, as Ettore did. Fermi could never understand the philosophical discussions on quantum mechanics kept by Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger, and Einstein. He couldn’t even begin to understand Schrödinger’s cat with its implication that the world could only collapse into a proper state (dead or alive, in the cat’s case) if an observer entered the picture. These views are solipsistic. I doubt Fermi even knew what the word solipsistic meant. He was a great problem solver, but his strengths finished there. Unsurprisingly, in a generation of philosopher physicists, Pauli called Fermi a “quantum engineer.”

In her book on Fermi, Laura reports that her husband once set out to prove to her that light was an electromagnetic wave. Laura complained, “No! You proved that you can obtain two equal numbers. But now you talk about the equality of two things: You can’t do that! Besides two equal things need not be the same thing.” Which I think is quite a good point. But Enrico was furious.

In 1942, Fermi didn’t think twice about testing the first nuclear reactor in the middle of Chicago. It’s nerve-racking to read reports of the first nuclear pile going critical, kept under control by Fermi doing calculations with a slide rule and shouting instructions across the room to the guy controlling the moderator. This first “controlled” nuclear reactor could have ended up like Chernobyl in the middle of a large town! But like ontology, ethics was a branch of philosophy that didn’t interest Fermi.

A schism was therefore developing at Via Panisperna as 1933 approached, a rupture mimicking the rift between Ettore and Fermi. You can feel it in the testimonies provided by Ettore’s surviving mates in latter-day TV interviews. If you were to hear me reading this page instead of reading it yourself, you’d most likely gain a better sense of who I am. The voice is the music of the soul. Ettore’s friends, Gastone Piqué, Giancarlo Wick, and Giuseppe Occhialini, sound affectionate, full of human confusion, endearing in their obvious love for a fellow soul they tried, but failed, to understand. Fermi’s side, Amaldi and Segrè, come through terribly—their voices fast paced and toneless, stiff with arrogance and authority, devoid of doubt. Their voices sound like robots programmed for omniscience. There are no uncertainties in their statements. Not even quantum mechanics is like that.

A mere personality clash . . . had history not intervened.

One should be aware that while all these events were taking place a powerful political stew had just begun to simmer. Since 1922, Italy had become a Fascist country, indeed the word was coined there (after fascio, Italian for “league” or “unity”). The founder was Benito Mussolini, and he carried all the marks of what was to come: authoritarian, vain, ruthless, populist, and not very intelligent. Mussolini’s Italy became an early dictatorship (together with the Salazar regime in Portugal), providing the loose mold for Hitler and Franco years later.

But the Fascist movement initially seemed more innocuous than later developments would prove. In 1922 the Fascists marched on Rome, carrying nothing but their enthusiasm for the glorious Italy of a remote past. As Senator Corbino put it to Fermi on the day the Blackshirts arrived in Rome, “They have no arms; there will be a massacre. What a pity! So many young men will die who were only searching for an ideal to worship and found none better.³⁴ “But there was no massacre, the king played along, and with his trademark astuteness Senator Corbino predicted that Italy would become a dictatorship under Mussolini.

Yet fascism didn’t degenerate into dictatorship at once, and even after the withdrawal of civil liberties (for example, multiparty elections and freedom of the press), many believed that these were temporary measures at a time of strife. In addition, fascism brought economic relief to many poor Italians. In a deeply Catholic country, where the church and state had been in conflict since the nineteenth-century reunification, fascism achieved reconciliation. It stirred national pride in its obsession with Italy’s past glories. When Umberto Nobile succeeded in overflying the North Pole aboard a dirigible in 1926, it meant a large dose of much needed self-respect for Italy.

So much so that two years later, when Nobile crashed while attempting a landing on the North Pole (leaving many dead, including pioneer Roald Amundsen, who commanded the rescue party), a nasty surprise awaited him back home. For all his efforts and risks Nobile was publicly humiliated, discharged from the army, and stripped of all his medals, narrowly escaping prison. Fascism didn’t tolerate failure.

Fascism was idealistic, in its strictly philosophical sense. Giovanni Gentile Sr., the father of Ettore’s best friend at Via Panisperna, was responsible for wedding Fascist doctrine to idealistic philosophy. The resulting synthesis is “condensed” in the Italian encyclopedia, a ridiculously expensive mastodon, so large it was never reedited. On one point you cannot fault idealism: It is logically inconsistent with racism. If the body and the soul are detached, and if the soul is the essence of the human being, then a genetic label is meaningless, and so discriminating against blacks or Jews is impossible.

But of course no one thought about the dangers of racism in the early days of fascism, or indeed well into the mid-1930s. Racism and anti-Semitism were not an issue in Italy, and in fact Germany and Italy were traditional enemies. In 1934, Mussolini moved troops to defend the Austrian border against an early German threat, after a Nazi putsch. The Germans were duly intimidated by the Italian army, at that stage more powerful than theirs. Hitler was widely seen as a joke in Italy, with nothing in common with Mussolini. There seemed to be no chance of any alliance between the two. Why, then, worry about German-bred racism and anti-Semitism in Fascist Italy? In 1932, Mussolini stated in a speech that “from happy intermixing of peoples results the strength and the beauty of a nation.”

The political turmoil had barely begun.

Yet by 1932, Ettore’s downward spiral was already well in motion. It would lock him in a black hole of despondency and dread from which he’d be unable to emerge for years. There were so many forces at play that it would be foolish to place undue emphasis on any one of them. They all dragged him down into the abyss in a cacophony of gargoyles: Fascist and Nazi politics, the burnt-baby scandal, poor health, scientific troubles. . . . In no particular order, let’s begin with a particularly heavy stone that looped around Ettore’s neck as he swam happily in the sea of science, finishing off what he regarded as his masterpiece. Meet Professor Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac, the autistic physicist. And unwittingly a major force in Ettore’s downfall.