Table of Contents

Title Page

PROLOGUE

PART ONE - LIFE: THE GRAND INQUISITOR

ONE - The Attic of 251 Via Etnea

TWO - Nuclear Crisis

THREE - Frankenstein’s Youth

FOUR - Poltergeist Exposed

FIVE - Bread and Sperm

SIX - Strong Interactions

SEVEN - Meet Ettore Majorana

EIGHT - Boys Will Be Boys

NINE - Neutrinos from Transylvania

TEN - Ode to the Vanquished

ELEVEN - Creation and Annihilation

TWELVE - The Serpent’s Egg

THIRTEEN - His Unfinished Symphony

FOURTEEN - The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

FIFTEEN - Stellar Collapse

SIXTEEN - Artichokes

SEVENTEEN - Meanwhile, at Via Panisperna

EIGHTEEN - The Crepuscule of Via Panisperna

NINETEEN - Ettore’s Neutrino

TWENTY - The Quiet Before the Storm

TWENTY-ONE - The Search Party

PART TWO - AFTERLIFE: THE DARK MATTER

TWENTY-TWO - Pagliacci

TWENTY-THREE - A Pirandellian Intermezzo

TWENTY-FOUR - Don’t Cry for Him, Argentina

TWENTY-FIVE - They Thought the Sun Was Sick

TWENTY-SIX - The Sign of the Beast

TWENTY-SEVEN - Ettore Majorana™

TWENTY-EIGHT - A Vote of Silence

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgements

REFERENCES

CREDITS

INDEX

Copyright Page

PROLOGUE

A Moment of Fatigue or Moral Discomfort

Your highness: my son’s malady has been caused by noble studies.

FROM A LETTER SENT TO MUSSOLINI BY ETTORE MAJORANA’S MOTHER

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 during one of these so-called “working trips,” as a bunch of us sat outside demolishing yet another bottle of Corvo Rosso, that I first encountered Ettore. I refer to him by his first name now: He’s been with me throughout my scientific career as a shadow I’ve never been able to shake off, perpetually reminding me of his story.

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.

Except for his stunt.

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.

Naturally, on that Sicilian evening, fueled as we were by Corvo Rosso, and given that we were all budding physicists—a specie endowed with psychotic levels of imagination—we came up with even more fantastic theories. I recall someone suggesting that he’d bedded the Pope and been killed by a Vatican bodyguard.²

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?

Close friends and relations maintain that his instability derived from a dreadful incident implicating his uncles, dragging all to court and many to jail. At its epicenter lies a baby. A carbonized baby. Burnt by criminal hands, in an outburst of cruelty almost impossible to fathom.

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.

Instead, at 10:30 pm he boards a mail boat (a piroscafo) bound for the Sicilian capital of Palermo. The boat is due to arrive the next dawn. One of the notes he has written is addressed to the director of the Institute of Physics of Naples University, Professor Antonio Carrelli, who receives it on Saturday afternoon. It reads as follows:

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.

He never uses the verb “to die,” and he never mentions death explicitly. He only talks of disappearing. As for wearing black, that can mean so many things. “For not more than three days” refers to the Sicilian custom. He’s simply saying that the family should follow tradition if they want to keep up appearances, but no more than that.

I won’t prejudice you any further with my own views: Reread these notes and form your own interpretations. You’re guaranteed to see something new.

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

The telegram referred to had in fact reached a very bewildered Professor Carrelli before Ettore’s original letter, on Saturday morning. It states:

Don’t be alarmed. A letter follows.

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.

It looks as if the worst has passed—he has overcome a well-concealed low point in his depression. Ettore had never done anything of this sort before, even though he’d been very ill for a while. Now it seems he has given up on whatever drastic action he may have planned to solve his situation.

Instead, he’s never seen again.

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.

We didn’t detect a neutrino until 1956, using a very clever trick indeed. It had to be, since your regular neutrino can penetrate several light-years of ordinary matter as if it were traveling through a vacuum, without stopping to let itself be known.

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.

I know that the Nobel Prize cannot be given posthumously: Statute 4 in its code makes that very clear. But is Ettore dead? We simply don’t know. And nothing prevents the illustrious prize from being given in absentia. After all, Einstein collected his by proxy.

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.

But at the last minute, Ettore changes his mind. We see him sweating and panicking, shouting, “ We’re all doomed!” and writing to Professor Carrelli to cancel his earlier message.

Too late. The Russian spies and his “friend” now reveal themselves as evil. Ettore is led at gunpoint to a trawler at anchor nearby. The Russian secret agent acting as Ettore’s double, meanwhile, duly convinces the few people who see him that Ettore boarded the boat to Naples, sending everyone off on the wrong trail.

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.

Looking gloomier than ever, he wanders amid the frozen human statues. Full of emotion, Ettore approaches a silent, luminous flying saucer.

“I . . . I . . . I’ve been waiting for you.”

He boards the flying saucer and leaves Earth for good.

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!”

. . . If they succeed in carrying out their plans, it will be the END . . .

Very silly, indeed.

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?

In real life, by the Wednesday after Ettore’s disappearance, Professor Carrelli had given up on him, and sent the following letter to the rector of the University of Naples.

(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

“A moment of fatigue or moral discomfort” . . . this cannot have a happy ending, but you already know that. I warn you, however, that I’m going to be an optimistic influence throughout the narration of this pitiful tale.

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.

The next day I caught a plane to Sicily. And so what if the mystery didn’t crack after all? I’d always been in love with Sicily. The worst that could happen was a number of outstanding meals, severe sunstroke, perhaps death by beauty.

I . . . was waiting for you . . .

PART ONE

LIFE: THE GRAND INQUISITOR

ONE

The Attic of 251 Via Etnea

Where to start? For almost two decades I’d been baffled by Ettore’s life, right from day one. So I began precisely at day one: Ettore’s birth, his early days. That’s usually where one finds the magic key to a person’s later life, Freudian intellectual excrement aside. The question, then, was whether the “Rosebud” had already been thoroughly burnt and the ashes hygienically disposed of. I knew where he was born: at 251 Via Etnea in Catania. The top two floors of the imposing building are still occupied by Ettore’s relatives. Before boarding that plane to Sicily, I found the contacts, sent e-mails, made phone calls. Honestly, I’d been fantasizing: Perhaps I would uncover a very aged Ettore hiding in the attic. In truth, I wasn’t taking my chances very seriously: Why would a family carrying such a burden of past tragedy tolerate my intrusion? Still, it was worth a try.

To my pleased surprise, the doors of 251 Via Etnea open up for me. And it’s Ettore’s nephew Fabio, the son of his brother Luciano, who invites me in, leading me to the top floor for a chat. I can’t quite believe my good luck—and I soon realize that things will likely be dramatic even if I don’t discover Ettore in the attic.

At that moment, however, a terrible thing happens. All my previous sojourns in Sicily had been spent organizing conferences, ordering beer, chatting with locals . . . and I got by with working, if uncultured, Italian.⁵ Suddenly, an appalling realization dawns on me: My Italian is entirely limited to the present tense. I’m João the Pastless—so how will I discuss Ettore? Should I just ask, “Is Ettore in the attic?”

Signora Nunni Cirino Majorana, holding court at her house in Via Etnea.

Undeterred, I converse with Fabio, using the most risible parody of his beautiful language. Remarkably, he doesn’t laugh, even though at times it’s obvious he’s exercising considerable self-control. He takes me to the apartment where his mother lives, into a room full of red draperies, luxurious in a style that’s at least a century old. I’m told that the furniture belonged to Ettore’s maternal grandmother, who occupied the lower two floors of the house until she died. Sitting by the window is Signora Nunni Cirino Majorana, Ettore’s sister-in-law, the last surviving member of his generation. When we enter, the signora is dozing, but she quickly wakes to greet us, evidently happy to have a visit. The signora is an old-fashioned, stylish lady—they don’t make them like her anymore. She carries her eighty-two years with unequivocal dignity, a powerful twinkle in her eye, her wits still very much about her:

“I’m old and a bit of an invalid, but I have a fondness for life that has never been any greater. I love living!”

She pretends not to notice how exuberantly bad my Italian is:

“Signora is displayed like a young rose!”

“Would you like an iced tea?”

When she talks, there’s a sharp clarity to her phrases, an intelligent humor that can’t be far removed from Ettore’s legendary subtle sarcasm. She’s particularly keen to recall her long deceased husband, and it’s via these recollections that I catch glimpses of what Ettore’s family life must have been like.

“Signora wifed a brother of Ettore, Luciano?”

“I did, I did. Ah, that Luciano . . . he made me wait for over a year!”

“ W hat age did signora owned at that time?”

“I was very young. And he was almost double my age. Everyone advised me against it, that he was way too old for me. But what did that matter to me? Why should I care? But for over a year I had to wait for him, not knowing if he’d marry me or not.”

“Why he forced you to long, Signora?”

“That was the problem, more than his age! He said he couldn’t do that to his mother; be so disrespectful, so tactless. I recall he even said that he couldn’t be so cruel. . . .”

“But he was olded fifty years!”

She smiles (that beautifully mischievous smile!) the way she does when she thinks that silence is more eloquent than words. She makes a gesture around her lips signifying that they shall remain pursed.

“But in end he husbanded you.”

“ Yes, I waited for him.”

“ Was it worthed?”

That permanent shine in her eyes redoubles in intensity.

“Yes, it was well worth it! Every little bit.” And then, as an afterthought, “His mother, Dorina, was a tough lady.”

It’s now Fabio’s turn to talk:

“Grandma was good, had a very generous heart. But she was also very tough! No one argued with her: You just did what she said. When I was a child, she terrified me. And, naturally, she also terrified her own children.”

The signora smiles, vaguely. Fabio lights up his pipe.

“She was a woman who knew she had to command for the family to move forward. She was full of initiative, of good sense, but with that she could also be overly protective.”

He takes a drag. A beautiful fragrance fills the room. From outside comes the standard Italian racket of ambulance sirens, motorini, human chaos.

“It’s true that her husband and children were useless with practical things. None of them, including her husband, could find his backside with both hands. But the fact is that she never accepted that her children would grow up. For her they were always children. She bought them pajamas; if they needed money, they’d ask her . . . and this, with sixty-year-old men!”

“I perused that Ettore lifed with mother until the year before his disappearance.”

“That’s right.”

“She buyed him pajamas too?”

“Of course.”

“How did mother react when she heard of his disappearance?”

There’s an embarrassed silence. I realize I screwed up. But the signora finally says:

“Years later, how often I heard her say,”—her voice gains a threatening tone, mimicking what must have been Dorina’s voice—“‘When that Ettore returns, he will hear me!’”

Ettore’s mother never believed that he died, it turns out. When she passed away at the age of ninety, many years after Ettore’s disappearance, she left him his share in her will. Regardless of how much Ettore would “hear her” when he returned, the prodigal son would likely have been quickly forgiven. In Italy, Fabio tells me, you are officially declared dead if you’ve been missing for a couple of years. By the time his mother died, Ettore had been “officially dead” for well over twenty years.

I decide to go for the jugular, to plunge into what could be the “attic” where Ettore is hidden:

“Did Ettore have a strong impulse to evade away from his mother?”

This time, there’s no embarrassed silence; the reply comes at once. “Fortíssimo!”

That was Fabio. The signora is nodding.

The next day, in the local paper, I read about an altercation that happened in Caltagirone, not far off. A very elderly lady confiscated her sixty-one-year-old son’s keys, cut off his allowance, and dragged him to the police station because he stayed out late at night. At the station, the son protested that his mother didn’t give him a large enough allowance and didn’t know how to cook. “My son doesn’t have any respect for me,” the lachrymose lady was quoted as saying. “He doesn’t tell me where he’s going and returns home late. He hates my food and keeps on complaining. This can’t go on.”

The police helped them make up and they returned home together, with the son’s keys and allowance restored.

Ettore was born in Catania, the second-largest Sicilian city after Palermo, with Mount Etna, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, looming in the background. Recently, the volcano has managed massive eruptions every three to four years, with minor affairs almost every year. (The cable car that goes to the top is one of the most expensive in the world: It has to be rebuilt every few years.) The eruption of 1669 reached Catania, almost twenty miles away, the lava filling its port and devastating the town. The city was resourcefully rebuilt in lava stone, its gorgeous baroque buildings now sporting a surreal dark gray hue. This would have lent it a heavy atmosphere were it not for the brutal Sicilian sun flooding its squares and avenues. Beyond the buildings, one can see Mount Etna smoking menacingly, but the pedestrians are far more worried about surviving the hysterical traffic.

Like everyone at the time, Ettore was born at home. A plaque, paid for by the Lions of Catania and the Etna, commemorates his birth at 251 Via Etnea. It reads, pompously:

In this house, on 5th August 1906, was born

ETTORE MAJORANA

Theoretical physicist

His timid and solitary genius scrutinized and illuminated the secrets of
the universe with the blaze of a meteor that too soon evaporated in
March 1938, leaving us the mystery of his thinking

The house at Via Etnea in Catania, where Ettore was born and raised.

Ettore’s mother, Dorina, issued from a very rich family; indeed, that magnificent house on Via Etnea belonged to her side of the family—as did several other houses in Catania, as well as extensive vineyards at Passopisciaro, at the foot of Etna. Ettore’s father, Fabio Massimo Majorana, is famous for setting up Catania’s first telephone company, so the name Majorana used to sound to Catanians a bit like Bell does in North America, synonymous with the telephone. As with all private enterprises, his venture was nationalized by Mussolini in the 1920s. Fabio Massimo received a pittance in compensation, but to sweeten the deal, he was appointed general inspector of communications, a cushy job in Rome. The family moved there in 1928.

Figure 1.1: A very abridged genealogical tree of the Majorana family, covering three generations. The name of the out-of-family spouse is indicated wherever the branches are followed.

If Dorina’s ancestors bestowed vast wealth upon the family, prominence and political influence came from Ettore’s paternal branch. The family jokes that their unusual name derives from Iulius Valerius Maiorianus, ordained emperor of the Western Roman Empire in AD 457; a jest, indeed, but one not totally divorced from reality, given the family’s uncannily successful and precocious offspring (see Figure 1.1).

The founder of the modern Majorana dynasty was Ettore’s grandfather, Salvatore, a self-made man who, while still very young, became an influential economist, lawyer, and writer, later becoming a member of Parliament; then minister of agriculture, industry, and commerce; and finally a senator. Out of nothing,⁶ he propelled himself to the summit of academic and political achievement.

Contemporary sources rate Salvatore as a “left-wing” liberal, “the only person capable of unifying the various factions into which the left was split.”⁷ Other sources portray him as a man who succeeded out of sheer determination and through the power of his intelligence and “despite ancient class traditions and personal interests.” Still others venture that he was “a man who antagonized the old powers, sometimes at a personal cost.” The last reference, I believe, is to a step-son of his who was assassinated. A powerful baron was indicted for the crime and found guilty of ordering the murder, only to be promptly freed.⁸

After the solid political foundations were laid by grandfather Salvatore, the family successes never ceased to multiply. Salvatore had seven children from his second marriage,⁹ and it’s rather telling that three of them became rectors of the University of Catania (for the record: 1895 to 1898, 1911 to 1919, and 1944 to 1947). Following the path from academia to politics mapped out by their father, they also became members of Parliament, important public figures, and notable politicians.

One family member of particular note is Angelo, the second of Salvatore’s sons, who was an example of absurd, if not obscene, precocity. Graduating with a degree in law at the age of sixteen, he was appointed assistant professor at the University of Catania at seventeen, publishing his first books the next year, to gain a full chair in constitutional law at twenty. He was appointed rector of the University of Catania at twenty-nine, a record to this day. Joining political life, he climbed to the powerful post of minister of finance in his thirties, to finally conquer the coveted position of minister of treasury, the second most powerful political post in the country.

For all his gifts, Angelo did something tremendously stupid at this point: He set out to solve Italy’s financial and taxation problems (which still plague the country to this day). He soon fell violently ill, dying at the age of forty-four of terminal exhaustion. At 251 Via Etnea, a picture still hangs on the wall showing him at the apogee of his career—on his return to Catania after being appointed minister of treasury, on a carriage surrounded by a cheering crowd.

“I perused that Ettore’s uncle, Angelo, acquired full professorness while aging at twenty,” I say, the Italian language screaming in pain.

“It’s remarkable, isn’t it? He was still a minor; you officially became an adult at twenty-one in those days. When he took up his professorship, his father, Salvatore, had to sign for him because he couldn’t legally do it. Imagine that! A full chair in constitutional law and he couldn’t legally sign. . . .”

“Incredibly precocitous!”

“Yes, but you must realize they had to work extremely hard for it. Angelo and all his siblings,” says the signora.

“I perused that they endured a verily tough regime.”

“Durissimo! All up at six, they worked all day, following a strict plan of studies laid down by their father, interrupted only by the briefest of breaks for meals or to go to the bathroom, working late into the night before being packed off to bed. That’s how the family successes were built. Those children didn’t play.”

“And that’s how they educated their own offspring,” Fabio continues. “Ettore and my father, before they were sent to school in Rome, studied long hours at home under the rigorous guidance of their father. They also didn’t have much room to play.”

We know what effect this had on Ettore—it turned him into a twisted prodigy—but it appears the story was quite different with his brother Luciano.

“My dad was not like the rest of the family, though. He never put pressure on us or forced us to study. He almost never talked of our past family glories. He used to say that as soon as you make children imitate their ancestors you kill their creativity. But in truth, I think he just didn’t want to burden us.”

The signora joins in pleasantly:

“My husband was really kind to the children. None of this nonsense Ettore and those other poor kids had to suffer. He was lighthearted, always playing with them, games, pranks, jokes. Always! It still warms my heart to think of their giggling filling the corridors of this house. . . .” She lowers her voice and her face changes into fake sternness, “Often at my expense.”

“Why, signora?”

“Bah! . . . I could spend a whole afternoon recounting the horrors I had to suffer because of this lot!” She gestures toward an abstract location.

“For example, he’d stuff the kitchen tap with cardboard, then sit with the children until I turned up, and politely ask me for a glass of water, just so that they could all see me getting drenched.”

She’s enjoying her show of indignation (she’s a great actress). Fabio and I are trying not to laugh.

“Another time, when I dozed off in a rocking chair, he made a circle with alcohol all around me and set it alight. Imagine my fright when I woke up! Until I heard them chuckling.”

A few more stories along the same lines are reported, to Fabio’s merriment. I get the idea that Luciano’s pranks were legendary.

“But you liked it, signora.”

“Me? What nightmares did I endure, because of this lot.” She gestures toward the same undefined location. Her face then loses its fake rigidity and she joins us in our mirth. “Ah, my Luciano was so very kind to the children. . . .”

“Papa was a grown-up child,” Fabio sums up.

Later I’m shown Ettore’s and Luciano’s school report cards. By this time they were attending a Jesuit school in Rome: They got marks for things like piety, civility, good behavior, urbanity . . . Ettore got 10 out of 10 in all; Luciano’s card is a laughable parade of 5s and 6s.

“They had very diversified personalities,” I comment.

“Is it too obvious?”

I realize I’m getting an image of the pressures Ettore must have endured by the negative: by learning about the way his brother reacted to those same pressures. In such an austere environment, you either become an anarchist or by the age of four you’re doing cubic roots in your head and winning chess competitions. Ettore’s early successes in chess, by the way, were reported—with awe—by a newspaper of the day.

Of Ettore’s many uncles, I should highlight Zio Quirino Majorana (the third of Salvatore’s sons), who was a physicist at Bologna University and corresponded with Ettore until the end. Today, Quirino Majorana is best known for never having believed in Einstein’s theory of relativity, performing several complex experiments to disprove it. His attitude has been labeled “very Sicilian”: He didn’t care what the whole world thought; he believed that relativity was rubbish, and he was going to prove it. His fundamental honesty then surfaces in the fact that he never failed to report the negative results emerging from his experiments. But he kept on trying, stubbornly.¹⁰

Ettore’s father, Fabio Massimo, is the fifth in Salvatore’s remarkable litter, and he was definitely a man haunted by family expectations. But if his own political life was low-key, he was still a very successful businessman, despite being hopeless with money. By all accounts, Fabio Massimo was a disaster with practical things: His wife Dorina took the family reins. He looked after the children’s education, but she collected money, took care of property sales and acquisitions, and kept track of the family’s finances. If anyone needed any money in that house, they’d ask her.

Between such a mother and father Ettore grew up—predictably timid and eccentric, just like his siblings. One wonders how Luciano managed to be such an exception.

But I soon realize that if Luciano and Ettore had very different temperaments, as attested by their wildly different Jesuit-school report cards, they also had a lot in common. They shared a room until the year before Ettore’s scomparsa (disappearance). On their school report cards, they both got 9s and 10s in the academic entries: study, diligence, benefit.

“Luciano was aeronautical engineer?”

“Yes, but he had to give it up. His mother was afraid of him flying and told him to quit. Which he did, unquestioningly.”

“After that, he makes designs for telescopes, no?”

“Yes, he designed the solar telescope up on Etna, for example. And another two: one in Monte Mario, in Rome, and another at the Observatory of Gran Sasso in L’Aquila.”

“He was a very curious man,” the signora continues, “always interested in problems that might improve technology. For the sake of solving them, never for the sake of money!” she adds, as if she should have disapproved of her man’s aloofness in financial matters; should have, but didn’t.

“Father also prepared one of the first proposals for a bridge over the Messina Strait.” I know what he means: The deep strait separating Sicily from the mainland is more than just a metaphorical chasm between cultures. It’s been said that a bridge straddling it—a common promise made by lunatic politicians—would cost more than putting a man on Mars.

“Let me show you something,” says Fabio, producing a letter from a huge folder. Recognizing it, the signora lets out some heartfelt laughter: “We should frame this treasure and put it on a wall!”

“In 1966, Papa sent Ferrari plans for a new type of car engine. It was built upon an idea he knew well from his days in the aeronautical industry. He’d designed engines for planes, different types of propellers and fuel feeding systems, and applied some of those ideas to cars. Why not? Back comes this brilliant document.” He passes it on to me.

On Ferrari’s letterhead is one of the most arrogant letters I’ve come across, and I’ve seen my fair share of scientific referee reports. Luciano is thanked for his endeavors, which have been well noted by Ferrari. However, he is informed, his contraption evidently could never be adapted to the complex engines built by that company; indeed one doubts that it could be of any practical significance whatsoever. Fabio waits for my inquisitive look before dropping the punch line:

“He’d sent them plans for a turbo engine.”

The signora roars with laughter. Quite a few cars with turbo engines contribute to the din that comes from the street.

Later I find that Ettore’s brother also worked on a prototype for an electrical train, with a similar response: He was ridiculed on the grounds that “such a train would require an electric wire running all the way along the track!” And in his attitude of laughing off the stupidity of the world, I find a common trait between Luciano and Ettore. They’d both get 10 out of 10 in “suffering poorly lesser intellects,” in accepting rejection as part and parcel of originality. Ettore was a cheeky bastard: You can see it from the way he played with Fermi, right from day one, even on his induction day at Via Panisperna. I now see that it runs in the family.

We talk about originality and the scientific establishment, and I’m asked my opinion. I have strong views on the matter, so I manage to talk in Italian for ten long minutes. Listening to the tape, even I can’t decipher what the hell I’m saying. I admire Fabio and the Signora’s patience and politeness—their ability to keep a straight face.

I finally manage to steer the conversation away from my opinions.

“Why Uncle Quirino work in Bologna?”

“One day Papa Salvatore found out that he was dating a girl in Catania. I don’t know how Quirino managed to slip out from his studies, but he did and even seduced a girl into the bargain! Over dinner, Salvatore simply ordered his son to pack, no reasons given, and sent him off to suitably monastic friends in Bologna. Dating girls wasn’t permitted.”

Gradually, I’m getting the picture of this unusual family. We’re obviously talking about a clan with a strong binding energy, where the whole is more important than the parts, and where, during Ettore’s generation, the head, the nerve center, was his mother, Dorina. I’m shown, not without pride, the cradle where Ettore slept as a baby. It’s truly sweet—they used it for four generations: Ettore’s father and uncles; Ettore and his four siblings; Luciano and the Signora’s three children, including Fabio Jr. himself; and finally, as Fabio tells me, his own two children, now in their teens. That cradle symbolizes a bond that cuts through generations. Perhaps for this additional reason, setting fire to a cradle is such an aberration, such a stain. It would be a crime even before it’s mentioned that a baby was sleeping in it at the time.

In one of the nearby bedrooms, Ettore was born. I was born at home, too. Being born at home creates a sense of attachment to a place that’s absent in those who first see the light of day in a hospital. I can sense it at 251 Via Etnea: The house is haunted. Just as traces of urine from several generations pervade that cradle, the spirits of the past have entrenched themselves in the house.

The cradle where Ettore slept as a baby. It has served well four generations of disgruntled geniuses.

“How mother Dorina deaded?” I pidgin along.

I’m shown a photograph of Dorina’s wake, her body spread on a bed as if she were asleep.

“Thus one dies,” says the signora, looking at the photo.

“One day she got home,” Fabio picks up, “and said she felt tired and didn’t want any food. Salvatore and Maria, the children who still lived with her, at once panicked. They called the doctor and told him it was an emergency.”

I laugh. She must have been hard as nuts. My grandfather was just like that. “The doctor listened to her heart, and reported that it was nothing to worry about, she was just tired, that was all. But she looked him in the eye and said, ‘Thus one dies.’”

“Thus one dies,” echoes the signora.

“The doctor left. And two hours later, she was dead.”

Signora is still nodding, as if by considering Dorina’s words, she might be contemplating her own death.

The high school where Ettore studied, today a major grafittiartgallery. Gems include a defense of the right to be stupid and quotes from Epicure, as well as endearing all-out anarchy (“Scuola di merda,” pink flying pigs, etc.).

Instead, Ettore worked on his own at home, when he didn’t while away his days at Café Faraglino or the Casina delle Rose, a delightful place in Villa Borghesa, a large park in Rome. At the Casina, a close-knit group of friends gathered around Ettore: his brother Luciano; Gastone Piqué, from whom he was inseparable; Emilio Segrè; and the “three Giovannis” (Enriques, Ferro-Luzzi, and Gentile Jr.), among others. Over glasses of wine and some serious gormandizing, they conversed endlessly, sometimes discussing science, philosophy, or literature, but more often gossiping as teenagers gossip everywhere, taking the piss out of the world (specifically their hydraulics professor, who they considered a first-class idiot). It

“Fabio, you were the one to answer the phone, remember?”

There’s an awkward silence; he doesn’t take up the lead. I look more closely at him and see that there are tears in his eyes. The signora and I let the silence unroll.

“One night the phone rang, and I picked it up. I was a little kid. It was . . . I forget, it must have been Maria or Salvatore. They told me to go call Papa, that it was very urgent. I ran; Papa came to the phone ash-faced, as if he already knew the news. They hardly exchanged any words. He hung up, and I can never forget what he said at that moment.”

His voice falters. The silence returns.

“He said, ‘Now she knows where Ettore went.’”

For a while, none of us says anything. It’s getting dark, but the heat coming from outside is still relentless. The signora and I let Fabio compose himself. He dries his eyes.

“You see, Papa never talked about Ettore to us. Maybe he felt it was too heavy going for children. But Ettore must have been permanently at the back of his mind. And of Dorina’s mind. Something that silently affected them to the end of their days.”

Looking at the photo of the dead Dorina, with all her children around her, I see the parallel with the cradle they all used through so many generations. Wakes are also times of family unity.

“Strange thing, this one of photographing dead people,” says Fabio, looking at the picture.

Now she knows where Ettore went. . . . This woman who terrified three generations looks calm, relaxed, as if enjoying the most pleasant of dreams.

TWO

Nuclear Crisis

Just to make things more theatrical, Ettore’s science itself revolved around energy gone missing. Had he worked on time machines, conspiracy theorists couldn’t have had more fuel. But it’s a fact: For most of Ettore’s life, no one knew where vast amounts of energy had gone. Energy was seemingly disappearing from the face of the Earth, unaccounted for, evaporated forever. Perhaps this might not sound so bad in Sicily, where “people have a knack for vanishing,” as I was once told at a café in Catania. Skeptical, I picked up the local paper, La Sicilia. To the amusement of my interlocutor, right there on the front page was the “storia triste” of a certain Rita Cigno, “la donna scomparsa,” who’d vanished into thin air twelve years before. The family had enlisted the services of a clairvoyant who had just been jailed for fraud. I recalled Signora Nunni Cirino telling me how she’d been pestered by a similar professional of the occult.

Whether it’s OK or not for people to vanish (not always to be found dead at the bottom of a pit), the very Sicilian Ettore was associated with an energy sink on a cosmological scale. But rather than add to this mystery, he helped solve it. Only to leave us with a larger conundrum, deep in the waters near Catania, as that other newspaper clipping—the one that prompted me to board a plane to Sicily and write this book—had hinted. Deep in those waters lies Ettore’s Nobel Prize.

You already know what it’s for: the neutron’s sissy little brother, the neutrino.

E = mc²: Energy has mass, and mass is worth energy. That’s what the most famous formula in the world tells us. The exchange rate is very large, the square of the speed of light, c², but conceptually matter and energy are equivalent: two sides of the same coin. Neither can be created or destroyed; they can only metamorphose, change in form and type, the overall amount of mass-energy always remaining the same. “In nature nothing is lost, nothing is gained, everything transforms,” as in the adage of Antoine Lavoisier. When I launch a rocket into space, quite a lot of energy in the form of motion is gained, but it’s not created out of nothing: It is born out of the chemical energy spent in burning fuel. When two particles collide and new ones are created, the type of mass-energy changes, but not its total amount. Conservation of mass-energy is one of the most sacrosanct principles of modern science, and it’s as if Ettore’s disappearance was the final twist in a long drama entailing energy destruction.

Yet that’s precisely where Ettore’s main discovery lies. It concerns “vanishing energy” and how it revealed a new particle, pathologically shy, almost impossible to detect: the neutrino. A perfect analogy between discoverer and discovered, observer and the observed, Ettore and his neutrino—an analogy spoiled only by the neutrino’s lack of a domineering mother.

Instead, the neutrino had a domineering father: the often revered, always feared Wolfgang Pauli.

A brilliant Austrian physicist, “Pauli’s mere presence in a city [was] enough to make all experiments go wrong,” it was universally said. In the vicinity of theoretical physicists, his effect was similar: To him everything was ganz falsch, “utterly false,” and he could be awfully nasty in his delivery of criticism. He was highly respected because his opinions were often, if not always, correct and also because he had equally high standards with regard to his own ideas. When he met the Dutch physicist Paul Ehrenfest, the latter felt compelled to remark, “I think I like your papers better than you.” To which Pauli replied, “I think I like you better than your papers.” The two became good friends.

A well-known anecdote describes Pauli, after his death, being granted an audience with God to discuss the secrets of the universe. After watching the old man scribble a profusion of formulae on the blackboard, Pauli explodes: “Das is ganz falsch!” Even God spoke out of His ass, according to Pauli.

But Pauli was also a complex man who drank way too much and endured long periods of extreme depression. His mother had committed suicide, and his father got remarried to a woman Pauli loathed, traumatizing him for the rest of his life. By 1930, Pauli had gone through several unhappy relationships, including a very short-lived marriage. (His wife dumped him for a chemist: “Such an average chemist,” he commented.) In 1931, he had a severe nervous breakdown and became a long-term correspondent and friend of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who treated his “neurosis.” Ettore was nicknamed Il Grande Inquisitore; Pauli was sometimes labeled the “conscience of physics.” It seems that such roles come with a price.

In a historic letter dated December 4, 1930, Pauli wrote to the famous nuclear physicist Lise Meitner—“Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen”—and proceeded to apologize for his intended absence from an important meeting due to take place in Tübingen, Germany. He explained that “a ball which takes place in Zürich on the night of the 6th to 7th of December makes my presence here indispensable.” The meeting in question was intended as a forum to discuss an extraordinarily grave problem in nuclear physics, something that had triggered a major crisis, casting doubt upon the respectability of the whole field of research. Pauli had sorted out his priorities correctly, favoring dance and flirtation over saving science from the perils of self-contradiction; but as a consolation in his letter to Meitner he offered a solution to the puzzle. “I dare not publish anything about this idea,” he wrote, before branding his solution “a desperate way out.”

In his letter, Pauli proposed a new particle—the neutrino, which he’d later call “that foolish child of the crisis of my life.” A few months before, he’d divorced his wife after less than a year of married life; shortly afterwards, Jung had to record four hundred of his dreams before he was deemed “treated.” Perhaps the ball he went to in Zürich wasn’t wild enough; perhaps giving birth to an idiosyncratic new particle wasn’t particularly fulfilling for him. As a memento of his frustrations, the particle has stayed with us.

With the massive benefit of hindsight—and simplifying a situation that was far, far more complex—I could shamelessly summarize nuclear physics in the early 1930s as follows: We’re made of atoms, which have a nucleus with a positive charge surrounded by clouds of orbiting electrons with a negative charge (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2). The chemical properties of a substance result from the actions of the outer electrons and their ability to bring atoms together into molecules. Explaining the behavior of these electrons is the subject of atomic physics, but by the 1930s a new branch of physics had emerged concerned with the nucleus: nuclear physics. This was to open up the world to a whole new “chemistry” no one had yet sampled.

Figure 2.1: The three main characters in the universe. The proton and the electron have the same charge but with opposite signs (positive for the proton, negative for the electron.) The neutron is electrically neutral. The caricatures’ mouths are meant as mnemonics.

Figure 2.2: An atom as we understand it today (not to scale, and with a very large pinch of salt). The nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons. Electrons whizz around the nucleus at high speed.

Figure 2.3: An illustration of the numbers A and Z labeling any element and isotope, where we chose lithium (A = 7 and Z = 3) as an example. The lithium nucleus is inhabited by three protons and four neutrons.

The nucleus was known to contain two types of particles: protons, with a positive charge, and neutrons, electrically neutral (see Figure 2.1). Each type of nucleus, associated with each element in the periodic table, was characterized by two numbers: A and Z. A referred to the total number of protons and neutrons; Z to the total number of protons. The total number of neutrons was therefore A minus Z. For example, gold has A = 197 and Z = 79; that is, its nucleus has 79 protons and 118 neutrons. Lithium (used in many laptop batteries) has A = 7 and Z = 3 (see Figure 2.3).

In the early 1930s, we knew the world was made of the elements in the periodic table, but not exclusively: Radioactive isotopes were regularly being discovered. A given element in the periodic table has fixed A and Z values, but trace amounts of “twins” of these elements had been discovered in nature, with the same Z but a different A. For example, most oxygen atoms in nature have eight protons and eight neutrons, but 0.2 percent of oxygen atoms have eight protons and ten neutrons.

Such nonidentical twins were called isotopes. Because they had the same Z, and thus the same outer electrons responsible for chemistry, they had the same chemical reactions and other similar properties.¹¹ In an isotope, only the nucleus was different, because it contained a different number of neutrons. The overall mass per atom was therefore different, but other than that, chemistry was blind to the distinction between an element and its isotopes (see Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4: The three isotopes of hydrogen (Z = 1). Regular hydrogen (with A = 1) has only one proton in its nucleus. Deuterium (A = 2) has a proton and a neutron. Tritium (A = 3) has a proton and two neutrons. The nuclei of all these isotopes are orbited by a single electron (not represented) and so have the same chemical properties.

These alternative versions of the elements existed in tiny amounts in nature, and it was difficult to “distill” or isolate them. But they had a striking property: Most of them naturally disintegrated into other elements or isotopes and in the process gave off especially energetic radiations. Because this phenomenon was first discovered in the element radium, it was called radioactivity. The process had astonishing features.

The energy associated with the radiations given off by radioactive disintegration was much, much higher than that in chemical processes: about a million times higher! Thus, those who studied nuclear physics must have realized at once that they had in their hands an enormous energy source. Explosives, at the time, resulted from particularly energetic chemical reactions. I wonder who first made this alarming connection.

Three types of radioactive reactions were known, associated with the three types of radiation that they gave off. They were labeled alpha, beta, and gamma. Alpha radiation was the least energetic and could easily be stopped with a sheet of paper. An alpha particle was made up of two neutrons and two protons, and it signaled the transmutation of a given element into another element with A reduced by four and Z reduced by two (see Figure 2.5).

Beta radiation, on the contrary, signaled a “sex change” in a neutron within the nucleus. Somehow a neutron became a proton, emitting very energetic radiation that could be stopped only by sheets of aluminum. Later, scientists understood that the stability of the nucleus is the result of balancing the number of neutrons and protons (something Ettore helped explain, as we shall see). If an isotope had a surplus of neutrons with respect to the optimal number, it was liable to convert one of its neutrons into a proton, leading to a transmutation into an element with Z increased by one but with the same A value (see Figure 2.6). In the process, it emitted the very energetic beta radiation, soon identified with an electron moving close to the speed of light. Electrons emitted during beta radiation are not to be confused with those orbiting the nucleus, as they are emitted directly by the nucleus and are much more energetic.

Figure 2.5: In alpha decay, a nucleus ejects an alpha particle (constituted by two protons and two neutrons), thereby losing two of its protons and two of its neutrons. After alpha decay, the nucleus transmutes into another with A reduced by four and Z reduced by two.

Figure 2.6: In beta decay, a neutron inside the nucleus converts into a proton, emitting a very energetic electron: the beta ray. Thus the daughter nucleus has the same A as the mother, but its Z is increased by one.

By far the most powerful form of radiation was gamma radiation. This was an extraordinarily energetic particle of light, a photon (see Figure 2.7). No transmutation occurred as its result; rather, gamma radiation was emitted when the nucleus shook off surplus energy after one of the other types of radioactive disintegration had taken place. Gamma rays could be stopped only by very thick layers of lead and were by far the most biologically destructive of the radioactive radiations. Mutations, cancer, and tissue damage were among the horrors gamma rays could inflict (see Figure 2.8).

Figure 2.7: A gamma ray is a particle of very energetic light. It signals an energy offload by the nucleus, typically after undergoing one of the other types of decay. In gamma decay, the nucleus is simply letting off steam, and its A and Z remain unchanged.

Figure 2.8: Alpha particles can easily be stopped by a sheet of paper. For beta rays, a sheet of aluminum might be a safer bet; whereas for gamma radiation, a thick layer of lead is the only protection against severe radiation damage.

It was quickly understood that radioactivity was precisely the ancient dream of alchemists! It opened up the doors for a new type of “chemistry,” in which elements transmuted into each other, for the number of protons and neutrons in nuclei did change during a radioactive process. By contrast, in chemical reactions, atoms merely changed their organization into molecules, or collections of atoms, but the nature of each individual atom remained unchanged. Turning sulfur into gold required nuclear physics. It was the “chemistry” of radioactivity that finally realized the original but failed motivation for chemistry—the philosopher’s stone: the key to alchemical transmutation into gold.

What I’ve just described in a couple of pages originally took over thirty years to clarify. And although it’s an oversimplification, with appropriate poetic license I can justifiably say that by the early 1930s, nuclear physics had pretty much fallen into place except for one tricky detail: the spectrum of beta decay. It was no laughing matter, and one must sympathize with the man who’d rather go to a ball than rack his brains about it. But, as usual, the problem was solved by the dancing grasshopper, while the ants labored at the lab. The matter that concerned all those ants, due to gather in Tübingen while Wolfgang Pauli licked his emotional wounds in Zürich, was simple: Energy was disappearing.

One can portray Ettore’s 1938 eclipse as vanished energy, but that’s only a metaphor. What was happening during beta decay was, by contrast, brutally concrete. A mother nucleus transmuted into a lighter daughter nucleus, and if you multiply their difference in mass by the square of the speed of light, according to the dependable E = mc², you obtain the amount of energy that should be carried away by each electron making up beta radiation. But the electron invariably had less energy. Much less.¹²

Figure 2.9: The spectrum of beta radiation. By considering the mass difference between mother and daughter nucleus, and using E = mc², one finds the “available” energy which should be carried by the beta ray. But it invariably carries less energy.

Where the hell was this energy going (see Figure 2.9)?

The energy, quite possibly, was going nowhere. It was just disappearing, and our principle of conservation of energy was wrong. Such was the opinion of Niels Bohr, who in a lecture given in May 1930 stated, point blank, “At the present stage of [nuclear] theory we may say that we have no argument, empirical or theoretical, for upholding the energy principle in the case of beta-ray disintegrations, and are even led to complications and difficulties in trying to do so.” He was well aware of what he was insinuating—he added, “Of course a radical departure from this principle would imply strange consequences.” However, he was prepared to take the leap and conclude, “[Still, the facts] may force us to renounce the very idea of energy balance.”

I like Bohr’s courage, but his was really a lazy explanation. After all, the same violations of energy conservation didn’t plague the other radioactive processes, alpha and gamma emissions, and Bohr offered no explanation for this. This logical flaw excited Pauli’s acerbic criticism; and thus in his December 1930 letter to Lise Meitner, Pauli suggested the presence of “a third man” to solve the mystery (see Figure 2.10). Of course energy was conserved—Bohr was a total donkey. It was just that an invisible third particle was taking it away. The neutrino was born.

Figure 2.10: The full picture of beta decay according to Pauli. A ghost particle, the neutrino, carries away the missing energy.

What Pauli did is a common form of scientific witchcraft: He willed something into being by the power of logic and generalization. It’s called making a prediction, and it is quite similar to what happens when a jealous wife finds that her husband is spending nights away from home. She postulates the existence of a lover even though she hasn’t actually seen one. And, of course, in due time she’s usually proved right.

For example, in the 1840s, French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier predicted the existence of the planet Neptune to explain strange perturbations in the orbit of Uranus. He claimed that this “Neptune” planet was too far away from us and therefore too faint to have been observed thus far, but that it must be there because its pull on Uranus was detected. He even directed astronomers as to where and when to look for the new planet. And when they pointed their telescopes to the appropriate spot they duly found the ghost planet, within a degree of Le Verrier’s pronouncement. It was in this tradition that Pauli proposed the existence of the elusive neutrino. As Pauli put it, “I admit that my expedient may seem rather improbable from the first. . . . Nevertheless nothing ventured, nothing gained. . . . We should therefore be seriously discussing every path to salvation.”

But after so much boldness, Pauli remained cautious about his creation. Admittedly he was suffering from a nervous breakdown, for unrelated reasons. But after his famous letter to Lise Meitner, excusing himself from the meeting and proposing the neutrino, the next time he aired his brainchild was on July 31, 1931, almost eight months later. Grossly overweight and in pain from a broken shoulder (having fallen down some stairs while drunk), Pauli finally owned up to his creation at a lecture in Pasadena, California. Even then he refused to write up his lecture; but a journalist attended it, and the New York Times reported on the neutrino hypothesis. For once, the overly keen science reporter was correctly ahead of the scientist.

We should not be too tough on Pauli, however. The luminaries of the time dubbed his idea “implausible,” “crazy,” or “simply wrong,” and for a good reason. Some time later, Rudolph Peierls computed that so intangible was the neutrino that we’d need a few light-years of lead to stop it and make it interact with our detectors. That’s a few million times the distance between the sun and Earth—in lead. So, the neutrino was not a ghost, but it was close.

Perhaps a bit like Ettore as a child.

THREE

Frankenstein’s Youth

After the grueling homeschooling imposed on his children by Fabio Massimo, Dorina perceived that they needed a more official learning environment. She sent them off to boarding school in Rome, where the boys attended the famous Jesuit school at the Istituto Massimo alle Terme, housed in the beautiful palace that today belongs to the Roman National Museum.¹³ Much has been claimed about child abuse in such places, most of it unwarranted—at least in the sense of naked sexual abuse. In the sense of severity, I’m not so sure: The hardships imposed by the Fathers upon their pupils would certainly be considered child abuse nowadays.

To my speechless surprise, the Jesuit Web site fails to refer to Ettore but parades Luis Buñuel, the surrealist filmmaker, as a leading alumnus. (This, to me, is a bit like linking a pedophile site to the Vatican Web page.) Buñuel refers to his schooling with the Jesuits as “seven years of sickness, of complete lack of the most basic freedom, of evasion into erotic fantasy.” Such was the exalted milieu where Ettore spent his youth.

A talented boxer and one-time collaborator of Salvador Dali, Buñuel’s films include gems such as the details of the defecation method adopted by Simon of the Desert (a saint who spent forty years atop a twenty-meter-tall pillar preaching Christianity); a mock picture of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper enacted by tramps and taken with a unique camera (a woman’s vagina, it turns out); and a depiction of skeletons dressed in full Episcopal regalia being dragged across the ground by a pair of mules.

All of this the Jesuit fathers take in their stride with unflinching religious poise—which makes their silence regarding Ettore all the more poignant. Particularly since Ettore was indeed a believer—as attested by the 10 out of 10 mark for piety embellishing his school report card—and he remained so to the very end. In stark contrast to Buñuel, who titled the last chapter of his autobiography “Thank God I’m Still an Atheist.”

For his reverence, Ettore is now ignored by the Jesuit Web site. Ultimately, the Fathers know that he’s a greater threat than Buñuel to their view of the world. The dark matters Ettore stirred up when he disappeared in 1938 are so disturbing that the Fathers cannot take them in their stride. They inspire more fear than the jibes of an ostensible atheist.

Between the ages of eight and fifteen, Ettore was “internal” at the Istituto, boarding together with his brothers and cousins. At the age of twelve he skipped a year, spending the rest of his schooling in the same class as his brother Luciano (who was one year older). Then Dorina moved to Rome (leaving Fabio Massimo on his own in Catania for three years) to make sure her kids were being properly fed and looked after. By all accounts, Ettore didn’t make many friends during this period. He was often described as shy and introverted, although his mathematical stunts caused awe among the other students. At the age of eight, for example, Ettorino solved in his head a difficult exam problem that the final-year students had all failed to crack. But his reputation for genius was not fully reflected in his academic marks, which were good but not exceptional. And with awe came fear: Most of the other kids avoided him as if he were Frankenstein. He must have felt very lonely and isolated.

Like most people who have trouble relating to others, Ettore had a single friend to whom he was very close: Gastone Piqué. And it’s through Gastone’s accounts (given in TV interviews many years later) that we glimpse Ettore’s other side as a teenager: funny, even outgoing, when in the right company, and very affectionate to his few friends. He could imitate the Sicilian peasant accent to perfection, causing riotous laughter among his friends. He played football in the corridors of the family’s house with his brother. In what must have been a hell of a bash, they even trashed the family car. . . .

A family outing, August 1926. From left to right: Dorina, sisters Maria (on the ground) and Rosina, Ettore, Gastone Piqué, and Ettore’s maternal grandmother.

“The family always had lots of vacations. They were rituals,” Fabio tells me at Via Etnea. It wasn’t all hard work for the Majoranas, it appears. Work hard, play hard.

“Every year the family followed a well-defined pattern, led of course by Dorina. She’d say, “‘Next week we’re doing so-and-so,’” and next week she’d be marching her troops there.

“Typically, they’d spend the vendemmia—the annual picking of grapes and making of wine—at Passopisciaro, where the family vineyards were. The family owned a huge house there.”

I’ve visited the place, at the foot of Mount Etna. It’s stunning, and the wine—based on the Nerello Mascalese grape—is excellent. The modest main square is called Piazza Ettore Majorana, and it has a small statue of him in one corner. Some of the wine made there is renowned for coming from very old vines. I note that “old” means they were probably planted around the time Ettore was spending his days there.

“Then they’d spend a month each at two resorts: Abbazia (now in Croatia) and Montecatini, a nice little spa town in Tuscany. They traveled by car, driven by the family chauffeur, and stayed always at the same hotels, where the family was well known by the owners.

The vineyards of Passopisciaro, with Etna in the background. The wine is highly recommended.

“And finally for one month they’d travel in Europe, usually to Paris. Not always, but most of the time Paris. The family loved the French capital.”

“Not bad,” I thought.

“They all went?”

“Yes, as children and later as adults. She’d give the orders and they followed, even when they grew up. Except for my father, who was more independent as an adult. He had his own car, chased after girls, had his own life. . . .”

The signora chuckles.

I ask, “The family had cars?”

“Yes, the family loved cars. In fact, they had one of the first cars in Catania.”

In Italy they called them quadrocycles. This particular car was a Fiat 507, old style.

I continue in my mangled Italian:

“I hearded Ettore displayed a bad scar in his hand on his right-hand side . . .”

“ . . . because of a car crash! That’s true.”

I knew about this because it’s the departure point of a conspiracy theory. It appears that a certain vagrant, calling himself Tommaso Lípari, tramped along the Mazara del Vallo road, drank with immoderation, and . . . could do cubic roots in his head. Signore Lípari had a deep scar on his right hand and rumors spread that he wore a metal bracelet with 5/8/06 etched on it. It’s a contorted story, but Signore Lípari was not Ettore Majorana.

“Ettore had a big problem when he drove,” Fabio continues. “He couldn’t help steering toward wherever he was looking. If he chose to admire the landscape, everyone had to start shouting at him to look at the road instead.”

I smile: Horrible driving is a common feature of physicists. Erwin Schrödinger was effectively banned from driving (if his passengers stopped talking to him, he’d go off the road); Paul Dirac’s drives around Cambridge are still legendary; Leó Szilárd didn’t even have a license and had to be driven around while seeking Einstein’s endorsement of the atomic-bomb project.

“Ettore owned a license?”

“No, only my dad.”

“And how did they accidented the car?”

“A joke, a bunch of friends. . . . They all got into the car, not knowing about Ettore’s little handicap. Presumably he felt the need to admire a wall.”

We laugh heartily: No one was badly injured. But Ettore carried that distinctive scar on his right hand for the rest of his life.

“Grandma Dorina requested a full report and my dad said it had been himself driving. Of course, she knew what had happened and turned a blind eye.¹⁴ But to me this story shows that Ettore wasn’t just gloomy, as some picture him. He didn’t only have dark thoughts. He was also playful, at times. And a good friend to his friends. It’s been said that once, meeting with a friend worried to death about an exam, he made a bet that he could sit the exam in his friend’s place without anyone noticing. He won it.”

It’s obvious he had an irreverent side.

“Do you want me to show you something?”

Fabio picks up a book by a famous scholar—the leading proponent of the suicide theory explaining Ettore’s disappearance. The cover depicts a tortured-looking Ettore, with mournful eyes focused on the beyond.

“People love exaggerating Ettore’s dark side. Particularly these intellectuals. . . .” I get a whiff of scorn for nonscientific culture.

“Do you notice something funny?”

I scan the book but see nothing odd, except that Ettore looks very sad. From the family folders, Fabio produces the original photo. The photo employed on the book’s cover is a detail edited from a much larger print. Behind Ettore is Cousin Angelo. Lying on a bed in front of him is Fabio Massimo, Ettore’s father. Dead.

“Now, tell me who doesn’t look tortured and sad at his father’s wake?”

I tell him that this may have been done by the publisher without the author’s permission, but I make a mental note to chase down the author later.

Besides Luciano, Ettore had three other siblings: Rosina, Salvatore, and Maria. With such an overprotective mother, it’s hardly surprising that only two of the children ever married. The others lived with their mother until she died. Even Ettore lived with her until 1937, the year before he vanished.

The eldest, Rosina, married her German-language teacher in what I suspect must have been a bit of a scandal at the time. But today the family has the fondest memories of her “kidnapper,” a certain Werner Schultze, a German who came to live in Rome. He was never naturalized, but he refused to give himself up for conscription during World War II, even though he was still bound by German law. They had to hide him in the cellar throughout the war, his wife and the rest of the family knowing full well that he was risking death by firing squad if he was caught. When I asked Signora Nunni Cirino if he was against Hitler, her reply was simply that “he was against war.”

Salvatore Jr., the next in the brood, was primarily “a man of religion,” who left behind a huge pile of unpublished theological manuscripts detailing his interests in the logical foundations of religion. Some of the same issues appear in Ettore’s writings during his dark period between 1934 and 1937. It wasn’t just the random sightings that led his brothers, Luciano and Salvatore, to spend months looking for him in various monasteries in the vicinity of Naples after Ettore’s disappearance in March 1938.

Salvatore was also osservante, “practicing.” Every morning he went to mass at seven. He then returned home to study theology, reading and writing all day. Three days a week he went to the Regina Coeli prison to perform acts of charity for the inmates. He was a cross between a hermit and an intellectual. Signora Nunni Cirino sums it up this way: “He was a very odd person. With a golden heart . . . but different.” Her husband was less forgiving, calling him “poltrone”—“lazy bastard.”

Maria Majorana was the youngest sibling, and by all accounts she was a free soul in an environment not much given to great liberties. She was an outstanding pianist (Schumann and Debussy were her core repertoire), took part in amateur theater (Chekhov plays, mainly), and recited poetry (Verlaine and Mallarmé were her best loved). She’s been described as romantic and sensitive; deeply cultured. But she’s also been called a “head in the air.” Artistic talent in a house so full of science and politics was tolerated, but ultimately disapproved of.

As the youngest sister, she was always fussed over by Ettore, who did her mathematics homework (which she hated), gave her impromptu lessons in astronomy under the dark skies at Passopisciaro, and generally spoiled her. Being poetically inclined, she probably took the corresponding license, but here’s a beautiful memory she recorded (in the preface to Bruno Russo’s book on Ettore) from a summer holiday that she and Ettore spent together:

“It was a bright and beautiful day during our Summer vacation in Abbazia. We were bathing together and swam farther out than usual. Suddenly I saw Ettore pale, stiffen, as if he was about to faint. He looked totally vulnerable, defenseless and for a moment I panicked. Then I placed one hand under his chin to keep his head out of the water, and kept on swimming with the other, pulling him slowly towards the rocks. After a while he felt better and we returned together to the shore. But I’ll never forget that moment, the expression he had at that moment.”

One gets the impression that Ettore spent a lifetime on the verge of drowning.

When Ettore was sixteen, Dorina transferred him and Luciano to the Liceo Torquato Tasso, a school known for its academic achievement (today a major graffiti-art gallery). Ettore passed his final exams with flying colors and registered for an engineering degree at the age of seventeen. At the university he never went to lectures, simply “borrowing a book from a friend two days before each exam, skimming through it and getting top marks,” according to his friend Gastone, who was still a colleague. This nearly cost him a failing grade in drawing, where perhaps a bit more practice was required.

The Casina delle Rose, a charming place in Villa Borghesa (nowadays used as Rome’s cinematheque).

was here that Ettore’s gregarious side came out: funny and cultured, informal but sophisticated. His sense of humor was almost British—subtle but ultimately caustic and quietly antiestablishment.

The atmosphere during these gatherings was one of convivial chatting, but unavoidably Ettore’s deep sense of culture would surface during conversation. Ettore loved theater: Shakespeare and Pirandello were his favorites. Gastone comments, “He knew everything of Pirandello and when someone talked about him his eyes shone.” It’s not a coincidence that Ettore references Ibsen in his second letter to Professor Carrelli at the time of his disappearance, in which he compares himself to a heroine in an Ibsen play. We get more of this cultured humor in Ettore’s letters to Gastone. From Passopisciaro, he writes:

Dear Gastone,

. . . I haven’t written before because I don’t like rushing, especially in certain things. You should be aware that I’ve given myself to the most scientific of the pastimes: I do exactly nothing and time goes by all the same. In truth I’m busy with an incredible number of things, but it being vile facts of the mind rather than facts of the world, better discount it.

If I don’t have an accident I’ll rejoin you in a few days. You shouldn’t believe it impossible that an accident may befall me in the flower of youth; on the contrary have it for very likely. From birth I’ve been an obstinately immature genius; time and experience have been useless and always will be, and nature won’t be as malign as to let me die prematurely of artherosclerosis.

But since vast and inscrutable is the sea of all my scorn for the sub-lunar world, it’s not without jubilation that I hurry to cross the threshold of your renowned living room in Via Montecatini, neither without trepidation will I drink the bitter chalice to the last drop.

A hug,

Ettore.

From the Tuscan spa town of Montecatini, lodging at Hotel Tamerici—a masterpiece of bad taste—Ettore further informs his friend of the following:

Dear Gastone,

I stoically drank three drops of bitter water, then another ten, then six glasses.

I am in waiting; may God take care of me.

The languor that pervades me lends to my soul the tenderest feelings. How much gentleness in the respite of a man who has sipped a liter and a quarter of purgative water! . . . The delicate fascination of your pretty region and of those who people it and a subtle sense of nostalgia complete the spell.

I will see you in three days (perhaps tomorrow I’ll book a room) and my mind rekindles with that thought; because there is no brighter joy for me than to see you.

Ettore

PS: The duty calls me. Goodbye.

Later he goes to see his friend at the nearby beach resort of Viareggio. He writes in a postcard:

An autographed photo of the young Ettore Majorana.

Dear Gastone,

I’ll come probably tomorrow, in the afternoon. I’ll actively and orderly look for you: 1stat number 42, 2ndat the Gatto Nero, 3rdat the Lido Felice, 4thunder those windows.

With affectionate salutations,

Ettore.

The last reference is to a lady Gastone was courting (removing suspicions of homosexuality between the two). And it’s Gastone himself that gives us an insight into Ettore’s feelings in that quarter. In an interview he said, “Since he was not physically beautiful, he had a complex toward women. Because beautiful, properly, he wasn’t; indeed, he was rather ugly. And I can tell you that at the Liceo there was a girl, the daughter of a prefect, a very intelligent girl, and this young man, so prodigious, such a genius, truly attracted her. But he did nothing, even avoided her, because he was a victim of his inferiority complex, due to his ugliness.”

I have no idea what the taste in men was at the time, or why Ettore thought he didn’t fit it. But that his best friend agrees he was ugly is quite damning. It’s significant that Ettore failed his compulsory military medical for being too slim, having a “chest too small.”

Ettore smoked a lot, but he wasn’t a great drinker. Too bad—it might have helped him loosen up with women. Maybe his tragedy would not have happened if he’d enjoyed a more substantial drop than the civilized glasses of wine he sipped at the Casina delle Rose.

How, then, to conciliate Ettore’s two sides: the timid and the gregarious?

Jokes and pranks aside, one should not get the impression that Ettore’s youth was a happy one. It was dire. Between the priests and his parents, his basic humanity was destroyed. He was brought up by social outcasts and grew monstrously distorted, lacking social skills and independence, full of ineptitude. People like him—when they don’t become criminals, drug addicts, or psychopaths—can’t help being intellectually superior. But they’re “Frankensteins,” artificially gifted, clever “against nature.” And like the literary monster, behind the bestial genius lies a very different nature: tender in a way that can never be fully realized; longing for love, knowing full well that it will always be denied; a furnace of kind emotions that the ogre exterior will always screen. Occasionally, as in the gothic tale, a blind man who can’t see their ugliness will hear out their plight and show sympathy; only for others to step in and inflict further humiliation.

This may explain Ettore’s later demise. Alloyed with such a “monstrous” existence, it is not surprising to find aggressive emotions geared toward destruction or, worse, self-destruction. Behind a facade of sadness and depression there’s a drive to run away, to escape: whether by suicide, disappearance, or just a clean break with the family. It’s a drastic and never guilt-free decision: to sever all ties with those to whom we owe our existence. But perhaps it would have been worth the price for Ettore, if it achieved the one thing he most wanted: to annul that grim existence, trading it in for a new one.

One can hear in the runaway Ettore of several years later that voice of longing and frustrated love. At nineteen he thought he was ugly, but perhaps he’d been made ugly by his environment. Perhaps he was just an ugly duckling, a swan accidentally left in the wrong nest, who’d one day reveal his true nature. By evading his family, he was also burning a baby—himself, in that cradle he may have grown to despise. His urge to escape is brutally patent in Fabio’s words at Via Etnea when I question him about his father’s efforts in 1938. He says: “Do you know the crux of the problem? No one searched for Ettore more than my father. He did everything, everything he could to locate him and help him back. But after one year, he didn’t search anymore. He understood that if Ettore hadn’t returned, it was because he wanted to be far away from the family, on his own. It was his choice. And they should all respect it.”

Comically, it was only after Ettore disappeared and acquired the notoriety of a ghost that numerous women emerged, claiming to have dated him. At least two Theories of What Happened to Ettore employ a hidden lady,¹⁵ but both clash tremendously with everything we know about Ettore’s personality and hang-ups. This is not to say that there were no women in his life—real, well-documented human beings.

On the contrary, there were. And one of them was present, filling his mind, on the day he vanished from Naples in 1938. We will have a unique chance to meet her, in due course. She makes Ettore fit the Frankenstein bill like a glove: the monster full of kind emotions who is condemned to hide and observe the happiness of others through a window, longing for a love that could never be his.

FOUR

Poltergeist Exposed

While Ettore was struggling with his identity, so was his elusive soul mate, the neutrino. For years no one believed the neutrino could be detected, assuming it even existed. But then something wild and menacing happened—in the shape of a mushroom cloud!

Estimates of the neutrino’s inability to interact with ordinary matter had been made early on, starting with Pauli himself. He even considered the possibility that perhaps the neutrino didn’t interact at all, scolding himself for proposing a “metaphysical” hypothesis. “I have done a terrible thing. I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected,” Pauli said shortly after proposing the neutrino. Top-brass nuclear physicists Hans Bethe and Rudolph Peierls added, after some calculations, that “one obviously would never be able to see a neutrino.”

But there are some stubborn and optimistic people in science called experimentalists—who usually disregard theoretical pronouncements—and in 1934 James Chadwick (the discoverer of the neutron) made a first attempt at detecting the neutrino. He met with no success, but his experiment established the first landmark in the field, what physicists call a bound to the neutrino’s reactivity (or lack thereof). His failure proved that the neutrino had to be able to travel more than 150 kilometers (about ninety-three miles) through air before interacting with a single atom. This was no theorist’s guess: It was an observational result in view of the known sensitivity of his experiment, plus his negative result. His experiment was powerful enough that if the neutrino reactivity were even slightly superior to that figure, he would have seen one.

Maurice Nahmias then performed an even more sensitive experiment, eliminating unwanted background by going thirty meters (about a hundred feet) underground into the Holborn tube station in London, near the British Museum.¹⁶ His failure to detect the neutrino raised Chadwick’s figure to 31,000 kilometers (about 19,000 miles): The neutrino could travel at least this distance through air without making itself known. Of course it might be able to travel much, much further unimpeded. Nahmias’s number was merely a “lower bound,” in the parlance of experimentalists.

These were the observational results, but in 1933, Fermi (Ettore’s boss and equal) discovered a masterful way to compute any quantity related to beta decay and neutrino emission. Remarkably, his theory predicted a new reaction that could potentially be used to detect the neutrino: inverse beta decay (see Figure 4.1). Schematically, beta decay happens when a neutron decays into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino. Fermi’s theory predicted that a neutrino could hit a proton to produce a neutron and a positron or antielectron. What is an antielectron, you might ask? Is there, then, an antineutrino? Ettore made his mark by answering these very questions. So bear with me—these particulars will later form an important part of his story, but they are irrelevant for the moment.

Details aside, Fermi had just proposed a concrete reaction that could be used to detect the neutrino, and had found a way to compute its predicted intensity. But when Bethe and Peierls actually performed the calculation in 1934, they concluded that the neutrino would require a water target 1,000 light-years across to have any chance of colliding with a proton, inducing inverse beta decay. That’s over 60 million times the distance between Earth and the sun. A very deep ocean indeed would be needed before the neutrino would let its corporeal nature be known. No wonder Pauli was as depressed by his theory as he was by his sex life.

It would be normal to give up at this point, and scientists did in fact give up on the neutrino for a few decades. Something dramatic had to happen to change the landscape of neutrino detection: a couple of atomic bombs being dropped, for example. Indeed, the bomb was essential in bringing the neutrino to light. Ironically, the specter of nuclear weapons was the price paid for exorcising the poltergeist.

Figure 4.1: Inverse beta decay takes place when a neutrino hits a proton (either on its own or inside a nucleus), converting it into a neutron and emitting a positron or positively charged electron (mouth changed for consistency).

As it turned out, the calculation done by Bethe and Peierls was correct if one wanted to detect a given neutrino: In order to detect it, one would need a target 1,000 light-years thick. But the problem in practice was quite different: Scientists wanted to detect any neutrino—it didn’t matter which one, and they didn’t even care if most of the neutrinos passed through the target unnoticed. Since they didn’t have access to oceans light-years deep but instead had to contend with more realistic targets, the probability of a single neutrino interacting was minuscule—as computed by Bethe and Peierls. But what if they bombarded their target with a huge flux of neutrinos? One of them was bound to interact eventually, even if most of them didn’t. The trick was to recognize the ethereality of the target and go for numbers: Shoot an absolutely ridiculous swarm of bullets at the target, hoping that eventually one of them would get stuck. Of course for this to work, they still needed a very powerful neutrino gun. Like a nuclear bomb.

And indeed, the man who eventually detected the first neutrino had a very strange perversion. He was obsessed with the beauty of nuclear explosions.

Fred Reines was a Los Alamos physicist who’d spent his formative years testing nuclear weapons, wondering if “this man-made star could be used to advance our knowledge of physics,” as he’d later say in his Nobel Prize speech. Some sources claim he belonged to a group of scientists violently in love with the bomb, calling it their baby, reassured by the beauty of that mushroom cloud, so much like a star in the sky, but so close to us that its brilliance amounted to darkness. These Dr. Strangeloves did love the bomb: even more so aesthetically than scientifically or politically. Ettore was emphatically not one of them, as will later become clear.

But by 1951, Reines must have had a crisis of doubt: He applied for leave to work on theoretical issues rather than bombs. He was thirty-three years old and had devoted his life to the construction of the death threats upon which world peace so precariously rested. Now he found himself in what he described as a “stark empty office, staring at a blank pad for several months, searching for a meaningful question worthy of a life’s work.” I note a tinge of bitterness in this statement. It occurred to him that detecting a neutrino might cleanse his possibly dirty soul.

Reines soon found a collaborator in Clyde Cowan, after a casual encounter while the two were stranded at the Kansas City airport (there should be a monument erected to plane delays there). What follows sounds like complete lunacy: They had the idea to detect inverse beta decay at the core of a nuclear explosion.

It does appear suicidal: You place a nuclear weapon at the top of a tower thirty meters (about a hundred feet) high. Some forty meters (130 feet)away you dig a well. You cover the entrance and suspend from the top a detector designed to sense the end products of inverse beta decay, the telltale signature of the neutrino. Air would then be pumped out of the deep shaft, to create a near vacuum down the well. As soon as you trigger the bomb, you release the detector down the shaft (by remote control, needless to say). So the detector is freefalling through the vacuum when the massive shock wave passes through. In a vacuum, the shock wave has no support—no medium in which to propagate—so the detector miraculously avoids destruction, falling onto a bed of feathers at the bottom of the well, ready to detect the huge swarm of neutrinos being produced by the concoction of isotopes created all around. A few moments later, a fireball ascends in the sky, and all hell breaks loose, but by then you should already have radioed in your results (see Figure 4.2).

“The idea that such a sensitive detector could be operated in close proximity [to] one of the most violent explosions produced by man was somewhat bizarre,” Reines admitted. “But we had worked with bombs and felt we could design an appropriate system.” I wonder how much of what was released of this initial plan was a joke or a red herring. It certainly has the flavor of classified information.

Eventually, the two men did something somewhat less extreme—they used a nuclear reactor as their neutrino source. In response to this news, Fermi remarked, not without sarcasm, “I was very interested. . . . Certainly your new method should be much easier to carry out and has the great advantage that the measurement can be repeated any number of times.” As Reines himself put it, “Reflecting on the trail that took us from bomb to reactor, it is evident that it was our persistence which led us from a virtually impossible experiment to one that showed considerable promise.”

Figure 4.2: A kamikaze plan for detecting the neutrino: at the core of a nuclear explosion.

Their first attempt was made with the Hanford reactor, built during World War II to produce plutonium for the atomic bomb. They arrived in the spring of 1953 and set to work building and installing the appropriate detectors. The results at Hanford were inconclusive, but the party used the opportunity to perfect their detectors and develop an intricate series of unambiguous signatures of inverse beta decay, thereby eliminating the possibility of mistakes. Some of their techniques are still in use today.

No one believed the Hanford results, but Reines and Cowan felt encouraged nonetheless. In the fall of 1955, at the suggestion of John A. Wheeler, the group gained access to the new, much more powerful Savannah River reactor in South Carolina. Suddenly all their hard work paid off. They found that their techniques were already adequately sharp: All they needed was a more potent neutrino beacon—just like the one they now had. After many checks and repeats, on June 14, 1956, Reines and Cowan were fully convinced that they were detecting neutrinos—at the incredible rate of two neutrinos per hour!

At once they felt compelled to send Pauli a telegram: “We are happy to inform you that we have definitely detected neutrinos. . . . Observed cross sections agree well. . . .” To which Pauli replied, “Thanks for the message. Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.”

Dry, you might think. It was later discovered that Pauli and friends drank a case of champagne in celebration.

Many years later, Reines would confront Bethe, the man who’d pronounced the neutrino undetectable, over his statement. Bethe replied with his characteristic humor:

“Well, you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.”

And this is where Ettore’s mystery really begins. He never did believe what he read in scientific papers, and therefore noticed at once—possibly as early as 1932—something about the neutrino that nobody in the scientific community took seriously until very recently. He published his observations, and that’s a knotty story in itself. But what’s worse is what Ettore didn’t publish, and which was subsequently lost.

Frustratingly, all the work from Ettore’s dark years (1934 to 1937) vanished with him. Luciano shared a room with him and saw him at his desk every day, working away. More important, Ettore’s later work refers to notes written at this time. None of these notes have survived.

“In 1966, after grandma died, my father decided to take all of Ettore’s writings to the scientific archive in Pisa,” Fabio tells me. “Why have all this stuff at home, he reasoned, when it could be of use to other scientists? All his notes were at the Rome house, so he asked Maria to collect them. She gave him a box containing about 10,000 pages, and that’s what you can now find in the Domus Galilaeana.

“Now it could be that there were two boxes of scientific writings, the other one containing whatever he produced 1934 to 1937.”

“Then the second box should still be housed in Rome.”

“No. Precisely. It got lost,” continues Fabio. “There are all these crazy theories saying that spies stole his work, that he was trying to build an atom bomb . . .”

“ . . . here in Catania!” says the signora with amusement.

“But the unfortunate truth is that this important work got lost.”

Did he destroy it? Why? Did he lose it? Or did someone else lose it for him? Strange events certainly took place on the morning Ettore vanished from Naples.

“And what of Ettore’s personal things?”

“Those stayed with the family. They were kept in a safe.”

A safe? How cinematographic.

“The family safe,” says the signora. “It was next to Dorina’s bed. Only she had the key, kept in her vast bosom. It had all the family cash, important documents . . . and Ettore’s personal papers.”

“Then she can have destroyed any letters that not nice!” I scream in my atrocious Italian.

“I don’t think so. . . .” They cringe in horror.

I blush. I’ve obviously made a faux pas. Well, I know that I would have destroyed anything a dead relative wouldn’t have wanted exposed, and Dorina was probably a far more determined person than me.

“And who carries these documents now?”

“Ettore Majorana.”

“Excuse me?”

But I’d heard right. Ettore Majorana literally kept these documents.

I needed to go to Rome, to the institute where Ettore did his postgraduate work, where his mind first blossomed. The institute is in a bizarre location, at Via Panisperna. The street name sounds horribly like “pane e sperma,” “bread and sperm”—undoubtedly an odd type of sandwich. Particularly because whatever happened inside that building, it was certainly a hearty way to earn your bread.

FIVE

Bread and Sperm

An electric wire snakes from a laboratory window and climbs up a wall toward the roof, where it loops around the finger of a classical statue pointing vaguely to imperial Rome. The wire then disentangles itself from the marble digit to fly freely into the blue skies, aiming for the orbs, the supralunar universe, but stops at the beck of a fat balloon, hovering calmly above the building.

From down in the lab comes a cacophony, the discordant noises of mistuning. This exasperates a bespectacled young man, a nerd from the first pressing:

“Shit! Fuck! Shit! This fucking shit isn’t working again!” The abuse flies across the lab, catching the attention of another standard-issue nerd. He looks at a sheet of calculations, scribbled mad professor-style, fixes a number here, adjusts a knob there, mumbles, and finally releases a powerful hammer-fist of frustration on the desk: “Better go call Majorana.”

And off they run, like two kids, through the streets of Rome, bursting noisily into a lecture hall not far off. By the blackboard the professor stammers: “Sine of twent . . . er, no, cosine of twenty-five, which gives us, er . . . which gives us; no, cosine of forty-five, which is zero . . . no.”

Unflattering comments pour from the auditorium—everyone is amused. Everyone except one young man, sitting apart from the others, evidently pained by so much incompetence. The nerds from the lab zero in on him and whisper: “Ettore! Give us a hand with this.”

He briefly looks at the nerds’ misguided labors, then at the professor; he jots corrections on the paper given to him but has hardly finished when he looks up and shouts, “No!”

He drops the sheet, storms to the blackboard, grabs the chalk from the old man and:

“That’s how it’s done. See?”

A silence falls. The old man is speechless, and so is the class. Availing themselves of the thick embarrassment, the nerds gather up the sheet of paper with Ettore’s corrections and escape from the classroom. They dash back to the lab where they readjust the equipment, following Ettore’s revised figures.

“It’s working! It’s working!”

“That Ettore is a genius!”

A clear sound is finally heard.

Not far from where these events are taking place, at a radio station an important ceremony is about to begin. An orchestra plays, microphones collect its harmonies, the ether carries them for the benefit of whole universes, present and parallel. Formally attired gentlemen preside over a table on a stage. And there’s a lectern, begging for a speech.

The orchestra continues its performance as the speech is introduced by a comely young lady:

“Italiani, amici. . . .”

Another formally attired gentleman enters the room, radiating dignity, valor, accomplishment; the comely lady corroborates this impression:

“With the audacity of Christopher Colombus, the genius of Volta, the strength of the Caesars . . .”

We are talking about no less than the Cavaliere, the Honorable, the Valiant Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian superstar inventor, second not even to Christopher Colombus—even if half-Irish, from the whiskey-producing family Jameson, but made the more Italian by being a personal friend of Mussolini, and rumored to be working on a death ray capable of instantly carbonizing hordes of black undesirables in Abyssinia, carrying Italy anew into exalted Imperial Glory.

But today we’re merely celebrating an anniversary, the many years since electric wire has become a redundant accessory in this battle we fight to be heard by the entire universe. And Marconi, as the inventor, is to be glorified.

Ettore has by now gone home, following his lecture-room outburst, where a middle-aged lady is listening to Marconi’s ennoblement in the living room.

“Switch that radio off, Mother! Do you want to make me lose my temper?”

She lowers the volume—and smiles—only to raise it again as soon as he’s gone. Ettore has hardly reached his room before he hears a loud whistle from the radio. A terrible screech of feedback and interference: an electronic misfortune! Ettore frowns: How could they have let this happen, at a moment of such importance? At the radio station we see the engineers sweating profusely, readjusting knobs. The Cavaliere looks on, slightly disgusted. Who’s going to be blamed for the debacle? But a young radio engineer—knowing he’ll probably be singled out as scapegoat—has already found the answer.

“A very strong signal. From Via Panisperna. . . .”

At the lab, the nerds are blasting their signal at full strength; up in the skies their balloon, serving as an antenna, shivers with effort. The cacophony on the radio finally subsides as the nerds take over the transmission with a perfect twin of the earlier broadcast. The orchestra has been replaced by a gramophone playing the same music at the lab; and they have their own comely young lady who mimics:

“Italiani, amici. . . .”

But the music now smoothly shifts into a funeral march. At the radio station, the apprehension mounts, as they listen impotently to a broadcast that isn’t theirs.

“We have terrible news for you.”

The funeral march gets louder, more dramatic.

“Guglielmo Marconi is dead!”

The cavaliere allows his jaw to drop.

“With him, Italian physics dies!”

In his room, Ettore chuckles. So does everyone at the lab.

Later, the nerds burst into Ettore’s office at Via Panisperna.

“Ettore, Ettore! The police are interrogating your mother!”

He grabs one by the throat:

“Why did you tell them?”

“We didn’t. Let me breathe, Ettore!”

He briefly releases the pressure on the nerd’s throat.

“They said that only you could have broken into the transmission.”

Ettore places his head between his hands:

“Oh, my God. How am I going to face Mother now?”

He hears giggling—the nerds are already in full flight. He chases them, but they benefit from a head start. They run and cackle, shouting back to him:

“Only Ettore Majorana could have killed Cavaliere Guglielmo Marconi!”

“With him, Italian physics dies!”

Apocryphal, no doubt, but true to the spirit of the physics institute set up by Senator Orso Mario Corbino at Via Panisperna, Rome, in 1926. The scene comes from Gianni Amelio’s film I Ragazzi di Via Panisperna (The Via Panisperna Boys). That’s the tag by which the young physicists became known. The Boys’ knack for atomic and nuclear physics would place Italy at the forefront of physics for the first time since Galileo. What a mess they made of it!

One can almost hear the arguments Ettore had to endure at the Café Faraglino, as his friends tried to convince him to join the Via Panisperna Boys:

“But what are you doing sitting in engineering lectures, bored to death by those ‘braying donkeys,’ as you put it yourself?”

Senator Corbino had issued an appeal to all bright students in Rome to come and join his institute, where a very young Enrico Fermi was already installed in the safety of a cattedra. And Emilio Segrè, one of Ettore’s friends, had answered the call.

“At Via Panisperna you’ll be in the company of other geniuses.”

Except that Segrè was anything but a genius, and Ettore knew it. Flattery is often a proxy for self-flattery.

“Come on. I’ll introduce you to Fermi. You’ll be enthused.”

And that was how a reluctant Ettore first came to be a Via Panisperna Boy.

The Via Panisperna Institute was a bona fide scientific brothel, by all accounts. Pranks, bets, mathematical races, and the like abounded. Unless you’ve done science yourself, it’s not what you’d expect of scientists at work. But that’s how real science is done: in a climate not dissimilar to “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman.” A typical prank was to steal Fermi’s car keys, park the vehicle elsewhere, then replace the keys before their absence was noted.

“Did you forget where you parked your car, Enrico? All that mathematics must be hurting your memory!”

A brief preoccupied silence would befall the great Fermi. Then, suddenly:

“I want you to put my car back where it was. Now!”

And they’d smear him with laughter—for a split second, they’d caught him.

“Things like that happened all the time,” Boy Franco Rasetti stated many years later. With Fermi barely seven years older than the youngest of his students, they were more like friends than colleagues. They called each other by the informal tu, played tennis at lunchtime, and went walking on Sundays. Concomitantly, if things went wrong, it quickly became personal.

Relations between Ettore and Fermi grew particularly acrimonious. When they first met, Ettore presented Fermi with the full solution to a tough problem Fermi hadn’t been able to solve. That incident set the standard: There was a competitive streak in their relationship that became only stronger with time. In Amelio’s film, Fermi allows Ettore into the group without an exam, on condition he doesn’t tell anyone he’s beaten him at algebra. Again, apocryphal—but metaphorically correct.

It was common to find the Boys congregating around Ettore and Fermi, a difficult mathematical problem laid out for them on the blackboard.

“Start!”

And Fermi would chalk away while Ettore used nothing but his mind, hands in his pockets, pacing and mumbling.

“Got it!”

“So have I!”

The result would be conferred over, the winner declared, and money would exchange hands among the loud entourage. And it must have irritated Fermi a great deal that he often lost. “[Ettore] could easily have been a professional numerical prodigy,” Emilio Segrè wrote. After a while no one computed anything at Via Panisperna: In the absence of computers, if they needed a calculation done, they’d just ask Ettore. “What’s the integral of the exponential of cos x between 0 and 3?” And Ettore would supply the answer. Straight from his mind.

It’s not as if Ettore wasn’t aware of the storm he was whisking up and the effect he had on Fermi. Soon after his induction he wrote in a letter: “At the institute I’m becoming the most influential authority.” Fermi made statements like, “If Majorana can’t figure it out, no one can” (as documented in the memoirs of the other Boys). Or the naked admission, “Ettore is more intelligent than me.” The fact is that Ettore vexed him: In an environment where informality reigned, but where, pranks aside, he was supposed to be the boss, Ettore was the only one who stood up to him. The Boys all agreed that Majorana treated Fermi as an equal, often with haughtiness. Fermi felt humiliated by Ettore’s genius but also by his overall attitude towards science and life. Because beyond his lighthearted side, Fermi had a big complex. Not with regard to women like Ettore, but with regard to science.

As Boy Bruno Pontecorvo put it, “It was typical to note in [Fermi’s] face this childish and guilty smile, when . . . he lost his self-confidence, which happened, for example, in the presence of Majorana, who was endowed with an imposing personality.”

How a pampered genius like Fermi became riddled by an inferiority complex is a very sad story. Who knows how much it eventually contributed to Ettore’s disappearance . . .

The Via Panisperna Institute was the work of Orso Mario Corbino, a bald and chubby Sicilian exuding vitality, with an explosive nature and an iron will tempered by worldly knowledge. It was said that Corbino could with absolute sincerity utter the most unpleasant truths without causing offense. A brilliant and witty orator, twice a minister (of education and of economy) and an eminent personality among industrialists, no one pulled strings as shrewdly as Corbino. It’s telling that he managed to be part of one of Mussolini’s cabinets without joining the Fascist Party. In fact, he amassed and retained enormous influence without ever joining the Fascist Party, which under the circumstances may not be entirely flattering. An ambiguous character, successful in all terrains, he seems to have reserved his moral standings for ends rather than means.*

A famous physicist himself (in Messina and then in Rome) who’d started his career as a modest high-school teacher, Corbino led a double life: on one side his political career, business, and money, and on the other, laboratories and the interests of Italian physics. In 1926, Senator Corbino, then head of the Physics Department of the University of Rome, decided that the time was ripe to set up an institute of physics that would put Italy on the world map. That’s how he began collecting his “Boys,” as he called them.

The Via Panisperna Boys. From left to right: the chemist Oscar D’Agostino, Emilio Segrè, Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti, and Enrico Fermi.

At first the Boys were four: Enrico Fermi, Franco Rasetti, Edoardo Amaldi, and Emilio Segrè. In their inimitable style they attributed nicknames to themselves: Il Papa (the Pope) for Fermi, Il Padreterno (God the Almighty) for Corbino, Il Cardinale Vicario (the Cardinal Vicar) for Rasetti, and Il Prefetto alle Biblioteche (the Library Prefect) for Segrè. Ettore once signed a letter “with cordial salutations in the name of the Pope, the Sacred College, the Seminarists and the Minor Friars.” As we know, Ettore himself was Il Grande Inquisitore—the grand inquisitor.

* It would be easy to heap Mafia slurs on him—connections with the Freemasons or the king might be more realistic—but he was obviously more complex than that. Senator Corbino may have been an opportunist, not overly concerned with the means he used to obtain his ends, but he was too well connected to need to do anything overly dirty. At a time when Italy was undergoing a full transition to dictatorship, it is telling of that country’s intrinsic anarchy that a “free-standing” individual could sail through such troubled waters doing basically whatever he pleased and commanding huge resources.

Corbino being God the Almighty, it was befitting that Fermi should be Pope. Corbino took care of politics while Fermi, his emissary on Earth, was the scientific leader. A fanatic adherent of the recently discovered quantum mechanics, with a well-established international reputation (for the codiscovery of the electron cloud and the Fermi-Dirac gas), Fermi would have fallen victim to the “jealousy of the influential mediocre” had Corbino not intervened. Competing for a position in Cagliari, Sardinia, Fermi was bypassed in favor of someone who’d got his degree almost ten years before Fermi was born. The reason: the majority of the panel was against Einstein’s theories, the subject of several of Fermi’s papers.¹⁷ But Corbino swiftly found Fermi a full professorship in Rome before he had time to emigrate. Corbino then set about building up a group around him.

Franco Rasetti—the Cardinal Vicar, sometimes the Venerable Master—was the next to be hired. A sportive and muscular man like Fermi, they pronounced words in the same Tuscan accent, cackled in the same way, and had the same overweening attitude toward women. Fermi and Rasetti had been undergraduates together at Pisa, where they’d become inseparable. The signature humor at Via Panisperna is often seen as a relic from their student days.

To complete his squad, Senator Corbino raided the school of engineering for talent. One morning he announced to his class that Rome was about to acquire the best school of physics in the world. If there was anyone with a solid intellect and exceptional valor, he could step forward. But he “only wanted the best available students, worthy of the time and effort that would be spent on them,” as Fermi’s future wife, Laura, then a student, later related. Amaldi, a cherubic eighteen-year-old (promptly nicknamed Adonis) was the only one with enough courage to do so.

Another engineering student who answered the senator’s appeal was Emilio Segrè. Two years older than Amaldi, he wasn’t in Corbino’s lecture, but later heard about it and transferred to physics. If you’re impressed by the bureaucratic flexibility afforded by Rome University, let me disabuse you: These transfers were made possible only because Corbino told the usual vermin of paper pushers to shut up and go to hell.¹⁸

Coming from an extremely rich Jewish family that owned a large paper mill outside Rome, Emilio Segrè looks perfectly nerdy in photographs but is always elegantly dressed, draped in expensive clothes his physique can’t quite support. He was more serious than the rest, and Fermi and Rasetti’s humor irritated him. Indeed he was renowned for his bad temper, as attested by his alternative nickname, the Basilisk. As Laura Fermi puts it, “Just like the legendary serpent, Segrè threw flames from his eyes when he felt offended.” His touchiness left its marks on Fermi’s meeting table, which still has a big hole in the middle where Segrè’s irate fist fell at one point when the others didn’t let him talk. Such were the wonders of Via Panisperna.

Segrè was a good friend of Ettore, and it was he who praised Ettore’s skills to Fermi and introduced him to Via Panisperna. But it won’t take much deduction to realize that Segrè’s character combined with Ettore’s subtle sarcasm was bound to produce an explosive mix. Indeed, on the eve of Ettore’s scomparsa, an all-out vendetta raged between the two. And Ettore, it must be admitted, had done something “downright inexcusable” to Segrè.

Just before joining Via Panisperna, Ettore was having a blast, enjoying perhaps his only happy days. With Luciano, Gastone Piqué, Segrè, and a new friend, Giovannni Gentile Jr., Ettore spent his days at Café Faraglino or the Casina delle Rose, discussing physics and philosophy, joking and gossiping—more often than not, just wasting time.

When the fashion of skiing and mountaineering hit Italy, Ettore’s group of friends sardonically set out to “conquer Mount Velino,” a peak some 2,500 meters (about 8,000 feet) tall, 100 kilometers (about 60 miles) away from Rome. Probably following a drunken bet, they set off without any preparation, renting boots and equipment on the way. Under the moonlight they started the climb from a nearby village, snow to their waists, getting lost almost immediately. When a storm unleashed its fury, they strategically repaired to a comfortable osteria, where a mountain expert informed them that it was only by a miracle that their stupidity hadn’t cost them their lives.

Throughout these early years, Ettore’s tricks continued to inspire awe. When Segrè, studying for an exam, couldn’t understand a mathematical proof, Ettore supplied him with a simpler alternative of his own. Serendipitiously, Segrè was asked precisely that proof during the oral exam, getting full marks from an awestruck professor. When Gastone felt bewildered by a four-page-long problem, Ettore commented, “Look, those four pages can be summed up in four words. . . .” Again, luck had Gastone impressing his examiners with Ettore’s elegant reworking of the problem.

Ettore’s matriculation booklet from the University of Rome, where he was the ultimate nightmare to his teachers.

Ettore’s friends during this happy period describe him as a striking character. “His eyes were penetrating, dark, full of soul. He was one of those people that commanded attention just by looking at you.” Or “He was very singular. You wouldn’t find many people remotely like him.” Labels like “full of spirituality,” “very sensitive,” “skeptical of mankind,” and “downright pessimistic” abound.¹⁹ Ettore liked the philosopher Schopenhauer and was obsessed with Pirandello’s plays, in particular Six Characters in Search of an Author. Apart from science tomes, the only books found in his hotel room after he disappeared were Pirandello’s.

But even during this happy phase, Ettore remained aloof, his mind elsewhere. He regarded his teachers as idiots, insisting that they complicated things unnecessarily and didn’t know the subject matter in depth. At the end of one of his assignments he wrote, “The measurements have been executed and interpreted according to rules imposed by the competent authority. The foundation of these rules remains occult to us.” There are records of several rather acidic confrontations between him and his teachers. So Ettore studied on his own, in his room, valuing only discussions with his friends at the Faraglino or the Casina. He was happy, but he was also adrift.

Until Segrè beguiled him into joining Via Panisperna, at the young age of twenty-one. His scientific genius then flourished—for all his sins. For that’s when Ettore’s neurotic, traumatic streak resurfaced. It would stay with him until the assumed end of his days.

How does genius emerge? A formula has long been sought, when the point is that such a formula cannot exist. Genius is arcane, alchemical, almost accidental: It doesn’t lend itself to industrial production. But it’s clear that it’s triggered by personal relationships. As a teenager, Fermi and a friend had scoured the secondhand markets looking for science books, reading and discussing them avidly, even when they were the most inappropriate sources. The direct knowledge they acquired may ultimately have been useless—but the coloring, the resonance that this attached to their mental frame is unique, impossible to reproduce, nothing that can ever be matched by the battery force-feeding of schools.

The same personal rapport and camaraderie infused Via Panisperna, and its genius ultimately sprang from it. Regarding the discovery of the double helix by Watson and Crick, it’s been said that “there had to be an extraordinary interaction between . . . people before the mind could do what they did. Jim and Francis talked in half-sentences. They understood each other almost without words.” There was “[a] marvelous resonance between . . . minds—that high state in which one plus one does not equal two but more like ten.”²⁰

Genius is the result of all this, but like a rare flower it’s also incredibly fragile. It attracts jealousy and must be protected. Italy is particularly fond of producing talent only to destroy it. That’s where Senator Corbino stepped in—he became the stone wall that protected talent from the prevailing harsh winds, like a Sicilian Giardino Arabo.

When Ettore arrived at Via Panisperna, the four first-generation, Mark I Boys formed a perfect team. Initially, Fermi was the theorist and Rasetti the experimentalist, but soon they were all doing whatever was needed, at great speed and with efficiency. They first worked in atomic physics but quickly ventured into the deeper waters of nuclear physics and field theory. As with Watson and Crick, the adjustments they made to one another’s personalities made for an easy and prolific collaboration. And as they churned out paper after paper, they became noted abroad.

There was a true all-out effervescence within the group. As Segrè put it, “The speed at which physicists were formed in Fermi’s school was quite amazing. Naturally this was due in part to the enormous enthusiasm [Fermi] imparted on young people, never preaching, but teaching by example. After a short time at Via Panisperna one found oneself completely absorbed in physics, and when I say completely I’m not exaggerating.”

Into this happy family Ettore stormed like a tornado. He was critical, he was better than they were. They feared him. His nickname, Il Grande Inquisitore, sums up the terror he must have inspired. His refusal to perform experiments—Ettore was a pure theorist—irritated everyone. And they were social—a well-oiled collective. He was not. He was an individual, a lone wolf. He was always an interloper among them.

Ettore’s mind during this period was in permanent turmoil. They’d tell him the results of their experiments, and he’d come up with an explanation almost instantly. He corrected the theories of Fermi, who didn’t fully understand the error of his ways until years later. Ettore became their in-house human computer. But more important than his circus-style tricks was his originality. He continually surprised them with new ideas and theories, explaining what the top minds abroad were struggling with: the neutron, the neutrino, nuclear forces, radioactivity. His talent looked supernatural, and he scared the shit out of them—especially Fermi.

To avoid myth making, one must recognize that a lot of Ettore’s apparent powers was mise-en-scène. One can trace the date of some of these “supernatural” flashes, in which new theories came to Ettore in one go, only to find that they were already neatly written down in his notes; that he’d actually solved the “new” problem just given to him a few days before. But the point is that the others didn’t know it: As with Feynman and other prodigies, Ettore was an equal mixture of genius and con man. And it takes a true genius to con the prank-loving likes of Fermi and Rasetti.

Segrè wrote in his book on Fermi, “Ettore was superior to his colleagues in intellect and depth. . . . His nature made him work on his own. He didn’t participate much in our studies because for him they were too elementary. But he helped us with theoretical problems and continually surprised us with his original ideas.” He was very tough in his appraisal of other scientists. “So much severity was nothing but a manifestation of an unsatisfied and tormented spirit,” according to Amaldi, but “such severity softened, even disappeared, close to friends; and was even worse with respect to his own work.”

One thing caused the group’s unmitigated exasperation: Ettore’s attitude toward publishing. The Boys published as much as they could, good or bad, ready or unready, following the “publish or perish” mantra that’s part and parcel of survival in academia. The rule at Via Panisperna was to publish the volume-fluffing crap in Italian, the good stuff in German. Ettore couldn’t have been more at odds with this. Presented with an experimental result, he’d immediately work out a theory, inscribing his calculations on a packet of his beloved Macedonia cigarettes, which he chain-smoked. Everyone would be impressed, but when they pressed him, saying, “Why don’t you write it up and publish it?” he’d reply, “What’s the point of publishing? It’s child’s play.” And he’d scandalize the Boys by smoking the last cigarette, crumpling the pack, and throwing it—along with the theory—into the garbage bin.

That’s how he never got credit for Heisenberg’s theory of nuclear forces and the neutron, the Weisskopf-Pauli second quantization of the complex scalar field, or the parity-violating properties of the neutrino, which earned Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang the Nobel Prize some thirty years later. They could all have been named after Majorana. But because he never published his work, only the Majorana neutrino—his inseparable soul mate—carries Ettore’s name today.

In the film I Ragazzi di Via Panisperna, Ettore works out that the atomic nucleus is made of protons and neutrons. Big deal? At the time, people thought the nucleus contained protons and electrons, in spite of the best evidence to the contrary, some of it discovered—but not understood—by Rasetti. Paradoxically, given his later career, even Fermi didn’t fully believe in neutrons as late as 1932—the proton and electron sufficed as the bricks of the world.

Yet for years, Ettore was aware that there had to be another particle in the nucleus, heavy like the proton but electrically neutral; there simply was no space for “nuclear” electrons. He also knew that a new force, stronger than electricity, must hold the nucleus together. He worked it out and then threw it away with the last cigarette as he crumpled the packet. This much is not apocryphal, as attested by the memoirs and TV interviews given by several Boys, many years later.

But in the film we see Ettore working it out at Fermi’s house, where he’d sought refuge from his mother, having been beaten up by the fiancé of the woman he was courting! That never happened, of course.

One night Ettore can’t sleep. And since he’s using a spare bed installed in Fermi’s studio, he goes through Fermi’s notebook (labeled “unsolved problems”) to pass the time. There he finds perfect evidence of the neutron’s existence. Except that the Boys “have understood nothing,” as he murmurs, with truth right in front of their noses.

In the morning, Ettore has it all worked out. But then he burns his work, page after page dissolving into ashes. When Fermi asks, “What was that?” Ettore replies, “Some old stuff I didn’t need,” adding, “My head is full of ghosts.” Fermi gives him the smile of a father figure—completely unaware of what has just happened. Months pass, and Ettore merely looks on as the Boys struggle with the problem of the stability of the nucleus, trying to fit electrons into a habitat where they can’t possibly live.

Even more apocryphally, the film shows an incident where one night much later Ettore catches a wannabe Boy breaking into the institute. Ettore teases the hopeful with an entrance exam: The subject is the nucleus. The intruder is keen and clever, but Ettore fails him because he says that the nucleus is made of protons and electrons. Ettore advises the terrified kid not to believe what he reads in books; and reveals to him the secret of the “neutral proton,” as he calls it.

The wannabe Boy is eventually taken on board—he’s meant to be Bruno Pontecorvo—and he’s shown as being present (an anachronism) when years later Fermi receives the news that Chadwick in England has discovered the neutron. Fermi is incensed: Why wasn’t the discovery made at Via Panisperna? The relevant data was all in his “unsolved problems” notebook! Pontecorvo’s eyebrows suddenly rise to the ceiling: Shell-shocked, he tells Fermi what happened on the night when he first met Ettore, and how Ettore had told him about the “neutral proton.” Fermi then understands what Ettore was turning into ashes at his house, all those years before.

A thermonuclear explosion takes place. Fermi seeks out Ettore and shouts at him: “Don’t you see what you’ve done?” Ettore is dismissive: “What’s the problem? Didn’t someone find it in the end?” “Yes, but it could have been you! Us!” Ettore becomes insulting: “I envy your love of physics, of the inanimate things. You love them because they’re dead.” Fermi slaps him and screams: “It’s not a matter of vanity! Can’t you see that to find something new and then burn it is criminal. It’s like a father burning his own child!”

I’m sure this never happened, or Ettore might have knifed Fermi in good Sicilian form. Because—as we know—there was a burnt baby in Ettore’s tragedy. He hadn’t burnt him, but someone in his family was accused of doing it. Yet Ettore did burn his neutron theory; that much belongs to documented reality.

In the film, this is why Fermi and Ettore fall out. They only make up years later, when Fermi is at odds with a bigger conundrum called uranium. Something unearthly had happened when the Boys bombarded uranium with neutrons—Fermi wasn’t quite sure what. Fermi journeys to Sicily to meet Ettore, where he lives in isolation at a remote farm. They talk and smoke the pipe of peace; Fermi leaves Ettore his notebook on uranium. It’s 1938.

On that night, Ettore can’t sleep, haunted by nightmares in which his mother parades him before visitors, forcing him to do mathematical tricks. He gets up and we see him going through Fermi’s notebook, feverishly doing calculations.

And then he raises his head from the papers and looks very seriously into a fixed point behind the camera.

Did he see it? We’re led to think so.

At dawn he burns his baby. Again. And a few days later, he vanishes without a trace.

SIX

Strong Interactions

Uranium? . . .

Beyond the anecdotes of a film, what were they actually doing at Via Panisperna? Uranium does come into play, but not until much later, around the same time that Ettore’s mind collapsed, some five years before he finally abandoned the world. We can’t be sure that the prospect of nuclear weapons was central to what happened, but it certainly added complexity to his drama. Yet in this early period the Boys’ tale was still innocent—their work was almost philosophical in nature.

They toiled on the recently discovered theory of quantum mechanics, the construction ruling the behavior—or misbehavior—of the microworld, the home of the neutrino and other elementary particles. Quantum mechanics has a reputation for being bizarre: It affirms that the microscopic universe works in a radically new way—like the insane, the schizophrenic, the bipolar. No wonder that old school physicists, including Einstein, found themselves in a state of denial with regard to the new theory.

We can predict with pinpoint accuracy the future locations of large objects, such as planets and spacecraft, but it turns out that for electrons and nuclei we have to content ourselves with probabilities. They’re plagued by indeterminacy and are free to do as they wish, limiting the rein of the scientist. If humans can be fickle, electrons and nuclei are even worse. Imagine that an unstable isotope wakes up in an irascible mood. Will it decay or not? We can only predict probabilities for what is intrinsically an erratic, “irrational” process.

Indeterminacy permeates the microcosmos, and it’s even more insidious than day-to-day uncertainty. No one would flinch at the idea of asking where a car is and what its speed might be; ask any policeman giving you a speeding ticket. But a quantum particle would offer a dilemma: You can measure either its speed or its position exactly, but not both. The more you know about its position, the less you know about its speed and vice versa. You can also settle on a compromise between knowing its approximate speed and position, but indeterminacy can’t be avoided altogether. If a policeman told a quantum particle its location when it was allegedly found speeding, the particle could take the lying bastard to quantum court and win the case. This is essentially the content of the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Several aspects of quantum physics offer similar dilemmas. A quantum particle can sometimes behave like a wave—its “wave function” is a vibration spreading throughout space; but at other times it can behave like a lumpy object well localized in a particular place. Arthur Eddington descriptively dubbed quantum objects wavicles. To make it more schizophrenic, whether a wavicle acts like a lumpy particle or an extended wave depends on how physicists ask questions about it. Quantum mechanics is like the fraudulent statistics supplied by politicians—who phrase the questions to elicit the answers they want to hear. In quantum theory the question affects the answer.

If all of this weren’t enough to make Sir Isaac Newton barf in his tomb, quantum mechanics then allows superpositions of opposites. Infamously, Schrödinger’s cat can be 20 percent dead and 80 percent alive. The reluctant beast is placed in a cage where there’s a cyanide device attached to a quantum system (e.g., the radioactive decay of a single nucleus of an isotope). Quantum systems can be in superpositions of opposites: If I say that a nucleus has 20 percent probability of having decayed and an 80 percent probability of not having decayed, I mean that until I make an observation (ruled by those odds), the nucleus is in a ghostly superposition of the two. Therefore so is the cat, whose fate is correlated with the quantum process: She collapses into one “reality” only when an observation is made, say, by presenting her with a fish and noting enthusiasm or lack thereof.

Schrödinger’s cat is a contentious animal, created for shock value, but quantum mechanical superpositions in the microworld are entirely uncontroversial. They were discovered by means of “spin,” a major player in Majorana’s saga. Protons and electrons spin like tops, a property discovered in 1925 by two young Dutchmen, George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit. But these spinning “tops” are unlike any other: Given a chosen direction for their rotation axis, their rotation “speed” is fixed, the only choice being whether they rotate one way or the other: “spin up” or “spin down” (see Figure 6.1). So important is spin to quantum mechanics that its central number, Planck’s constant (which plays a role in quantum physics akin to that of the speed of light in relativity), is a measure of “spinning.” In units of Planck’s constant, the spin of the electron and proton is half: either plus or minus half, depending on whether it is spinning up or down.

Figure 6.1: The spin of quantum particles, illustrated with a proton. Given a direction for the rotation axis (set, say, by an external magnetic field, here represented as a dashed line) the proton rotation “speed” is fixed, the only choice being whether it rotates one way or the other. The clockwise direction (left) is called spin up; the counterclockwise rotation (right) is referred to as spin down.

Eerily, one can concoct superpositions of up and down, just like the ghost states of Schrödinger’s cat. An electron can be 80 percent up and 20 percent down, and its future dynamics can be understood only if we assume that it evolves in this psychotic state. If you don’t believe these oddities of “quantum spin” neither should you believe the results of your MR scan. Or trust your mobile phone, computer, TV set, automobile, etc. Dislike quantum mechanics all you want, but modern technology is predicated on it.

But where exactly is Lilliput? Just how small is “very small”? It can mean different things in different contexts, such as in the diverse subjects of atomic and nuclear physics. The two fields involve quite different creatures: Atomic physics deals with electrons whizzing around the nucleus; nuclear physics, with the dark secret of the nucleus itself. It wasn’t until the 1930s that we first accessed the interior of the nucleus; the orbiting electrons, meanwhile, have been probed ever since the birth of chemistry.

The Boys first worked in atomic physics—it was their scientific nursery, where they honed their quantum-mechanics skills. We learn much about the electrons surrounding the nucleus from the light emitted when they transit between different quantum states: That’s how quantum mechanics, with its package of oddities, was first revealed. Franco Rasetti was an expert in measuring this “spectral light,” and Fermi was a leader in its mathematics. Segrè and Amaldi fawned upon these two, performing menial duties with enthusiasm and diligence. Ettore stood aside, his role, seemingly, to prove them all wrong.

Ettore’s first known scientific intervention occurred in 1928, when he was only twenty-two years old. It was a communication to the Italian Physical Society, in which he corrected the Thomas-Fermi model, a way of dealing with multiple electrons in an atom by replacing them with “electron clouds.” Fermi adamantly disagreed, which didn’t stop him from publishing the same work six years later in collaboration with Amaldi, giving no credit to Ettore.

In his “atomic physics” period, Ettore published half a dozen papers, all single-author apart from one. Of these, his best-known work is the discovery of how “spectral light” shifts when atoms are bathed with an oscillating magnetic field. The result, the Majorana-Brossel effect, nowadays carries his name, and the mathematical technique used to solve the problem is called the Majorana sphere (still much in use; for example, in the beautiful formalism devised by Roger Penrose to describe spinning particles). Modern MR scans are an offshoot of Ettore’s work.

But it was in nuclear physics that Ettore and, later, the Boys would leave their most indelible mark, beginning with Ettore’s prediction of the neutron. Given their later role as experts on the topic, it’s extraordinary that the Boys struggled to recognize the neutron’s existence until as late as 1933. They weren’t alone. At the time, almost without exception, scientists believed the nucleus to be made of protons and “nuclear” electrons. The idea was based on common sense. But common sense is seldom the path to truth.²¹

How were nuclei and atoms envisaged when Ettore disturbed the status quo? The hydrogen atom, for one, was easy to figure out. A hydrogen atom contains one nuclear proton orbited by one electron. The electron is much lighter than the proton—1,836 times lighter—so that most of the atomic mass is in the nucleus: The mass of the hydrogen atom is roughly the mass of the proton. Because the proton and the electron have the same charge with opposite signs (positive for the proton, negative for the electron), the atom is electrically neutral. Nothing about the hydrogen atom was controversial; the issue was how to account for heavier nuclei.

Take nitrogen, for example. A nitrogen nucleus weighs roughly fourteen times as much as a proton, but it has a (positive) charge only seven times larger. The nucleus is orbited by seven electrons (rendering the atom neutral), but let’s forget about those for the moment. Focusing on the nucleus, the question was how the nucleus could be fourteen times heavier than a proton but only have seven times its charge. The textbook answer was to employ fourteen protons and seven intranuclear electrons.²² The charge comes out right because 14-7 = 7 (seven electrons neutralizing seven protons); and the mass also works out because the mass of the electrons is negligible, and there are fourteen protons in the nucleus (see Figure 6.2).

Believing the nucleus to be made of protons and electrons was therefore far from stupid, particularly considering that the fad of postulating thousands of unnecessary particles—as in string theory—was still well in the future. Combine this with the fact that during beta decay the nucleus emits one electron (suggesting that this electron already lived inside the nucleus), and you’d have to be an outright lunatic to come up with any other model for the nucleus. Which is exactly what Ettore did.

Figure 6.2: The nitrogen nucleus as it was understood before and after the neutron entered the picture. Charge seven and mass fourteen can be explained either with fourteen protons and seven nuclear electrons, or with seven protons and seven neutrons.

Because in reality there was a need for the neutron, as should have been obvious since the 1920s. Much as the Boys resisted it, of all people they should have known better. No one more so than Franco Rasetti, who was sent abroad by Fermi in 1929 “to season,” and found himself at Caltech studying the properties of the nitrogen nucleus, just as in the example I chose. The Cardinal Vicar’s project was to measure the spin of this nucleus.

When you combine spins in groups, they add or subtract according to well-defined rules. Two spin half particles can only add up to a spin one (when both spins align in the same direction: ½ + ½) or spin zero (when the spins point in opposite directions: ½-½). Quantum mechanics tells you the probabilities of one pairing over the other. And similar addition laws rule larger conglomerates of quantum particles. Rasetti found that the nitrogen nucleus has spin one.

This utterly contradicted a nucleus made of fourteen protons and seven electrons, because such a nucleus would have an odd number (twenty-one) of particles. No matter how you pair and combine an odd number of spin half particles, you can only produce a half-integer collective spin: ½,,, etc. Yet the total spin of the nitrogen nucleus was one. A puzzling result—ignored by everyone and quickly forgotten.

Except by Ettore. He must have been the first to understand that if the nitrogen nucleus contained protons and a new kind of spin half particle—the neutron—then Rasetti’s observation could be explained. In contrast to Amelio’s film, Ettore did talk openly to the Boys about a “neutral proton”: a particle with a mass similar to the proton, no electric charge, and spin half. He noticed that given its existence, the nitrogen nucleus could be made up of seven protons and seven neutrons, accounting for mass fourteen and charge seven. And then there would be an even number (fourteen) of spin half particles in the nucleus, so that their spins could add up to an integer number. Such as one, the observed value.

The clues were all there—at the Panisperna labs! And Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics, had already remonstrated about “the remarkable passivity of intranuclear electrons,” which somehow lost even their spin as soon as they were inside the nucleus. Yet these clues went unheeded, and Ettore did in fact “see beyond,” as portrayed in Amelio’s film, when he predicted the neutron’s existence. But there was more to it than the nitrogen spin experiments: There was something else of crucial importance that may have scared him.

Rasetti’s discovery may have been important, but there was at the time another much more blatant conundrum in nuclear physics: No one understood why a nucleus made of protons and electrons, governed only by electricity, didn’t simply blow apart. The energy budget of a nucleus governed by electric attractions and repulsions favored its quick dismantling. Scientists envisioned the nucleus as a small molecule, which is indeed stable due to the collective electric attractions and repulsions of its components. But the nucleus is 100,000 times smaller than any molecule, and for something that small, electric repulsion wins in the overall budget. It just doesn’t scale, as a simple calculation (surely performed by Ettore) quickly shows. In order to explain why the nucleus was bound together, a new type of force, stronger than electricity, was needed, as well as a new, electrically neutral particle.

We find this prescient remark in Ettore’s notebooks when he was in his early twenties. He wasn’t being stubborn: He’d tried to set up a nuclear model using the conventional picture and had come up with nonsense. He wasn’t proposing a new particle and a new force gratuitously—he was seriously attempting to explain the mysterious stability of the nucleus. And he’d found that with his new particle and force, not only was the nucleus stable, but its binding energy was millions of times larger than that binding electrons in atoms. Did he gasp in horror upon recognizing the enormous strength of nuclear forces? We don’t know. No one listened to him on the few occasions he mentioned neutrons and strong forces to the Boys.

The picture changed dramatically when the Joliot-Curie husband and wife partnership accidentally produced the first free neutrons. They had no idea what they’d found but, as good experimentalists, gave an accurate account of what they’d seen. This new radiation could easily approach or even penetrate nuclei and produced such gigantic knocks on these nuclei that its particles had to be at least as massive as the proton. Everyone, including the Joliot-Curies, was baffled. What the hell was going on?

It’s telling that Ettore, upon hearing the news, chose to play the Inquisitor: “They haven’t understood anything! It’s probably the result of recoil protons produced from heavy neutral particles,” Ettore said, according to Amaldi. The Joliot-Curie particle was like a proton but had to be neutral: If it were positively charged, it would have to overcome an enormous repulsion barrier to penetrate the (positively charged) nucleus. For someone like Ettore who had worked with neutrons for several years, the Joliot-Curie results were therefore hardly surprising.

Meanwhile, Fermi and the Boys were utterly in the dark. Even Werner Heisenberg, who officially proposed the first theory of nuclear stability, couldn’t quite believe in the new particle. To illustrate the generalized mental block, I note that the great Werner understood the “neutron” as a “little atom” made of one proton and one electron. In effect, he simply repackaged the old nuclear model of protons and electrons, combining some of the electrons and protons into couples. Rasetti’s experiment clearly hadn’t sunk in. The neutron has spin half, whereas such couples would have spin one or zero. No wonder Ettore felt impatient.

Not only was Ettore sure of the neutron’s existence, he had also finished a theory of nuclear stability (and isotope instability) based on protons and neutrons, bound by a new type of force he dubbed “force of exchange.” This was the precursor of the strong force and later quantum chromodynamics (or QCD), and it was a most remarkable breakthrough. Ettore didn’t burn it, but he never published it, vehemently refusing to do so to everyone’s puzzlement. Although Fermi had yet to be convinced by the argument, he realized that Ettore’s theory might be right and what a coup it would be for Via Panisperna. He insisted that Ettore publish it—to no avail.

So upset was Fermi that he even suggested presenting the theory at an important congress in Paris, giving due credit to Ettore. Ettore agreed, but on condition that the theory be attributed to a certain professor of electronics in Rome, widely regarded as a moron, who was bound to attend the conference. Fermi didn’t have the guts for the prank. And so Ettore’s idea remained in the drawer.

A few months later, Dmitri Ivanenko in Russia recognized the new particle, and Heisenberg in Germany proposed much the same theory as Ettore. When Fermi expressed his disappointment, Ettore only laughed. He found the entire situation hilarious. And when Fermi suggested publishing at least a follow-up, Ettore—having refused to publish before Heisenberg—said, “Now Heisenberg has already done everything.” And he chortled away while the other Boys commiserated.

How can we ever understand Ettore’s bizarre behavior? Was he disturbed by the large nuclear binding energies he’d found; did he foresee their deadly potential? Or are there simpler reasons? For someone as driven by competition as Fermi, Ettore must have been impossible to comprehend. And the inner workings of such psychotic behavior can’t be trivial.

Writer Leonardo Sciascia²³ offers a disconcerting explanation. He compares Ettore to Stendhal, who dreaded his precocity so strongly that he squandered as much time and talent as possible in a vain attempt to “delay” his genius. “Like Stendhal, Majorana tries to avoid accomplishing what he has to accomplish, what he can’t help accomplishing,” Sciascia writes in his book on Ettore. The Boys were keen in their pursuits, had unbeatable enthusiasm and stamina, but they were “seeking”; Ettore, in contrast, just “found.” But such miracles came with a price. Ettore must have sensed death and self-destruction in each of his revelations. They were so extreme that they became sinister, malignant. In this mental climate, throwing away Nobel Prize-worthy work might actually have been an act of self-preservation, Sciascia suggests. So “when Heisenberg’s theory is eventually acknowledged and publicized, not only does Majorana refrain from lamenting . . . but conceives for the German physicist a feeling of sincere admiration (based on self-esteem) and gratitude (based on dread). Heisenberg represents for him an unknown friend—someone who without knowing him, has saved him from disaster, enabled him to avoid a sacrifice.”

I like Sciascia’s affinity for poetic license. How else could one ever explain utter madness?

Back at Via Etnea in Catania, I’d been told I should meet Ettore Majorana, because he now kept the private documents found in Dorina’s bedside safe. And so I go to Rome, where Ettore’s scientific dramas originally unfolded. The building at Via Panisperna is still there, sadly no longer housing the Physics Department. I have to go instead to the new University City, not far off. That’s where Ettore has his office.

SEVEN

Meet Ettore Majorana

I can’t help feeling an odd sensation about sending an e-mail to Ettore Majorana. Such an anachronism. . . . Yet I do e-mail him, and we make an appointment to meet at his office in Rome.

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.

“As sure as I’m Ettore Majorana,” he smirks at his little pun, “I’m certain that was his real misfortune.”

EIGHT

Boys Will Be Boys

In a beautiful part of town, not far from where I met Ettore, lies Via Panisperna. The building that housed the Via Panisperna Institute has itself become fabled. It was once on the grounds of two convents belonging to the papal state, but when the state was absorbed by the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, the property reverted to the king (as did everything else but the Vatican). After the University of Rome was created, the two convents were donated to become the departments of physics and chemistry.

The chemists performed minimal conversions, turning cloisters into labs and cells into classrooms. The physicists chose to demolish and start anew. Unfortunately, the nuns who lived in the convent took strong exception and refused to leave. Offers of money and other terrestrial enticements failed to produce the desired effect and soon gave way to blackmail and open threats. Still, the religious didn’t budge from what had been their seat for centuries.

As a testament to the conflict between science and religion, an infantry detachment was enlisted to displace the nuns and pave the way for progress. Some claim that the building has been cursed ever since—an interesting thought, considering that the fission of uranium was first achieved there.

Nowadays, a persistent rumor maintains that the basement of the distinguished edifice houses a seedy nightclub, but this misconception results from a modern renumbering of the street. In fact, the building is part of a complex belonging to the Ministero dell’ Interno (Ministry of the Interior), and apparently houses a high-security jail. This didn’t stop me from sneaking in one Saturday afternoon, while the guards were dutifully watching football on their TV monitors.²⁵ As I wandered around unchallenged, I caught glimpses of the idyllic environment gifted to the Boys.

A view of the modern Via Panisperna.

The building that housed the Via Panisperna Institute (now part of the Ministry of the Interior).

The Boys loved their workplace. According to Segrè, “the location of the building in a small park on a hill near central Rome was convenient and beautiful at the same time. The garden, landscaped with palm trees and bamboo thickets, with its prevailing silence (except at dusk, when gatherings of sparrows populated the greenery) made the institute a most peaceful and attractive place of study. I believe that everybody who ever worked there kept an affectionate regard for the old place.”²⁶

There were three floors and a basement. The first floor was used for teaching, and the second for research. The third floor was the official residence of Corbino, who lived there with his family according to custom, amid tiled domed ceilings and ample rooms. The back garden, with its pond full of goldfish, was meant for Corbino’s private use, but the Boys overran it: Rasetti used it to rear salamanders; races with candle-powered toy boats gave rise to more bets among the Boys; outrageous nuclear-physics experiments were performed there. The basement may have been the most important of all—it harbored a secret, a treasure more valuable than gold.

The research floor was sharply divided between north and south wings, the former being occupied by Corbino’s archenemy Professor Antonino Lo Surdo. It was in the south wing that the Boys practiced their trade. It was a bit cramped, as they had to share it further with Professor Giulio Cesare Trabacchi from the physics arm of the Department of Public Health. But Professor Trabacchi was a generous soul who lent the Boys equipment, chemical products, and even staff—like his nuclear chemist Oscar D’Agostino, without whom the Boys’ main contributions to physics wouldn’t have been possible. With eternal gratitude, the Boys nicknamed the professor the Divine Providence. Professor Trabacchi, incidentally, owned the key to the safe in the basement, where the dark treasure of Via Panisperna was kept.

But if the Via Panisperna Institute benefitted from a serene location, it was also the scene of much strife. Even the relations between the Boys, and between Fermi and Corbino, could be rather strained. Tempers soared, quarrels developed. The hole that Segrè—the Basilisk—made in their meeting table is witness to how edgy and personal science became there. More generally, as in most Italian academic institutions, there was a state of civil war between various factions within the institute.

For example, a conflict raged between Senator Corbino and the other senior physicist at Via Panisperna, Antonino Lo Surdo. Like Corbino, Lo Surdo was Sicilian: They’d both taught at the University of Messina before transferring to Rome. A feud had started, with Corbino skillfully winning every battle. When Fermi was appointed to Rome in 1927, as Corbino’s first salvo to establish the Boys, Lo Surdo had virulently opposed it. When he lost the fight, he felt personally affronted. Lo Surdo thus turned his venom against the Boys, who predictably retaliated with the cruel and merciless humor of youth.

They spread rumors that Professor Lo Surdo had a case of “evil eye” so lethal that “even mentioning his [real] name brought bad luck.” It seems that Lo Surdo had witnessed a terrible Italian naval accident in which three hundred people drowned, a man had dropped dead inexplicably on a streetcar platform the moment Lo Surdo stepped onto it, plus a number of similar incidents. Thus, to prevent disaster, the Boys posited that he should be referred to exclusively by a nickname. Due to the location of his office in the north wing, “Mr. North” was chosen. The poor man then became the butt of an “evil eye” running joke; e.g., “the best hydrogen tubes exploded for no reason other than that Mr. North minutes before had told the student working with them: ‘Be careful, it might explode.’” Now consider that Sicilians are invariably superstitious. The Boys must have driven the professor mad.

When Mussolini created the Royal Academy of Italy in 1929, Lo Surdo—a rabid Fascist—nourished high hopes of being included in the first batch of appointments. His expectations, however, were brutally cut short by Corbino’s pervasive political influence. According to Laura Fermi, when the announcement was made, “Amaldi ran to the North side of the building shouting: ‘The first academicians have been named! There is also one physicist . . . ’ Mr. North’s bulging eyes popped out further behind his thick lenses. His cheeks were aflame. ‘Fermi!’ Amaldi exclaimed with candid joy, then turned away as fast as he had come, but not before he saw Mr. North’s face turning purple.”

Like Corbino, Lo Surdo had been in Messina on December 29, 1909, the day a massive earthquake and tidal wave killed a third of the population. Mr. North had lost all his family, as well as the girl he hoped to marry; whereas Senator Corbino had miraculously escaped unharmed with all his relatives. Afterward, Mr. North led a lonely life, never marrying or making any friends. It’s telling that his research shifted from atomic physics to seismology. It seems that his bitterness towards the senator derived from this tragedy, which he perceived as an unfairness of fate. Is his attitude more palatable in this light?

Not to the Boys, that much is for sure. Their “evil eye” stories, applied to someone so unlucky, were in very poor taste, to say the least.

By around 1930, the Via Panisperna Institute had become well-established in Italy and abroad. Its staff grew as the institute attracted a second generation of Boys from Pisa, Florence, and Turin, all in search of a slice of glory. Giancarlo Wick and Bruno Pontecorvo would be the most distinguished of these latter-day Boys. There was also a profusion of largely forgotten minor Boys, and even—God spare us!—failures. One of the earliest Mark II Boys who did stand out was Giovanni Gentile Jr., son of the eponymous patriarch of Fascist culture. Gentile became Ettore’s best friend and ally at the institute.

As Via Panisperna’s reputation spread abroad, a stream of illustrious foreign visitors also began to pass through. Some stayed for long spells, writing landmark papers and performing historical experiments. Names like Bethe, Block, Peierls, Placzek, and Teller lent the institute a cosmopolitan tinge; foreign languages now echoed in its corridors. These famous visitors were attracted by the institute’s rising fame, but some were also escaping Germany’s developing political situation. Many were German Jews en route to permanent resettlement in the United States. There were also several American visitors, of whom Eugene Feenberg was Ettore’s favorite: “Their mutual attraction manifest[ed] itself in their sitting in the library facing each other in silence because they knew no common language.”

Being on the world map must have been of little import to Ettore, who remained a lone wolf, as before. It must have been inspiring for Fermi, though, who had previously felt “somewhat isolated because only Majorana (who was rather inaccessible anyway) could speak with him about theory on an equal footing,” as Segrè commented. During his time at Via Panisperna, Ettore wrote only one collaborative paper, with his friend Giovanni Gentile. To the other Boys, engaged in permanent collaborative work, he must have seemed like a black hole—a human neutrino. Typical testimony: “I avoided talking physics with Ettore because anything I could have told him would have been insignificant for him. As it happened to me with Pauli later, Ettore must have thought that it was more accessible for me and less banal for him, to communicate, for example, how good it was that he’d been born after Michelangelo and Beethoven.”²⁷

But with Giovanni Gentile things were different—another example of Ettore’s duplicity between extreme warmth to his friends and zero-Kelvin frost to everyone else. Ettore and Gentile were the same age almost to the day and had met via the Casina delle Rose group. Gentile had first joined the Boys as an unpaid assistant to Corbino in 1928, but had interrupted his studies to do his military service like a good Fascist. He then rejoined for good until the strange events of 1937. Like Ettore, Gentile was Sicilian. They became very close.

And just as with Gastone Piqué before, Ettore’s letters to Gentile provide our best insights into his attitudes on life, science, and his own work. Self-deprecation, lack of seriousness and sarcasm are the main flavors. At the age of twenty-three, after dryly describing “the Pope’s” recent work in his letter, Ettore adds:

As for myself I do nothing sensible. That is, I study group theory with the firm intention of learning it, similar in this to that Dostoyevsky character who started one day to set aside his small change fully persuaded that soon he’d be rich like Rothschild.

Or a year later, while Gentile was visiting Heisenberg in Germany:

Rome doesn’t present to me, like Leipzig to you, the attraction of novelty, neither does it feed under cloudy skies vast masses of grave thoughts. Rare are here the causes to meditate; and even rarer those who engage in it. And still they say that this is the blessed land of God! The thousand German luminaries, shining like beacons in the snow, compete without success with our burning Sun as it graces the poor mortals with its light and warmth. . . . I say this not to diminish our respect for such a tenacious race, but so that it won’t be uncritically that we voice our interest in their works and also in their sterile attempts; because that which fails elsewhere is destined to triumph under our more friendly sky. Moving on to what might be closer to our interests, I can report to you that the rhythm of scientific activity at the Institute is in decline due to the habitual effect of the summer heat as well as the upcoming Pontifical departure, which will take place as you know on June 7. One of these days I shall see Pirandello’s “As you desire me.”

Fermi made no effort to polish his articles and, according to Segrè, wrote in a “flat careless language.” Ettore’s letters, in their eloquent style if nothing else, emphasize the abyss that separated him from the Boys.

The period between 1930 and 1933 was Ettore’s most prolific: The small change he so disparagingly set aside led him to a colossal masterpiece, which I like to call his unfinished symphony. His work to a large degree prefigures modern attempts at grand unification, as I shall explain. But he was far from happy. The fact is that not all was a bed of roses at Via Panisperna. Indeed the relations between Ettore and the Boys were fraught with the highest-voltage tension.

Most obviously, Ettore didn’t like Rasetti and Fermi’s brand of humor. Their pranks were deeply puerile (stink bombs, etc.), their games childish to the point of ridiculousness, their humor educational, patronizing, wholly unaware of the human dimension. Reciprocally, one wonders how Ettore’s sophisticated “British” sense of humor was received. If it registered at all, I’m sure it caused more hurt than mirth.

Rasetti and Fermi also had an unbearable way with women, always lecturing and then quizzing them on butterfly species, the exchange rate of Brazilian reals, the death dates of all the kings of England, and other inane trivia.²⁸ “Those two just drove us crazy,” their future adoring wives, who had to put up with these ordeals, would comment later. Women were attracted to bachelor Rasetti, but according to Laura Fermi, “He examined them, he dissected them with his piercing look, as if they were rare butterflies or strange plants . . . with a smile of amusement in his mouth, tinged with a bit of mockery.” The girls loved him “because he remained unaffected” by them. Ettore must have felt very uncomfortable with all of this.

In the Gianni Amelio film, we see the Boys driving to a lake in an old-style convertible car. The too-cool-to-fuck Rasetti is pontificating on the nature of love: that love doesn’t exist, “there’s only sexual energy.” Ettore rolls his eyes and listens with embarrassment, remaining mute throughout the trip.

Later they push Ettore into the water in one of their predictable pranks; to their horror, he doesn’t resurface. Hours later they’re still calling his name in a panic, searching everywhere on the edges of the lake. Exhausted and in tears, they return to the car, only to find him sitting at the wheel.

“Where have you been?” they scream furiously. Ettore drives away, making them run after him.

“I’ve been dead and drowned,” he shouts back, laughing.

“I’m a ghost. I’m the drowned professor.”

To my mind, there were three deep chasms between Ettore and the rest of the Boys—and between Ettore and Fermi in particular. The first chasm was purely scientific. Scientists today divide themselves between experimentalists and theorists. Fermi’s strength was that he combined the two; he was probably the last scientist to do so. He wasn’t outstanding in either, but he had both sets of skills, and the same applied to the rest of the Boys. Except for Ettore, who was a pure theorist and didn’t apologize for it. He seldom set foot in the lab, and even when he did, it was only to hear how things were going. He never did any “dirty work.”

The Boys surely resented Ettore’s attitude, so much at odds with theirs. When Fermi built the first nuclear reactor in 1942, someone suggested he hire the university’s American-football squad to cart the tons of uranium needed. Which he did—but Fermi still wanted to do his bit, side by side with the players. He only gave up when he saw that he was brutally outclassed: They’d each carry ten times his load in half the time. Ettore, in contrast, always refused to do any manual work “like a painter’s assistant.” He was always less assiduous than the others. He turned up at Via Panisperna for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, more or less regularly. By comparison, the others put in as many as fourteen hours of work each day.

But this was only the tip of the iceberg that divided Ettore and Fermi. How shall I put it? . . . Let’s just say that Fermi was intellectually a bit limited. He had great skills but, above all, relied on vast stores of energy, hard work, and determination: pure brute force. His imagination, however, was lacking—he simply wasn’t a “lateral” thinker. Ettore was just the opposite. Beyond his impressive mathematical exploits, and the unavoidable impression of laziness he must have imparted, it was his scientific imagination that was most impressive. Ettore was a seer.

Scientifically, Ettore and Fermi were at odds just like the ant and the grasshopper. But then—just to make matters worse—there was a second chasm regarding nonscientific culture. And this ravine cut deeper through the Boys than the first and may have been the true origin of much conflict between Ettore and his colleagues. Fermi, Rasseti, Segrè, and Amaldi loved sports, mountaineering, and other outdoor pursuits, and they organized something together almost every weekend. Ettore never participated, preferring to sip wine and discuss Schopenhauer and Pirandello with Gentile and the rest of the mob in Casina delle Rose.

All of this deeply alienated Fermi. “Fermi was a simple person . . . Majorana instead had a refined and complex character,” Pontecorvo wrote in his memoirs. For Fermi, everything had to be devoted to science: He didn’t like music or literature and couldn’t understand artists.²⁹ Even his affinity for sports was a device to clear his mind, helping him do his science more efficiently. Fermi was monochromatic; Ettore was like a rainbow. Ettore did science because he found it fun, without any sense of obligation or purpose, and never to the detriment of his other intellectual interests. Fermi must have been very suspicious of Ettore, and reciprocally, Fermi must have struck Ettore as an unmitigated philistine.

As if these two chasms weren’t enough, there was finally the very important issue of publishing and formal academia. In 1929, at the age of twenty-three, Ettore received his laureate, 110 out of 110 cum laude, and started working at Via Panisperna on a nonstipendiary basis. And he never made the slightest effort to get an academic position. Pontecorvo would explain the situation: “He was rich, the institute was poor.” But Segrè was even richer, and he still sought a position. Segrè went as far as accepting the job of assistant to the master of the tuning fork (the official who ensures that an A is an A all over Italy) as a first step into academia. Fermi had tried to get a cattedra (a chair, or professorship) as soon as he finished his degree in Pisa. All the Boys would end up as distinguished professors. Such career efforts seemed beneath Ettore. Or at least they were, until his last months—as we shall see.

Combine Ettore’s apathy for academia with his bad attitude towards publication, and we have a serious problem. Ettore didn’t give a shit. He’d discover something quite spectacular and throw it away. And when someone beat him, independently finding and publishing the same result, he would fail to complain. Because, as he saw it, no one had beaten him: He simply hadn’t bothered to run. He was above the race. And this truly exasperated the Boys, and above all Fermi. It touched him right where it hurt; where his innermost complex lived.

It’s hard to gather complete evidence of the conflicts between Ettore and the rest of the Boys nowadays; everyone involved feels ashamed, perhaps guilty. The Boys later revealed Ettore’s stunts, praised him, half said why he didn’t fit in; but they invariably provided an incomplete, sanitized picture of just how sour it all must have become.

So I had no choice but to look into what is not published, what has almost been clipped from existence. For this purpose, I continue my Roman sojourn by meeting Professor Francesco Guerra, one-time head of the Physics Department at the University of Rome. After a substantial meal and a congenial amaro to oil the tongue, he takes me down to the dungeons of the University of Rome, “La Sapienza.” The dungeon rooms are officially classified as a storage area, so air is pumped in only a couple of times per hour. Francesco leads me into a stuffy room that looks like a bank safe: rows of movable shelves encased by metal doors endowed with large circular knobs. Significant muscle power is required to rotate these knobs and furrow an opening between the shelves. As we squeeze in, I’m warned that I’m about to see a heavily “filtered” version of Edoardo Amaldi’s personal papers. Edited by guardian angels.

True enough, the files are replete with references to letters that have been removed from the archives. We go through piles of documents and it becomes evident to me that Amaldi, who later presented himself as Ettore’s first biographer (his monograph appeared in 1966), was kept at arm’s length by Ettore. We dig deeper into the piles, Francesco looking for something in particular he can’t find (“did they make it disappear?” I hear him mutter in Italian). But finally he finds it, and I see why they didn’t make it disappear—and why it took him so long to find. It’s a letter mistakenly stapled together with a pile of irrelevant papers.

In this letter, Segrè comments on Amaldi’s draft of Ettore’s biography. He takes strong exception to the description of Ettore as a prodigy and insists that Ettore was mediocre. This, he stresses, holds true even given the fact that Ettore disappeared young. He reminds Amaldi that Fermi (and himself!) had already reached notoriety at that age, unlike Ettore. The work Ettore didn’t publish goes unmentioned, as well as the work Segrè couldn’t understand (either because he was an experimentalist or, if one is less charitable, because he was stupid). This includes quantum electrodynamics, group theory, and Ettore’s 1932 “unfinished symphony.” Segrè even revises Amaldi’s description of one of Ettore’s famous mathematical performances. No, he says—on that occasion it was he, Emilio Segrè, who suggested the problem. Ettore solved it merely because he, Emilio Segrè, couldn’t be bothered. The historical records prove just the opposite. In fact, they prove that the corresponding paper, later published by Fermi, is a clear example of scientific robbery. Given his lack of interest in publishing, Ettore never complained; at most he may have dropped a sarcastic comment on the matter.

This is bad enough. But then Segrè strikes below the belt. Wondering why Ettore’s mind collapsed in 1933, he suggests that it was due to syphilis. “Merely a suggestion ,” he hurries to stress, something he can’t “objectively” substantiate. But he suggests that Amaldi check this possibility with the family.

Amaldi’s reply is on record and equally unpleasant. He rejects Segrè’s syphilis hypothesis as “nonobjective” and superfluous. Ettore’s mental collapse, he says, was the unavoidable outcome of his lack of human skills and nasty personality. Which doesn’t stop Amaldi from sounding out Segrè’s hypothesis with Ettore’s family, as “suggested.” And later spreading the rumor that Ettore suffered from “the Naples disease.”

What could have happened between Ettore and these two to produce such animosity? I dare say that their relations were contaminated by syphilis.

NINE

Neutrinos from Transylvania

Meanwhile, Ettore pressed on with his work, against the grain of Via Panisperna. It was not only with regard to the neutron that he was in conflict with Fermi. Pauli had just brought its sissy brother—the neutrino—into the world, and it was in his research on the neutrino that Ettore would see the furthest “beyond.” It wasn’t until several decades later that anyone realized just how odd a particle the neutrino was. To Ettore, however, this would hardly have been news.

Saying that we live in an odd world is often an understatement. I once had a random conversation on a Toronto street that derailed into the most sublime insanity. After a few minutes of pleasant platitudes, my casual acquaintance, out of the blue, revealed that “they” had implanted radioactive isotopes in his testicles. Being high-minded, he refrained from ejaculating, lest he might contaminate the entire universe. He’d done so for years and was sexually desperate—he couldn’t take it any longer.

Later I discovered that there was a psychiatric hospital just up the road, but we do live in an odd world. Ettore was odd; the neutrino is Ettore’s soul mate; ergo, the neutrino is odd. A cheap syllogism, but true: The neutrino is odd. Except that this statement has a precise, concrete meaning—it’s not as if the neutrino believes its balls have been irradiated.

The “oddity” of the neutrino remains one of the major unexplained features of our world. The issue was first raised as a pure mathematical problem by the lonely hearts of physics—Ettore and Dirac—circa 1933. But it wasn’t until 1957 that the full brunt of the news befell the world. Ettore’s science was so visionary that once again we require the services of a time machine, shifting us from the 1930s to the 1950s. The world is literally odd.

Imagine Alice gone through the looking glass, in a world “inverted” by a mirror. “Perhaps looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink,” Alice remarks to her cat, after they’ve walked through to the other side. Such is the issue of “parity” (in scientific jargon): Would the mirror-inverted world be any different from ours? Alice and Ettore were the pioneers of this new method of tripping.

At first it might seem that not much would change. Most people look the same in the mirror-world with the possible exception of their hair. Some haircuts don’t essentially change in the mirror (see Figure 9.1a)—these are an example of what physicists call parity symmetric. Other haircuts manifestly do (see Figure 9.1b): These are an example of what physicists call chiral, or parity violating. If you look in more detail, however, even leaving moles and scars aside, everyone looks quite different to their mirror-world twin. The left hand appears in the mirror like the right, but they’re “palpably” not the same. Try shaking someone’s right hand with your left (or shake hands with your mirror-world self): It just wouldn’t work.

To drive the point home, the term chiral, coined to describe parity asymmetry, comes from the Greek word for “hand” and is sometimes replaced by “handedness.” Our hands have handedness: That is, they are parity violating or chiral, each distinct from its mirror image. The same goes for our feet—scientists in particular are well acquainted with the experience of putting on the wrong shoes. Chiral wearing of nonmatching socks is another ubiquitous feature of the absentminded genius.

The more we think about it, the more we realize that our world is abundantly chiral. Alice sees a distinctly different universe on the other side of the mirror. The majority of people are left-handed, unlike in our world; human hearts turn to the right, not the left; seashells and snails look different (see Figure 9.2); writing is gibberish; Alice finds corkscrews and taps awkward to operate. But among these “oddities” she identifies things that are “maximally chiral”: where the mirror world is actually the opposite of the real world. On which side of the road do you drive?

Figure 9.1a: A parity invariant hairstyle.

Figure 9.1.b: A chiral or parity-violating hairstyle. In this case, a parting on the left becomes a parting on the right in the mirror image.

There’s a difference of opinion between the British and the Continental: They make opposite choices. But seen through a mirror, Britain would have adopted Continental driving, and vice versa. Except for parity-symmetric Indian roads, driving is maximally chiral: In such extreme cases, the two opposites are called right- and left-handed states, or even and odd. Left-handed driving is odd.

Figure 9.2: Seashells are usually chiral. Most species are left-handed and a few are right-handed. In the case shown, individuals in the same species can exhibit the two chiralities.

Chemists and biologists have long been familiar with chirality. Amino acids—the building blocks of the proteins we’re made of—are chiral molecules (see Figure 9.3). Strangely enough, only left-handed amino acids exist in the organic components of food and living beings. When traces of left-handed organic molecules were discovered in meteorites, it sparked controversy. Is the observed handedness of “living” amino acids a peculiarity of life on Earth, or a feature of life everywhere in the universe? Are these meteorites proof of alien life? Mr. Spock, incidentally, was in one of his incarnations made of organic components with the wrong handedness.

It’s not surprising that drugs can also be made of chiral molecules, given the handedness of our inner chemistry. Dramatically different effects may then result from right- or left-handed drugs. A medicine used to cure tuberculosis, for example, has a mirror image that causes blindness. Infamously, thalidomide is chiral; its right-handed version treats morning sickness, whereas its mirror image causes birth defects. The tragedy of thalidomide is that once ingested, the right- and left-handed chemicals naturally interconvert.

Figure 9.3: Chemists have long known that some molecules are chiral. Here two molecules with the same formula mimic the right and left hand in their mirror asymmetry.

Alice was right to voice grave concerns over the quality of looking-glass milk. Like thalidomide, it might be poisonous. I doubt her cat—clever beasts that they are—would have touched it. He’d have disdainfully sniffed it, sneered, then haughtily stalked off.

Yet until 1957, physics was ambidextrous, making no distinction between the right and left hand. The contents of the world, for sure, were chiral, but not the laws governing the world, an entirely different proposition. Of course the solar system is chiral, but if the planets all orbited the sun in the opposite direction, nothing else would change (e.g., the duration of the terrestrial year would be the same) because the laws of gravity don’t distinguish between the world and its mirror image. So much was parity trusted that it was long regarded as an essential tenet when proposing new theories. Imagine the surprise of physicists Chen Ning Yang and Tsung Dao Lee when they examined the beta decay of certain particles found in cosmic rays, only to find that their disintegration laws were chiral.

Cosmic rays are very energetic particles resulting from big explosions inside our galaxy, sometimes even beyond.³⁰ When they hit Earth, they provide physicists with a natural, inexpensive look at high-energy phenomena. In 1956, Yang and Lee were studying new particles found in cosmic-ray showers, deemed to be so weird that they were baptized “strange particles” (a terminology that persists to this day, although they’re now run of the mill in particle accelerators). To their consternation, the beta decay of these particles appeared distinctly different from its mirror image. This was serious stuff! But it was it a general rule? Or was it yet another peculiarity of “strange particles,” which nobody understood anyway?

What followed is even more remarkable sociologically than scientifically. When Yang and Lee scrutinized vanilla-flavored beta decays—involving non-strange, well-known particles and nuclei—they found that parity violation was highly prominent. But these decays had been studied for over fifty years: How could such a conspicuous feature have passed unnoticed? The answer is a monument to prejudice: The parity violations had not been noted because no one had bothered to ask the question. Experiments implicitly assumed parity symmetry, averaging between what they actually saw and a presumed identical mirror version, in a case of tautology derived from carelessness.

But no one was quite prepared for the news that followed. First it emerged that virtually all beta decays were chiral, so that the startling feature couldn’t be blamed on a particular mother or daughter nucleus but on the decay process itself. Second, the decays were maximally chiral; i.e., one of those instances where there are two opposites, and our world picks one but the mirror world plumps for the other.

Physicists were astounded. But the bombshell was so dramatic that at least the logical implications were completely clear. It didn’t take long to discover the culprit; indeed, it’s quite predictable. Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary.

This is how things stood: All beta decays were known to be maximally chiral regardless of the mother or daughter nucleus. Their common trait was the emission of a very energetic electron (the beta ray) and a neutrino. The electron had impeccable credentials regarding parity: Its ambidexterity had been tested over and over again by all manner of experiments.

This left the neutrino. What else?

But although the culprit was found, there remained one important question: What made the neutrino maximally chiral? The answer was not unexpected by 1957, thanks to the work of Ettore, Dirac, and Wigner. In fact, issues of chirality had been central to Ettore’s mathematical constructions since the early 1930s. Recall that quantum particles have a habit of spinning like tops—tops with rather strange behavior. Given a fixed direction, they can only rotate around it with a fixed “speed,” the sense of rotation being their only choice: spin up or spin down. This means all they can do is stand up or perform a headstand, or at least nothing else can be observed. But quantum mechanics, having limited the options for what can be seen, then allows for ghost superpositions when no one is looking. You can’t sit down if you’re a quantum particle, but you can be 80 percent standing up and 20 percent doing a headstand, in a mixed state pregnant with possibility: Ask Schrödinger’s cat.

Spin turns out to be the clue to the neutrino’s chirality. Suppose that we choose its direction of motion as the preferred axis with which to play the quantum-spin game.³¹ The two possible spin states, up and down, translate into “along” and “against” the direction of motion, depending on how the neutrino corkscrews along (see Figure 9.4). One is the mirror image of the other, so we call them right-and left-handed neutrinos, or even and odd. Is this the origin of their chirality?

Figure 9.4: Two particles (here protons) moving from the bottom to the top of the page (as indicated by the arrows). Playing the spin game with respect to the direction of motion, the particle on the left has spin up (it rotates clockwise with respect to its translational motion), whereas the one on the right is spin down. One is the mirror image of the other. (Notice that the translational motion doesn’t change in a mirror.)

Not quite: This classification can be applied to all spinning particles, such as protons, photons, and electrons, which have no chirality. What makes these particles ambidextrous is that they exist in both right- and left-handed states, each behaving in exactly the same way. The probability of emitting a right- or left-handed photon in a particle collision is the same. If a right-handed photon excites an atom, the effect is the same as for a left-handed twin. The world of light is ambidextrous because there are right- and left-handed photons, and they shake hands without any problems: They are interchangeable.

Not so with the neutrino, evidently. Beta decays pointed to the neutrino’s maximal chirality. This implied that in beta decay processes, only one type of neutrino—either right- or left-handed—was present. Which one was it? Was the neutrino right- or left-handed? Curiously, after the remarkable discoveries of Yang and Lee, it took some complex experimentation to settle the issue. It was finally decided—by an experiment conducted by Goldhaber, Grodzins, and Sunyar—that the neutrino is odd. Only the left-handed neutrino exists, or for those with a weird frame of mind, the neutrino has two left hands. This is a very extreme form of chirality: We’re in Transylvania. Look at a (left-handed) neutrino in the mirror and you’ll see nothing, as with Dracula. Because its mirror image—the right-handed neutrino—simply doesn’t exist.

The surprising discovery of the neutrino’s oddity was a moment of glory for Yang and Lee. But hiding behind it lies a nasty tale illustrating much about human nature. The success of one person is often the misfortune of another. A mere hesitation can be the undoing of much genius.

Before Yang and Lee made their discovery, there was a PhD student at Cambridge University who had long been struggling with the mathematical constructions of Ettore and Dirac. Something wasn’t quite right when the neutrino was entered into their equations. His confusion didn’t stop him from getting his PhD (it never does), but he felt uncomfortable. His name was Abdus Salam, and he would later become one of the greatest exponents of twentieth-century physics, codiscovering the “standard model,” for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1979.

In September 1956, while Yang and Lee were struggling with the decay of strange particles, Salam went to a conference in the United States where he heard news of their observations. On the trip back to England, on a crowded military plane (his visit was funded by the US Air Force), he couldn’t sleep and revisited the problem. And that’s when he had a revelation: His mathematical problems miraculously evaporated if the neutrino were maximally chiral, if only left-handed particles, say, existed. Despite the screaming children of servicemen he got off the plane feeling “naturally very elated,” as he later reported in his Nobel Prize lecture.

He rushed to Cambridge to work out the details of his idea and bestow his wisdom upon the world. But Peierls—who’d examined his PhD—was dismissive, telling him, “I do not believe left-right symmetry is violated in weak nuclear forces at all. I wouldn’t touch such ideas.” Unabashed, Salam contacted the world authority on neutrinos, no less than their “inventor,” Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli warned Salam that he’d be committing career suicide by suggesting such a stupid idea. “Give my regards to my friend Salam and tell him to think of something better,” wrote Pauli soon afterwards.

Salam was crestfallen and perhaps unsurprisingly never published his idea. A year later Yang and Lee did. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery, and Abdus Salam was never the same.

A strong moral may be drawn from this tale. This is perhaps the right place to delve deeper into Fermi’s complexes and hang-ups, which Ettore had such an uncanny knack for irritating.

TEN

Ode to the Vanquished

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.

Typical Fascist poster: “The Fascist government has given me back my dignity as a worker and as an Italian.”

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.

Umberto Nobile’s blimp, Norge.

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.

ELEVEN

Creation and Annihilation

Sometimes I think that despite their scientific differences, Ettore and Dirac would have been the best of friends. They found themselves at opposite ends of a scientific dispute, yet their mathematical minds worked in similar ways, and their personalities had much in common. But to the best of my knowledge they never met. What a pity: It would have made for some first-class anecdotes.

Dirac was Ettore without his gregarious side, to the point of borderline if not outright autism. He seldom spoke, but when he did the outcome was minimalistic, logically crafted insanity. He was incapable of not thinking literally. At a conference someone got up and said, “Professor Dirac, I don’t understand how you derived the formula on the top right-hand corner of the blackboard.” To this he responded with silence. When the chair inquired why he didn’t answer the question he replied, “That was not a question, it was a statement.”

Perhaps Dirac’s genius derived precisely from the savant streak present in some autistics. When a Russian colleague gifted him Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment his opinion was “It’s nice, but in one of the Chapters the author made a mistake. He describes the Sun rising twice on the same day.” Was this uncanny ability to discern irrelevant detail an autistic-savant trait? It certainly led him to new mathematics where others had failed. But on the very few occasions when he commented on his own work, he claimed to be guided by “mathematical beauty,” a concept he considered superior even to simplicity. “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment”—the ultimate victory of Platonism.

Dirac was even more taciturn than Ettore, and his inability to make small talk was legendary (that his wife, Manci, never shut up was apparently unrelated). A visitor to Cambridge narrated, “The weather outside was very bad, and since in England it’s always respectable to start a conversation with the weather I said to Dirac, ‘It’s very windy, Professor.’ He said nothing at all, and a few seconds later got up and left. I was mortified, as I thought that I had somehow offended him. He went to the door, opened it, looked out, came back, sat down and said, ‘Yes.’”³⁵

Unfortunately, I have the dreadful feeling that none of this outlandish behavior is actually funny; that it was involuntary, something he couldn’t help, and caused him much suffering. Dirac was severely abused as a child. If Ettore was traumatized by his mother, Dirac endured an authoritarian and sadistic father. “I never knew love or affection when I was a child,” he’d say cryptically in his old age. His brother committed suicide while still very young, and Dirac blamed his father. When Dirac won the Nobel Prize in 1933, he invited only his mother to his lecture. The extent of the abuse to which he was subjected has never been fully investigated. For someone so quiet and private, it’s harrowing to hear that Dirac once publicly said that his father was the only person he ever loathed.

Paul Dirac was born in Bristol, England, on August 8, 1902, and, like Ettore, first trained as an engineer. His aversion to experimental work, however, soon led him to switch to mathematics. While Ettore was attracted to Via Panisperna, Dirac fled to Cambridge, that ivory tower of lunacy, where his behavior passed largely unnoticed. In the early 1990s, when I was a fellow at what had been Dirac’s college, he was still fondly remembered (unlike Manci, who terrified generations of misogynist academics). At the high table, “the Dirac” was still in use as a unit of “verbal output,” similar in nature to the carat or the microgram for weight.

In 1926 Dirac finished his Cambridge University PhD degree, with a thesis titled “Quantum Mechanics,” the equivalent of titling a book Poetry or Science Fiction. But it’s a befitting title: It’s where the foundations were laid down for what had been a fragmentary hotchpotch. Overnight, the twenty-five-year-old Dirac became the leading authority in quantum theory. Dirac’s formulation of quantum mechanics led to all the modern offshoots, including attempts to quantize gravity.

After completing his PhD, Dirac embarked on an even more ambitious project: “relativistic quantum mechanics.” In its initial formulation, quantum mechanics was only applicable to particles moving much slower than the speed of light. Einstein’s theory of relativity gives a radically different picture of the universe when things move fast. Clocks tick more slowly, distances shrink, objects become “heavier” and more difficult to accelerate. A relativistic quantum theory that unified quantum mechanics and special relativity was lacking.

No one knew how to describe quantum phenomena for particles moving close to or at the speed of light. Dirac set about filling the gap. The result was Dirac’s theory of the electron. And most infamously, the antiworld.

Dirac’s discovery was made purely via mathematics, and at first it didn’t conform to experiment at all. Had it not been for his obsession with “mathematical beauty” (to the detriment of experiments if need be), I suspect that Dirac would have given up and the antiworld been found only much later. He worked with formulae and abstract concepts, conciliating Einstein’s theory of special relativity and quantum mechanics in his mind, setting up a mathematics embodying both. It took him several months of trial and error in 1927 to hatch his theory. But when he finally devised an equation describing a quantum-mechanical particle (with spin and all the quantum trimmings) moving close to the speed of light, he got a surprise. His equation—nowadays called Dirac’s equation—described not one particle, but two.

Somehow the mathematics doubled the number of particles in the theory once quantum mechanics and special relativity were married. Taking the electron as an example, Dirac’s equation contained solutions with the correct mass, spin, and

Figure 11.1: The positive energy “bowl.” At zero speed, the electron has a rest energy E = mc², associated with its mass at rest, m. As the speed increases (for both positive and negative speeds), its energy increases. (The bowl extends upward forever and is actually infinite.)

charge and, crucially, with positive energies (see Figure 11.1). But there was also a whole world of identical electrons, with the same mass and spin but negative energies (see Figure 11.2).

Physicists don’t like negative energies and for good reason. If you accelerate a negative-energy particle you gain rather than spend energy. Sounds like a cool solution to the world’s energy crisis, but things just don’t work that way. Furthermore, I’m not sure we’d like the free ride: We wouldn’t be able to stop the process, and it would end in apocalypse. In the same way that all matter rolls to its minimal-energy state, electrons with negative energies would indulge in a runaway behavior, where they would accelerate more and more (causing their energy to become more and more negative), meanwhile flooding their environment with positive energy, in a spiraling, uncontrollable mess.

The solution to the problem found by Dirac is ingenious. Nowadays it’s considered heuristic, and there are more mathematically rigorous alternatives, but it’s still an intuitive depiction.³⁶ Dirac cured the instabilities associated with these negative energies with the following recipe: Fill all the negative-energy states with particles, so that no state is left free. And call that “nothing,” or the vacuum (see Figure 11.3).

Figure 11.2: Dirac’s inverted energy bowl, servicing negative-energy electrons. The rest energy of such electrons is negative, and their energy decreases (it becomes more negative) as their speed increases. It therefore costs nothing (indeed energy is gained) to accelerate a negative-energy electron. A runaway instability follows.

Figure 11.3: Dirac’s cure to the negative-energy instability: Fill all the negative energy states with particles so that no state is left free and define such a “sea of electrons” as “nothing.” Negative-energy electrons now cannot run away down the bowl, because the bowl is entirely full.

If you accept this “redefinition” of the vacuum, stability is accomplished. Negative energy particles can’t run away into even more negative states (shedding an overdose of positive energy into the rest of the world), because all such states are already filled. Neither can positive-energy particles jump into negative-energy states. The universe becomes stable because the negative-energy states are all filled by default. Crucial to Dirac’s argument is the realization that you can’t put two particles into the same state (at least not for fermions, precisely according to the principle Fermi failed to grasp ahead of Pauli).

But if this “Dirac sea” of negative-energy particles is declared to be the vacuum, then what is “something” that exists, “something” that isn’t part of “nothingness”? One only measures differences between things, so reality—existence—should be what’s new with respect to Dirac’s sea. Such as an electron with positive energy—a regular electron, negatively charged as usual (see Figure 11.4). Or a hole in the Dirac sea: the failure of one of the negative-energy states to be filled by an electron. Such a hole would be perceived as a deficiency in negative electric charge and in negative energy. It would therefore be seen as a particle with positive energy and positive charge (see Figure 11.5 and Figure 11.6). Less debt is equivalent to more money: Likewise, less negative energy and charge is equivalent to more positive energy and charge. Thus, the prediction of the antielectron, or positron: a particle with the same mass and spin as the electron, but opposite electrical charge—and with positive energy, of course. The antiworld was unveiled.

I’m told that on cruises, if the ship’s engines are turned off in the middle of the night, everyone wakes up startled as if by the loudest of dins. The engine’s hum has become the vacuum. Its absence is now perceived as a loud, sleep interrupting, antinoise. A similar argument willed the positron into existence.

In fact, the electron is not alone and any charged particle, by the same token, must have a corresponding antiparticle with the same mass and spin but opposite charge. There is an antiproton, whose experimental discovery earned Segrè the Nobel Prize in 1959. The antiproton has a negative charge like an electron but the same mass as a proton. Likewise for all charged particles.*

Figure 11.4: A positive-energy electron hovering above Dirac’s negative-energy sea. The sea passes unnoticed (because it’s “nothing”) and only the positive-energy electron is noted.

Figure 11.5: A hole in Dirac’s sea would necessarily be seen as “something,” since it constitutes a blemish in the vacuum, or the nothingness.

Our world is primarily made of matter, and antimatter is rare, produced only in physicists’ accelerators or by cosmic rays. Just as well. Because something dramatic happens when matter meets antimatter: They annihilate.

Consider Dirac’s picture of the positron as a hole in a sea of electrons filling all the negative-energy states. If a regular electron (i.e., an electron with positive energy) meets such a hole it happily jumps into it (things love going downhill). In the process it sheds the large energy difference between the two states in the form of light (typically two photons). At the end we have the hole filled and no positive-energy electron; i.e., we have what we defined as nothing. The electron and positron have annihilated, releasing their inner energy in the form of very powerful light (see Figure 11.7). The amount of energy released in these annihilations is enormous. Just plug the electron mass into E = mc², and you’ll find that you wouldn’t want to be anywhere nearby. A bomb made of matter and antimatter brought together would be more than a thousand times more powerful than an atomic bomb with the same mass. Except that I’m not sure how such a bomb could be manipulated without detonating immediately.

Figure 11.6: A hole in Dirac’s sea is equivalent to the sum of a perfectly filled sea and a particle with opposite qualities to that missing in the hole; i.e., a particle with positive energy and charge (notice the “mouth” of the positron). Thus was the positron predicted.

Conversely, a large amount of energy (say, in the form of two photons) could make an electron in the negative-energy sea jump into a positive-energy state (see Figure 11.8). At the end, with respect to the vacuum, we have a positive-energy electron plus a negative-energy hole; i.e., an electron plus a positron. Two very energetic particles of light can therefore create a pair of matter and antimatter particles in a process reciprocal to their annihilation. Creation and annihilation are two sides of the same coin—and are the most distinctive hallmark of Dirac’s theory.

Nowadays Dirac’s theory is lauded as one the greatest achievements of the twentieth century, but no one believed it at first (and Pauli took the piss out of it

* For neutral particles the story is more involved. For example, the photon doesn’t have an antiphoton, or seen in another way, the photon and the antiphoton are identical. But the neutron does have a very distinct antineutron. As for the neutrino . . .

tremendously). In his first paper, Dirac wrongly stated that the antielectron was the proton; Oppenheimer duly pointed out that particles and their corresponding antiparticles must have the same mass. The proton, recall, is 1,836 times “heavier” than the electron.

Figure 11.7: An electron-positron annihilation. If a positive-energy electron meets a hole in Dirac’s sea (a positron) it may jump into it, releasing the energy difference in the form of two very energetic particles of light. At the end, the hole is filled at the expense of the positive-energy electron. We have, therefore, a perfect Dirac sea, or a vacuum: The two particles have annihilated.

Figure 11.8: The creation of an electron-positron pair. In the converse process to annihilation, two very energetic photons knock a negative-energy electron into the positive band. With respect to the vacuum, we end up with a positive-energy electron plus a negative-energy hole; i.e., an electron plus a positron.

But Dirac found the mathematics in his theory beautiful, so he stuck to his guns. OK , so his theory didn’t describe the electron and the proton: It described the electron and another particle with the same mass and spin but opposite charge, which had yet to be seen. Somebody would eventually find the positron, he was sure. Dirac thus started the trend of postulating new, as yet unobserved particles that has continued to this day, when everyone fancies themselves a little Dirac. Thousands of unobserved particles fill the tomes of theoretical physics, waiting to be detected in order to provide the proposer with a suitable Nobel Prize. Too good to be true, their enthusiastic creators seemingly fail to notice.

Of course, the story with Dirac was different, but as Ettore came into the picture there was no evidence for the positron. Ettore wasn’t amused. To him it was all utter rubbish: negative energies, particles that didn’t exist, and whatnot. His anti-Dirac reaction would lead him to the Majorana neutrino, but Ettore’s claim to Nobelization is much more profound: His neutrino is merely the bastard child of much deeper work. What really worried Ettore was what he perceived as the sheer nonsense of Dirac’s sea and its negative energies. This opposition to Dirac’s theory led him to a masterpiece, “Relativistic Theory of Elementary Particles with Arbitrary Spin” published in 1932: his unfinished symphony.

But then, in the months that followed its publication, a strange set of events was set in motion in Ettore’s life.

TWELVE

The Serpent’s Egg

By the end of 1932, at the age of twenty-six, Ettore had become a mature scientist in the eyes of the establishment. He’d finished his libera docenza³⁷; had written groundbreaking papers in atomic, nuclear, and particle physics; and was internationally renowned. A generous grant of 12,000 lire, personally signed by Marconi, was awarded to him (for comparison, a full professor earned about 25,000 lire per year). Ettore was fast becoming famous. He even joined the Fascist party.

For the record, by 1933 everyone at Via Panisperna, with the sole exception of Corbino—who had other strings to his bow—was a party member. It was a mere formality, handy for cutting through red tape and when applying for state jobs or obtaining grants. Fermi joined in 1929; Ettore’s Zio Quirino in 1926; Lo Surdo—the only one who was a real Fascist—in a record 1925. Even Giulio Racah from the Florence group (later to emigrate to Israel and found physics there) was a member. Ettore wasn’t in the country when the relevant paperwork was signed, suggesting that he sent someone (his brother Salvatore?) to impersonate him. Like everyone else, he wore the Fascist party pin in his lapel, yet “every first of January he made a bet with a friend that before the end of the year Mussolini would be thrown out. And at the end of the year, at San Silvestre, he’d pay up the lost bet,” according to Maria.

Grant in hand, Ettore journeyed to Leipzig in January 1933 to join the Physics Institute. Which meant Heisenberg—his scooper and savior. And then a miracle happened. Ettore’s social reticence, his difficulties with dialogue and friendship, completely dissipated. Reading his letters and pooling recollections from others, we find him incongruously upbeat, positive, open to all. “At the Institute I’ve been received very cordially,” Ettore wrote to his family in January 1933. “I had a long conversation with Heisenberg who is a person of extraordinary courtesy and sympathy. I’m in excellent relations with all, particularly with the American Inglis whom I already knew from Rome and who keeps me company and often plays the guide. . . . The climate is pleasant . . . and life isn’t expensive. The numerous cafes and nightclub venues are good value, with great music and carnival-style happiness, brimming with people every Saturday evening. . . . The Institute of physics . . . is located at a pleasant location, slightly out of hand, between the cemetery and the madhouse.”

He went to the cinema, plunged into the nightlife, found the town comfortable and its people welcoming. Contrary to his habits, he even bothered to publish his work: “I’ve written an article on nuclear structure that pleased Heisenberg a great deal, even though it corrected his own theory. I’ll also publish in German an expanded version of my last article in ‘Nuovo Cimento’; in this paper one can find an important mathematical discovery, as it has been confirmed to me. . . .” He’s referring to his 1932 masterpiece, notably proud of his achievement, parading it around Leipzig, for once sensitive to praise and recognition.

The miracle was accomplished by none other than Heisenberg, who was then only thirty-one but already a full professor, famous for the discovery of his “uncertainty principle” and the mathematical framework of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg led a hedonistic lifestyle: He drank liberally and was an unabashed playboy; he played the piano exquisitely (if rather extravagantly) and was a top-class dancer; he was a recklessly speedy skier, always going off to the mountains in search of a good time. Heisenberg invariably woke up late and worked only in the afternoon: He claimed he could only do physics if he was enjoying life.

In keeping with his lifestyle and personality, Heisenberg kept things informal and lighthearted at his institute, but without the foolishness of Via Panisperna. He had a Ping-Pong table installed in the library, and much time was spent playing rather than working. But unlike Fermi, Heisenberg was highly cultured and could also be a deep thinker. His father was a classicist, and Heisenberg had been educated in that tradition, reading Plato and Aristotle’s major works in the original Greek. He had strong humanistic leanings and besides cutting-edge physics, philosophical discussions were part of the work schedule at his institute.

Together with Niels Bohr—his mentor and the founding father of quantum mechanics—Heisenberg was concerned with the ontological implications of the new theory. According to the most direct interpretation of quantum theory (to this day controversial), the world can happily live in superpositions of opposites until an observation is made, forcing reality to collapse into a solid certainty. The old philosophical threat of “reality as a projection of an individual mind”—or solipsism—had broken into science. Some of Heisenberg’s early works are a mixture of physics and philosophy, addressing the issue of solipsism very closely.

This was precisely the side of quantum mechanics Fermi could never understand, but which appealed so much to Ettore. His discussions with Heisenberg must have covered everything from neutrons to philosophy and literature. He wrote of Heisenberg in his early 1933 letters: “We have became great friends after many a conversation and some chess matches.” And “[Heisenberg’s] company is irreplaceable for me.” So complete was their rapport that they became a threat to everyone else, particularly during seminars, where they ganged up on critics of their strong nuclear-force theory. It seemed that Ettore had found a twin soul. And this probably explains why he became so outgoing.

But the revolution in his life extended beyond his relations with colleagues. He reported home that he was in good health, even though he drank liters of coffee and chain-smoked throughout this period of intellectual ebullience. On his own, without his mother, he dealt well with “life on a practical level,” to use Ettore Jr.’s turn of phrase. In his letters to his parents he notes and comments on the financial crisis that followed the Great Depression in America, expertly changing his lire as most appropriate, given the general volatility in the exchange markets. He became a man of the world, and it was through his diligence (by introducing him to an Italian employer) that his sister Rosina’s future husband, Werner Schultze, came to Rome. The escalating German political situation, mounting all around him, didn’t pass unnoticed to Ettore, either.

The interesting timing of Ettore’s sojourn in Germany has probably not escaped you. Barely a week after Ettore’s arrival, following a protracted political crisis, Adolf Hitler was nominated chancellor of the Reich. The gears were set in motion. It would have been difficult to ignore what happened next—even at an institute of physics.

On the night of February 27, the Reichstag fire took place, an obvious act of arson that destroyed the German parliament. On the surface, this seemed to be a Communist plot, but it was actually a bit of theater orchestrated by Nazi storm troopers. Like modern terrorism (real or perceived), the fire gave Hitler the perfect excuse to suspend individual freedoms and assert his rule. On March 5, rigged elections gave a majority to the Nazis, who passed the Enabling Act on March 24, transferring full powers to Hitler. All opposition was ruthlessly destroyed in a series of purges that led to the establishment of the first concentration camps. Racism and anti-Semitism became widespread and part of the state ideology. March 31 was declared National Day of Boycott of the Jews, when storm troopers beat up or killed prominent Jews and those who engaged in business with them. On May 10, a large group of Nazi students congregated outside Berlin University to burn 20,000 Jewish books. “These flames not only illuminate the end of an old era, but shed light on the new one,” said Goebbels, the state ideologue. Jewish composers, and writers like Thomas Mann and Eric Maria Remarque, came under attack. And physics would not avoid the line of fire.

Boycott of the Jews demonstration. In this picture German Jews were made to march carrying signs stating “A good German doesn’t buy from the Jews,” and the like. The men in uniform are SA.

Strong credence was suddenly given to a movement called Deutsche Physik, which for years had attempted to establish the concept of Aryan—as opposed to Jewish—science. The movement was headed by two Nobel laureates, Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, and at best it was a critique of theoretical physics in favor of experimentation, at worst a mere smokescreen of racism and forceful interpretations. Unsurprisingly, their prime target was Albert Einstein: They condemned his theory of relativity as “the great Jewish bluff.” Einstein chose at first to ignore rather than respond to their attacks, but by 1933 he was forced to emigrate to the United States.³⁸

Although Heisenberg was a staunch right-wing nationalist with undeniable “Aryan” credentials (he’d been part of the German Youth movement, for example), he wasn’t a moron, and all this nonsense against the theory of relativity irritated him. He opposed Deutsche Physik and was soon dangerously high up in their bad books.³⁹ A public political argument broke out as to how the scientific interests of the Third Reich could best be served; the Deutsche Physik mob called Heisenberg a “white Jew,” providing a sense of the level of the debate. The early squabbles of 1933 would erupt into a full confrontation over the succession of the main professor in Munich (Arnold Sommerfeld), in what would become known in Nazi Germany as the “Heisenberg affair.” Heisenberg stood his ground, suffering heavily from his anti-Deutsche Physik stance. Who knows where his mind was while he discussed physics and philosophy with Ettore.

Perhaps so as not to alarm his family, Ettore refrained at first from commenting in his letters on the political incidents. He only mentioned hearing gun reports in Leipzig on the night of the fire, months after the fact. It wasn’t until May of 1933 that his letters began to reflect his views on the subject. We will examine these letters in detail, for the role they played in his personal tragedy. Because it was in one of his letters commenting on Nazism that Ettore did something “downright inexcusable” to Emilio Segrè.

As March 1933 approached and German academia broke up for Easter, Ettore moved on to Copenhagen. He liked the town a lot less than Leipzig but was still in high spirits as he joined the Niels Bohr Institute. He commented, tongue in cheek, in a letter to his father: “[Bohr is] the great inspiration of modern physics, now a bit aged and considerably senile. He still passes for a deep thinker; he speaks a jumble of all languages swallowing his words, giving the impression that if he bothered with his elocution other people might actually understand what he’s saying. Everyday he writes one word for his new article, which everyone is certain will be of decisive importance.”

Unlike relativity, which came to the world in one piece by the grace of the great Albert, quantum mechanics was a collective and multistage effort involving two generations. The early stages were the work of Max Planck, Albert Einstein (in his spare time), Prince Louis de Broglie, and, above all, Niels Bohr. Bohr also acted as a pivot to the second generation and the final formulation of the theory, as proposed by Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, and Pauli. So productive were those days that there weren’t enough Nobel Prizes to go around. Heisenberg won the 1932 Nobel Prize, but lest it might cause offense to his equally deserving competitors, this was only announced in November 1933, at the same time the 1933 Nobel Prize was awarded to Schrödinger and Dirac.

Niels Bohr was a national hero in Denmark and physically “looked as if he had absconded from the captaincy of a herring trawler,” in the words of Graham Farmelo. Bohr had been a talented football player (dispelling the myth that all footballers are stupid⁴⁰), and like most of the quantum-mechanics pioneers was a heavy drinker (Dirac and Ehrenfest were the exceptions). By 1933 he was generally regarded as the father figure of quantum mechanics, attracting funding to the field and arbitrating disputes, providing worldwide leadership. He was thus the perfect target for cynicism and sarcasm à la Ettore Majorana. A leader just had to be a senile old fart, according to Ettore.

But Ettore did warm up to Bohr as he grew to know him better, acknowledging his good nature, if not his intellect. He wrote to Gentile to describe how Bohr had invited him to his home, which, like the Copenhagen Institute, was paid for by Carlsberg (as in “probably the best beer in the world”). The house was surrounded by such mountains of kegs that Ettore couldn’t find the entrance—he needed Bohr’s assistance to find the path through the beer labyrinth. Parenthetically, I note that much of the early research on quantum mechanics was sponsored by Carlsberg—a non-profit-making foundation. Spot how its bottles sneak into many historical photos. (One wonders if the most abstruse aspects of quantum mechanics, like the lack of determinism and the wave nature of matter, have deep roots in ethylization.)

Bohr’s institute was the center of quantum-mechanics research in those days, and Ettore had a chance to interact with its luminaries. He met the very rude Pauli, but did not seem to notice the hiccups and complaints reported by others (“a tipaccio , very nice and intelligent” was his verdict). He met the Dutch physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who inquired at great length about his work, inviting him to Leiden later in the year. This visit would never take place. Ehrenfest—a very intimate friend of Einstein—suffered from severe depression, and in September 1933 shot his younger son (who suffered from Down’s syndrome) before killing himself. But in the conversations between Ettore and Ehrenfest, there was no hint of dark thoughts from either side. The things that people think but don’t mention.⁴¹

Later, Bohr left for a brief stint in the mountains with Heisenberg, where the two often retired to discuss philosophy. They were both deeply concerned with the interpretation of quantum theory. They spent their breaks trekking and mountaineering, all the while racking their brains up in the snowy summits, trying to understand the deep meaning of the new science. “When [Bohr] returns he will resume the apostolate to spread the Spirit of Copenhagen,” Ettore wrote to Gentile on December 3, 1933. A hint of jealousy regarding the special relationship between Bohr and Heisenberg lingers in these words.

Ettore spent a short Easter break in Rome, going to Via Panisperna only a couple of times. He then returned to Leipzig, still in a good mood. On the train, he struck up a friendship with a drunk Neapolitan traveling to Germany to sell tomatoes. Ettore passed himself off as a fellow tomato seller, and the two became best mates for the duration of the trip. He arrived back in Leipzig in May of 1933, and for some time it was business as usual. And then something happened.

We simply don’t know what, but it triggered the beginning of a long slump into depression. After his uncharacteristic openness in the previous months, his dark side returned with a vengeance. He resumed his habit of walking on his own and rarely talked to anyone. His extreme negative criticism became worse than ever, alienating those around him. He became poignantly antisocial. During a conference, Heisenberg praised Ettore’s work and prompted him to intervene regarding a certain point of their theory; to everyone’s embarrassment, Ettore responded with silence. He rarely mentioned Heisenberg now in his letters home, and when he did, his enthusiasm was gone. His tone became brusque, rude, blatantly meant to shake off human contact. He wanted to be alone.

Why this sudden break in his humor? We simply don’t know, but he had followed a similar pattern before—for example, when he alternated gregarious happiness at Casina delle Rose with a more somber mood at Via Panisperna. But this time the swing was much more dramatic, and it would permanently damage his life. Are the roots of what happened in March 1938 to be found in May 1933? It’s possible, but what exactly happened?

We can only speculate, but I’m sure the chronology can never be so simply linear. Whatever happened in May 1933 must have been in part the culmination of the events of the past two years. Ettore had endured a war of attrition on many fronts, steadily fraying his nerves. He’d had to contend with the specter of a charred baby, in an affair that came to a head in 1932. He’d been trying to evade the stifling Majorana family atmosphere and the overwhelming presence of his mother. The quarreling at Via Panisperna, with its “negative energy,” had been getting worse: He’d been back there over Easter—we don’t know what happened, but his tone to the Boys, Gentile excepted—immediately changed. Lack of love and of a woman can’t have helped. And his health had finally given in to the bombardment of coffee and cigarettes. He may not have caught syphilis, as “suggested” by Segrè, but he did develop a bad ulcer while in Germany. Was this a cause of his troubles, or an effect?

Maybe it’s pointless to seek out a first cause. Perhaps the point is that there wasn’t one. Anyone can handle a single calamity; it’s usually the combined effect of many blows that topples even the strongest. And the maelstrom whisking Ettore into depression had been steadily upping its beat. Given the numerous upsets in his life, could Ettore have been a victim of the proverbial last straw?

Regardless, we can identify one event that hit Ettore hard in May 1933. Ettore may have been insensitive to publication and career accolades, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t care about his science. And it was around this time that he suffered a nasty blow. For he was in Leipzig when news began to arrive that his critique of Dirac’s theory, embodied in his 1932 masterpiece, was wrong.

THIRTEEN

His Unfinished Symphony

To put it simply, the Majorana neutrino is what happens when Dirac’s antiworld meets a shy and left-handed particle. But hiding behind Ettore’s 1937 paper on the neutrino there’s a complex human drama. By comparison, the scoops that haunted Fermi and Salam feel like prepubescent self-aggrandizement. Ettore’s scientific tragedy, in contrast, had nothing to do with vanity. There’s strong evidence that Ettore had finished his neutrino paper as early as 1932 and kept it in the drawer. He did this because the neutrino paper was nothing but a minor appendix to another paper he published in 1932, which he regarded as his real masterpiece. “Relativistic Theory of Elementary Particles with Arbitrary Spin,” reads its title. I must prepare you for what follows. Seventy-five years on, I sometimes have the impression that physics is all wrong—and that the contents of that paper hold the key to our errors.

It’s amazing that Ettore’s 1932 masterpiece reached the public at all, given his history of abandoning his work. That he bothered to publish it suggests he knew his theory was so crazy it might even be true. But he published only in Italian; when he was in Leipzig he mentioned in a letter that he was working on an extension with a view to publishing in German, but he never finished it, or if he did, it was lost (much of his work went missing in strange circumstances). His masterpiece had to wait for a revival in the 1960s. It’s a gem that was quickly forgotten and even today no one knows quite what to make of it. My personal view is that it set up a fork on the road of twentieth-century physics, and we didn’t take Ettore’s path. We may yet live to regret it.

A page from Ettore’s notebook, where he developed his infinite component equation, meant to replace Dirac’s equation and do away with the ungainly negative energies.

Ettore didn’t like Dirac’s theory. A sea of infinite particles with negative energies being defined as the vacuum? Nah, it sounded bogus. His original motivation in writing his masterpiece was to do away with Dirac’s negative-energy sea and the prediction of antimatter. Ettore examined the root of the problem with a clinical eye, deconstructing Dirac’s elegant mathematics and homing in on the source of the negative energies, and he decided to do something entirely orthogonal. It’s hard to explain without mathematics, but it’s beautiful, even more so than what Dirac had done. Mathematical beauty isn’t easily explained. As Fernando Pessoa stated in a poem: “Newton’s binomial is as beautiful as the Venus of Milo; it’s just that very few people notice it.”

Essentially, he allowed himself to be guided singly by the principle of relativity—that there are no preferred observers in the universe—and didn’t require his equation to describe an electron from the start but to describe anything with spin and consistent with relativity. Only at the end did he require the electron to be an aspect of this “anything.” More mathematically he considered infinite dimensional representations of the Lorentz group. In fact, what Ettore did is a more obvious way to unify relativity and quantum mechanics than Dirac’s theory. I find it a bit surprising that Dirac in 1927 didn’t follow Ettore’s path.

Dirac had been shocked to find two types of particles emerging from his equation: matter and antimatter. Ettore found instead an infinite tower of particles, all described by the same equation, unified into a single quantum-mechanical wave. At low energies they seemingly split into distinct particles (including the electron), unfolding a particle rainbow, each “color” with a different spin and mass. But as with Dirac’s electron and positron, at a deeper level they were in fact the same object showing different faces. The crucial fact that the various particles in Ettore’s tower had different masses (unlike the electron and positron) allowed him to ignore all but one (and to “decouple” the rest, to use the modern terminology). He didn’t need to appeal to a Dirac sea because there were no negative energies or antiparticles in his theory.

Ettore was very proud of his accomplishment. His construction was even more graceful than Dirac’s; by Dirac’s own aesthetical token, it should therefore have been correct. In Leipzig, Ettore continued to polish his masterpiece while he worked on strong nuclear forces with Heisenberg. He referred to it in his official reports sent to Italy and in letters to his father and to his friend Gentile. It’s obvious he valued it more than anything else he’d done. Not many understood it, but he didn’t care. He knew Dirac’s theory was tripe, both theoretically and experimentally. Just to mention one problem, where was Dirac’s so-called antielectron or positron, anyway?

The innocent track seen in this picture led to the discovery of the positron and the antiworld.

It was while Ettore was in Copenhagen, in March 1933, that news started to trickle in that the positron had been discovered by American physicist Carl Anderson. Examining cosmic rays in a cloud chamber subject to a magnetic field, Anderson had seen the telltale curling track of a particle with a mass and charge like the electron, but bending in the opposite direction, implying that it carried a charge with the opposite sign. At first Anderson couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he let out a sigh of relief. Of course his prank-loving friends had just reversed the polarity of his magnets. The idiots! But when he saw that no one had tampered with the magnets, it gradually dawned on him that he’d discovered something new. A bit shaken, Anderson eventually published a cautious note titled “The Apparent Existence of Easily Deflectable Positives.” Only much later did he make the connection with Dirac’s positron.⁴²

No one believed Anderson’s results. Pauli, who, like Ettore, hated Dirac’s theory, poured scorn all over Anderson. Even Dirac, who had a vested interest in these findings, was skeptical. Niels Bohr went as far as to suggest that Anderson’s anomalous tracks were caused by air currents in the cloud chamber. “Here everyone has taken it for a formidable equivoque,” Ettore reported sarcastically in a letter from Copenhagen. “The positive electrons are nothing but normal electrons [moving in the opposite direction]. This is also Rutherford’s opinion.”

All this cheerfulness on the matter dissipated after the Easter break. In England, Patrick Blackett and Giuseppe Occhialini independently confirmed Anderson’s discovery. Pauli was so incensed by this little twist of nature that he went on holiday to southern France, so he wouldn’t have to hear news of the confirmation of the positron. But the evidence in favor of the positron kept mounting, and even Heisenberg began working on Dirac’s theory. “Season’s news,” Ettore wrote in a letter, “credence is being given to Dirac’s theory of the positive electrons. Heisenberg is working on it seriously.” Ettore then makes fun of the prediction of creation and annihilation of pairs of matter and antimatter particles in Dirac’s theory, but the joke falls flat. Soon afterwards Occhialini and Blackett observed precisely these outlandish creations and annihilations. Dirac was right; and by the most linear extension, Ettore’s theory was dead.

Ettore lost heart. I don’t know why: He’d only proposed a theoretical idea that wasn’t upheld by nature. So what? That’s science. Better to have a good idea than a bad one or none at all, even if nature doesn’t choose our idea. But he took it very personally; some suggest that this was the trigger for his 1933 fall into depression.

I’m not sure how Dirac would have reacted if the positron had never been found and instead Ettore’s infinite tower had been discovered in cosmic rays. He probably would have fared better than Ettore: Even with all of Dirac’s emotional scars, Ettore’s mind was on much shakier ground. But seventy-five years later, the story is far from finished. Ettore’s 1932 paper is a box of surprises, quite apart from the fact that it led to an amazing prediction about the neutrino. As Dirac himself put it, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement; but the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” Ettore’s and Dirac’s mathematical constructions are so beautiful that being opposites doesn’t preclude them from being complementary, and possibly both true.

The problem with Ettore’s paper is that it was too far ahead of its time. I have a sneaking suspicion that it may be the most lasting contribution he left us. Ettore’s theory is a gem in unification. And we badly need it.

Current particle physics is built upon the so-called standard model, which is a glorious mess. Twelve fundamental particles make up matter, another four carry forces and mediate interactions between things, one “auxiliary” particle is thrown in for good measure, and this still neglects gravity (see Figure 13.1). The electron and neutrino have been joined by two more families of similar but more massive particles, the muon and the tauon, plus their corresponding neutrinos, the whole lot called leptons. The proton and neutron are no longer fundamental, but are instead known to be made up of two types of “quark” (the up and down quarks.) As if this weren’t enough, four more quarks have been discovered (the charm, strange, top, and bottom quarks). Fermi’s weak force is known to be carried by the W and Z bosons, while light and electromagnetic interactions are transmitted by photons. Ettore and Heisenberg’s strong force is mediated by gluons. We need the Higgs particle to give mass to particles, if appropriate.

Figure 13.1: The standard model of particle physics. There are enough so-called “fundamental” particles to compose a periodic table.

A hell of a zoo of building blocks for the world! (To think that the Greeks were happy with earth, air, water, and fire.) Anderson may have received the Nobel Prize for discovering the positron, but nowadays the view is that the finder of a new elementary particle ought to be punished by a $10,000 fine. And if you consider all the “free parameters” that have to be dialed to exactly the right values for the model to agree with the data, then between masses, interaction strengths, mixing angles, and so on, you have almost thirty independent numbers. All thrown into the theory by hand, as input, without a glimmer of justification.

Pathetic.

So far, attempts to improve the overcomplicated state of particle physics have focused on unifying forces; i.e., turning the many particles mediating interactions into a single unifying force particle. For example, Fermi’s weak force, electricity, and magnetism now fall under the single umbrella of the “electroweak model,” discovered by Salam, Steve Weinberg, and Sheldon Glashow. Some voice hopes that the strong force (or even gravity) may join the “interactions” party. All very well, but this still leaves us with a ridiculous proliferation of fundamental particles that don’t carry forces: quarks, leptons and the Higgs: the forgotten side of unification. To my mind, this signifies one of two things. Either these particles are composites—little “molecules” composed of smaller and simpler constituents we haven’t yet discovered; or we should seriously revisit Ettore’s 1932 theory.

The underlying idea is easy to grasp: No one ever counts electrons and positrons in Dirac’s theory as two different types of particle. They’re just two different states of the same particle, much like spin up and spin down for a spin half particle. A single quantum wave describes the doublet: They’re different “entries” of the same object. By analogy Ettore’s construction throws us a lifeline in unifying the whole wild menagerie of particles we insist on calling fundamental. Perhaps they are really manifold expressions of the same fundamental object, just like the electron and the positron. The different states in Ettore’s infinite tower have different masses and spins, and these don’t match experiment. His symphony is unfinished. But an adaptation of Ettore’s 1932 idea just might provide the ultimate unification.

After his 1933 descent into depression, Ettore was quoted by Amaldi as saying, “Physics is on the wrong road, we’re all on the wrong road.” This quote has made its way into Italian comics, with references to atomic weapons and visions of Armageddon. But it could just as well be applied to the state of modern physics. We had a choice in 1932, and we took Dirac’s path, when in fact we never actually needed to choose one path exclusively (it’s possible to fold antiparticles into Ettore’s scheme). We got ourselves into a terrible muddle and are now appealing to string theory, supersymmetry, and other complex constructions containing infinite towers of particles that don’t fit the observed world any better than Ettore’s infinite dimensional wave function. Ettore, with a simpler approach, in a sense had already achieved as much as string theory—it’s ironic that what excites some people so much nowadays is no better than what for Ettore seemed an utter failure. But why not go back to where he left off and adapt his construction to clear up the chaos pervading our cherished “standard model”?

“In all probability Majorana knew exactly what had happened . . . and had guessed the destructive potential of the discovery. . . .” Ettore’s speech balloon: “Physics is on the wrong road . . . we are all on the wrong road . . .”

Late at night, I often have a lingering feeling that a variation on Ettore’s theory may provide the essential clue. It could unify in a single particle what then unfolds into the fundamental-particle avalanche we’re struggling with. But his 1932 masterpiece is not only unfinished: It has largely been forgotten. As for its appendix, left to gather dust in his drawer for almost five years, that certainly can’t be ignored. I know I advocated a Nobel Prize for Ettore based on the Majorana neutrino, but this work was insignificant in comparison to the majestic views he unveiled in 1932. The Majorana neutrino was a mere sidekick to a forgotten, ill-understood masterpiece: Majorana’s unfinished symphony.

It’s always tough to be disproved, but was this the only cause of Ettore’s sudden collapse in 1933? One certainly cannot discount the effects of the main undercurrent to all the waves in these stormy seas: the specter of the burnt baby—the leitmotif of his tragedy. It was a curse that had been continuously hacking at his soul for almost a decade, sapping precious stability and coherence, year after year wearing away the remainder of his certainties. The charred-baby blight changed Ettore’s worldview forever, and had a similar effect upon his brother Salvatore. Neither was ever the same again. And when its troubles finally relented, in the months just before his visit to Leipzig, it may well have been too late for Ettore to feel any relief. Permanent soul damage had been sustained.

FOURTEEN

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

The story of the burnt baby—”the outrageous Majorana affair”—is so improbable that it may prove useful to consider a fictional prelude: a short story from La Paura di Montalbano by Andrea Camilleri; a tale well tuned to the world of Sicilian vendetta.

Detective Salvo Montalbano, a multibook character renowned for his cynical attitude toward Sicilian officialdom, comes across a story that has its roots more than fifty years in the past. An old lady on her deathbed confesses to a priest, who is, naturally, bound to silence. But the priest then drops disturbing hints to the detective.

The old lady had had a friend who’d asked her for rat poison many years before, while going through a difficult phase with her husband: a good-for-nothing who slept around, spent his nights playing cards, and ran up large debts that his wife then had to pay. The old lady had easy access to poison, since her own husband, recently deceased, had left her a pharmacy. But seeing the obvious intent in her friend’s request, she gave her a harmless white powder instead.

A few weeks later, her friend’s husband felt unwell while playing cards late at night. He was brought home, the doctor reporting that it was nothing more serious than the effects of excess. He recommended rest, less drinking and smoking, and left the wife a medicine—a white powder—asking her to administer it to the patient. The next morning, the wife was still locked in their bedroom when the servants broke in to find her in a state of shock, her husband bathing in his own shit and vomiting his guts out.

He died shortly afterwards, and the wife promptly confessed that instead of giving him the medicine, she’d poisoned her husband. Fifty years later, the old lady who’d provided the “poison” still feels guilty and insistently murmurs to the priest, “It was not rat poison!” before she expires.

Given the long period of time that has elapsed since the original events, it takes Montalbano quite an effort to find out what actually entered the official records. It appears that the wife did go to prison at first—after all, she confessed her crime. However, the case was reopened several times. Her father was an important politician (read: a powerful mafioso) who was engaged in open warfare with several political enemies (read: competing Mafia factions). He claimed that his daughter had been forced to confess under duress by his enemies and ordered an autopsy in Palermo. After careful testing, the doctors found no evidence of poison in the husband’s corpse. The woman was promptly released . . . still claiming that she really had poisoned her husband.

Naturally, her father’s enemies argued that he had bribed the doctors and asked for an independent autopsy to be carried out in Florence. The body parts, however, were lost on the way there, and when they eventually arrived six months later, had quite possibly been tampered with. When the second examination was finally performed, it did reveal poison . . . and in such large amounts! Questioned as to how the Palermo doctors could possibly have missed it, the Florence doctors explained that they mustn’t have tried “the right chemical.” The poison they’d found could only be detected by means of one particular chemical. The woman returned to jail, despite her father’s protests.

The archetypal Sicilian mêlée is now installed: what a richness of layers, what depths of corruption! You can see Montalbano’s dilemma: A woman seeks revenge on her husband with poison that isn’t poison; however, her husband does die from poisoning. Palermo doctors, paid by her father, find no poison in the body, whereas an “independent” inquiry committee, bribed by his political enemies, does find poison in the body. There are at least two levels of vendetta, but could there be yet a third? Could someone else have poisoned the husband? But then what a coincidence. . . . This is genuine Sicilian intrigue, strand after strand of political and emotional battle intertwining, different layers of feuds and revenges combining in a web where cause and effect can no longer be distinguished.

But amid the confusion, the clever detective smells a rat. Why did the old lady feel so guilty about this incident? How could she not be sure she’d given her friend an innocuous substance? It’s not a mistake easily made. And if she did know that it wasn’t rat poison, it would surely have been enough to tell the police her version of the story to get her friend’s sentence reduced, the crime diminished to mere intention to murder. Was she protecting someone? What else might be hiding beneath the topsoil?

It is then that two developments come to the aid of the detective. First, he finds out that while the Palermo doctors were writing their report, one of them had died. Another doctor had stepped in to complete the work, and it appeared that after backhanding the initial doctors the mafioso father hadn’t bribed the new doctor. Being scrupulous, the new doctor had repeated all the tests himself before signing the report. And although this detail was included only in his case notes—not the report itself—he had tried the missing chemical alluded to by the Florence doctors. With a negative result.

To Montalbano this proved beyond doubt that the man hadn’t been poisoned, but had died of natural causes. Even though both sets of doctors were corrupt, the Palermo doctors didn’t need to lie, so the final Palermo doctor didn’t even have to be dishonest.

Second, he learns that the old lady left Italy to live abroad shortly after the original “poisoning” incident. She sold everything, including the pharmacy left to her by her husband, and Montalbano discovers that the new owner is still alive and is the sort of old man who likes to talk at length about the past. The old pharmacist recalls that one day, while the woman was checking the business records before completing the sale, he’d caught her in great distemper, indeed shouting with rage, her nerves completely out of control. He’d never found out the cause but the old man manages to place this episode just before the poisoning occurred; i.e., after the old woman had given the fake poison to her friend. All then becomes clear to Montalbano.

He only needs proof, and illegally breaking into the place where the old woman’s belongings are stored confirms his theory. Among her possessions he finds several letters between her late husband and the “friend” to whom she’d given the powder. Her husband and friend had been lovers and the letters are cruel, unforgivable. Not only were they cheating on her, but they made fun of her in their correspondence: of her sexual frigidity, her character, her physical flaws.

The old woman felt guilty on her deathbed not because she might have given her friend rat poison by mistake. Her silence, regarding the fact she knew it was not rat poison, was the third and final level of vendetta, and the cause of her guilt. She’d been responsible for her friend’s long jail sentence, and worse, for her friend’s lifelong remorse for having “killed” her husband. The priest enlisted Montalbano because the friend turned out to be still alive, presumably still believing she’d poisoned her husband. But Montalbano, having satisfied his curiosity, does precisely nothing about it.

Contrived? You read worse things in La Sicilia newspaper. Or closer to the topic of this book, in the history of the Majorana family. Except that the burnt-baby case is only formally similar to Montalbano’s story: Its contents are infinitely more gruesome and the emotions involved much more disturbing. Not to mention that the Majorana “case” was enacted by very real people—just ask the innocent baby who was caught in the middle.

The dead-baby case was closed shortly before Ettore’s collapse, but its inception goes back some eight years, to the summer of 1924, when Ettore was eighteen. At the house of Antonio Amato, a wealthy confectionary industrialist, a terrible fire broke out in the bedroom where his only son—a baby—was asleep. Tongues of fire soon engulfed the cradle, turning the space between mattress and mosquito net into an inferno and burning little Cicciuzzo Amato to a crisp. Although the incident was initially seen as a misfortune, closer examination revealed that the cot had been doused with a flammable liquid. Further police investigation, Sicilian style, extracted a confession from the culprit: a sixteen-year-old nursemaid, Carmela Gagliardi, who turned out to be mentally retarded.

In the logic of the half-wit, she explained to the police that her family had forced her to work for the Amatos whereas she wanted to work for another family, the Platanias, who were fond of her and to whom she had become attached. Therefore she had burnt the Amatos’ baby.

Sic.

Besides being simple, the poor girl had good reasons to be emotionally disturbed. Her brother sexually abused her; her mother spanked her on a regular basis; she had to work hard while her sister idled away at home; the same sister was betrothed to a boy Carmela had dated and still loved and who had previously sworn eternal love to her before assaulting her . . . the ubiquitous Sicilian cataclysm.

But just as in Montalbano’s chronicle, or any other good Sicilian tale, one layer of vendetta doesn’t suffice; and another was already running in parallel, ready to pounce upon the case. It concerned the Majorana family. As chance would have it, two of Antonio Amato’s sisters were married to Ettore’s uncles Giuseppe (the eldest brother) and Dante (the fourth). When I described Ettore’s family, I hope I gave you the correct impression: These were men of great distinction—jurists, deputies, senators, and rectors.

For reasons not clear to me, Antonio’s sisters had been cut out of the family will, which Antonio had thus collected whole. But in Italy the law compels a certain portion of every will to be given to all the children, regardless of the wishes of the testator.⁴³ “La legitima”—the legitimate, or the fair one—prevents any child from being entirely cut off and left destitute. Antonio had chosen to ignore this law, but Dante and Giuseppe, as knowledgeable lawyers, requested that he restore la legitima to his sisters. A battle then developed along the following improving lines:

The Majoranas proposed that the matter be amicably settled by means of sum X. Antonio countered by offering one-fifth of X. Counteroffers were made. Antonio didn’t budge. The matter was taken to court, the Majoranas’ natural environment. The court ruled that Antonio should pay seven-fifths of X; i.e., 40 percent more than the Majoranas originally asked for. Antonio was left with a big chip on his shoulder.

I leave it to the reader to work out who started “hinting” to the police that the reasons given by Carmela Gagliardi, the retarded maid, weren’t good enough; that someone else must have been behind her crime, and that Dante and perhaps Giuseppe should be investigated. Suitably buttered up, the police put “pressure” on Carmela, who duly produced a second confession.

In true soap-opera style, however, the plan backfired. Instead of incriminating the Majoranas, the girl, perhaps predictably, chose to take revenge on more immediate targets who had slighted her. First of all, her previous lover, now betrothed to her sister: It was he, she said, who’d given her a white glass bottle filled with petrol to burn the baby. Then her mother and brother: They were the ones, she insisted, who had forced her to do the terrible deed against her wishes. For some reason she spared her sister; maybe leaving her out of jail was part of her sweet revenge. But with four people now involved in the affair, it took several twists, turns and further twists to bring the blame back to the Majoranas, as initially intended. At any given time at least one of those imprisoned denied any involvement.

A few years later, after much bribery, all jailed parties finally agreed on a story. By then, Carmela’s brother had gone mad, which didn’t deter the police. The case was reopened. Yes, they were all part of a conspiracy to burn Amato’s baby and they had acted at the command of Dante Majorana. He’d given them money as well as a green bottle filled with benzene. The fact that Dante had no motive to take revenge on Antonio (quite the reverse) was ignored in court. And how the white petrol bottle changed color and content in the intervening years also seems to have gone unnoticed. Dante Majorana was jailed, together with his wife Sara, sister of Antonio. The second level of vendetta was complete.

It then took three long years for the defense to dismantle the prosecution’s case. Part of the problem was that the judge was compelled by law to follow the rule that “children always tell the truth” (!?), and therefore Carmela Gagliardi couldn’t have lied. Furthermore, Italian law at the time ruled that a second confession is more reliable than the first. Against these absurd rules, the defense produced evidence that witnesses had been roughed up by the Mafia, that the Majoranas lacked any motive, and that the forensic proofs produced by the prosecution were deeply flawed. But I suspect that, in the end, the Majoranas may simply have resorted to counterbribery.

Eight years after the case had started, the by now grown-up Carmela, sobbing and sniveling, confessed for the third time: “I alone am guilty.” I’m amazed this stood up in court, given that she was no longer a child. But as Sciascia puts it, “Were it not for her tears, her remorse, no one would have remembered that, at the heart of that labyrinth of hate, falsehood, and despair lay the little corpse of Cicciuzzo Amato, the baby burnt to death in his cot.”

The murdered-baby tribulations affected Ettore tremendously. Laura Fermi wrote that “Ettore wanted to prove his uncle’s innocence, clear him of a suspicion that could not fail to taint the entire Majorana family. . . . The ordeal was too great a strain on Ettore’s sensitive temperament. After his return from Germany Ettore became a recluse.” Amaldi, who kept in touch with Ettore during his dark period of reclusion, stated that “This incident would have had a decisive influence on Ettore’s attitude to life.” The family has protested against these views. Ettore wasn’t a blood relative of the burnt baby. But he was very close to the accused uncle and aunt.

It’s been said that he wrote to his uncle Dante “almost every day” while he was in jail. Another source said that he was so incensed at the court’s hypocrisy that he offered to defend his uncle in court, putting his logical skills into action. “I don’t believe in lawyers,” Ettore told physicist Gleb Wataghin. “They’re all idiots; I shall write the defense of my uncle myself: I know what happened, I’ve talked to him.”⁴⁴ I very much doubt whether anyone took Ettore’s opinions seriously: After all, the court case was not a matter for logical argument but for political manipulation and kickbacks. Ettore meant well, though, and this incident reveals much about his personality. In an ideal world things would be resolved in the way Ettore proposed. As it was, mathematical logic had nothing to do with the court trial; indeed, justice had nothing much to do with it either.

It certainly must have disturbed a person as private as Ettore to see his name associated with what was referred to in the sensational press as the “delitto della culla” (the cot murder) or the “outrageous Majorana affair.” And then there is what might lie beneath the surface.

Let’s face it: None of this makes any sense! It just doesn’t square, as was the case in Camilleri’s story. Burning a baby is an act of such extreme violence—even for an emotionally and sexually abused mental retard—that I have to believe yet another layer must have been present, hidden below the two surface layers, just as in Montalbano’s tale. A cornuto tier, perhaps: a crime of passion of some sort, motivated by stronger venom and malice.

I don’t want to start a conspiracy theory, let alone suggest anything concrete. But I’m absolutely sure there must be more in the “outrageous Majorana affair” than meets the eye, providing a final sense of logic for that which, on the surface, has none. Perhaps this hidden layer is even more “outrageous” than the obvious two—perhaps it has the simplicity of the one uncovered by Montalbano. And who knows how it may have mingled with Ettore’s own tragedy; or not.

If only we had a Montalbano in attendance to unravel the mystery.

FIFTEEN

Stellar Collapse

The burnt-baby incident permanently injured Ettore and his brother Salvatore. They were both naïve intellectuals who had led very sheltered lives. As the story unfolded and became more sordid, it shook the foundations of their worldviews. That the affair was eventually solved by the Majoranas by descending to the same level as their detractors (and by the men of the world in the family, rather than either of them) only made matters worse. The family publicly cleared its name, but in their eyes only dirtied itself even more. It did not remove their need for exculpation.

It’s been said that Ettore lost faith in science; that he became sensitive to the alleged contradictions between science and religion; that his tragedy reflected that of Pascal, the French philosopher who rejected science for religion. But Ettore may have lost faith in more than just science. He may have lost faith in rationality altogether. In 1933 he descended into madness for numerous reasons, but it is indisputable that the baby incident contributed a crucial spice to the curry. We’re all shocked by the story; but for Ettore and Salvatore—ivory-tower bookworms who believed in logic as the universal weapon—the burnt-baby affair symbolized the breakdown of rationalism. And neither fully recovered. Sending all to hell may, then, have felt like an adequate response: “Well, if you’re going to be that base, then take this, motherfuckers.” And they retreated into their shells. In Ettore’s case it only took writing a letter.

Here’s what Ettore did to the Boys that was “downright inexcusable,” thus ensuring they’d leave him alone. On May 22, 1933, he sent a certain type of letter to Emilio Segrè—the Basilisk—knowing damn well how touchy and insecure he was. This letter would be the subject of much public scrutiny many years later. An Italian newspaper titled an article about it: “The Surprising Letter Revealed by Nobel Laureate Segrè: Majorana Liked Hitler.” Yet for anyone who examined the letter even superficially, it would be obvious that its point wasn’t political. It was a personal assault. This letter would cut Ettore off from Fermi and the Panisperna Boys; that was conspicuously its intended purpose.

“Caro Segrè,” begins Ettore, before adding a couple of formulaic greetings. He then complains about Dirac’s theory becoming the flavor of the day in Leipzig and the world. He reports on the apparent tranquility of the political situation in Germany, quickly moving on to the core of the letter: a lengthy discussion of the “Judaic question” in Germany. It’s May of 1933.

Five long, dry paragraphs begin with “The question of anti-Semitism [here] should be seen in the context of the [Nazi] revolution which eliminated wherever it could all opponents, among which were almost without exception the Jews. This is not to say that there isn’t in Germany a grave Judaic question in itself and by itself. . . . The Hebraic question in Germany is quite different from that in Italy, be it by the spirit or number of the local Jews.”

The tone is objective and emotionless, and if I didn’t know the context I’d say it was uncharacteristically dull, considering Ettore’s lively writing style. He quotes a profusion of statistics explaining how German Jews had come to dominate certain areas of public life; he explains the extent to which this led to social resentment. He states the facts underlying racism and the persecution of German Jews without comment. He never expresses an opinion. He details the philosophy of racism developing in Germany with minimal use of adjectives. Paragraph after paragraph drones on without much color or emotion unless one can read between the lines.

With one dramatic exception. Halfway through his letter, out of the blue and against the grain, Ettore announces that “it’s been stated that the Judaic question wouldn’t exist if the Jews were acquainted with the art of keeping their mouths shut.”

Now, Segrè was Jewish, and he most certainly hadn’t mastered that helpful art. We know about this letter because Segrè had it published in 1988, just before he died. He could hardly conceal how much it irritated him: “It’s strange that [Majorana] wrote this letter to me, who certainly didn’t appreciate it. . . . I like to think that if Ettore Majorana had lived longer, he’d have seen things differently and would have repudiated this letter.”

The views Ettore expressed are undoubtedly indefensible: There is an undertow of tacit approval of German anti-Semitism throughout. But it’s important to put this letter in its historical context, even before examining the personal background. This is 1933, and expressions already in use regarding the German Jews—such as “surgical intervention” or “final solution”—didn’t yet have the meaning they’d acquire after the holocaust.⁴⁵ Ettore’s letter to Segrè also contradicts the rest of his correspondence. A week earlier, in a letter to his mother, he stresses the disingenuous opportunism of the Aryan majority in their dealings with the Jews. In a letter to Gentile, dated June 6, 1933, he ridicules German racism: “Germany, not finding in her culture and history sufficient elements to establish a unifying feeling among German speaking peoples, is constrained to appeal to the silly ideology of race, which seemingly doesn’t find an echo in Austria. Also the anti-Semitic fight, partly justified by instinct, isn’t well supported by the arguments usually invoked, among which sadly dominates the eternal theme of race, and it’s likely that it will die down quickly.”

In other words, Ettore plays anti-German to his Fascist friend Gentile, and pro-German to his Jewish correspondent. If it weren’t for the other events taking place in his life, we might think this was an intellectual game of “devil’s advocate.” But in the context of “retreating into a shell” and “leaving the world,” it’s obvious how to interpret Ettore’s letter: It’s anti-Segrè rather than anti-Semitic. And it would be almost funny, all these years on, were it not for the fact that Segrè lost his whole family in the holocaust.

Ettore’s letter achieved its intended effect—he was duly severed from further interactions with the Boys. On his last official report, composed just before he returned from his working spell in Germany, he provided his home address for correspondence, not the Via Panisperna Institute. But why did he want to break with the Boys?

It’s true that he was bypassed for promotion (a fact he must have learned around May 1933). After Heisenberg’s blessing and his 1932 masterpiece (despite its flaws, real or perceived), it’s possible that Ettore expected recognition—an official position, perhaps. He didn’t get it. But he’d never shown any interest in career academia and so wasn’t really slighted. It’s also true that in 1933 Fermi and Amaldi were happily publishing Ettore’s 1928 work without even acknowledging him. But Ettore had never cared about such things.

The fact is that he wanted to break with the world, not just with the Boys. His mood towards his family wasn’t any better. When his family drove to visit him in Germany in July 1933, he dispatched them rather forcefully, refusing to join their European tour. Later he shook off his mother’s insistence that he rejoin them in the resort of Abbazia in August. And when she threatened to travel to Rome to be at home when he returned from Leipzig, he replied in a letter, “Your concerns with my intention to go directly to Rome seem to me exaggerated. . . . You’d give me unnecessary displeasure by undertaking such a long trip without a good reason or purpose. But I don’t intend to change my plans for fear that you’ll put into action such an irrational threat.”

On a hot Sunday in August 1933, Ettore returned to Rome from Leipzig. He found the enormous house in Viale Regina Margherita empty. He was completely by himself, as he wished. And thus began his silent years. From that day until 1937, he barely left his bedroom. Even after his family returned, he’d take in food—usually just milk—leave out a chamber pot, and keep ablutions to a minimum. He shared his room with Luciano, but his brother was hardly ever at home during this period. When Luciano was home, he saw Ettore always at his desk, working away. Whatever he was doing has since been lost.

Despite his strange behavior, the family let him be. He grew his hair and beard to proportions that wouldn’t be socially acceptable until well into the 1960s. His friends sometimes sent a barber to tame his hippie looks despite his protestations. Those who visited him said that he acted like a terrified man. But he didn’t tell them much: His heart became intangible.

Amaldi, the most self-effacing of the Mark I Boys, tried to keep in touch. Against Ettore’s wishes, he visited on a regular basis. He reported on the developments taking place at Via Panisperna: how Fermi had finally come to believe in the “neutral proton,” as Ettore had called it; how he was now becoming a world authority in the matter; how they were experimenting with slow neutrons. This is allegedly when Ettore uttered his infamous statement: “Physics is on the wrong path; we are all on the wrong path.” A chilling statement given that the Boys were about to bombard uranium with slow neutrons, not realizing what they were doing.

Ettore’s only expressions of warmth were reserved for Giovanni Gentile, who sent him a book with the dedication, “To a dear friend, of whom I no longer know anything.” Ettore wrote back, with a pale shade of his earlier sarcasm. Over the next four years, Gentile continued to send books. Ettore always acknowledged them, albeit in letters that became briefer and briefer. He also kept up a skeletal correspondence with his uncle Quirino.

Ettore’s overall behavior has been catalogued as a “nervous breakdown.” It wasn’t: He could go in and out of this “mad” state at will, as is well attested by the surviving documents of the period. It is also clear that while he carried on with his science, his interests diversified. He became intrigued by medicine (the physiology of the brain) and by what would now be called game theory (he used real navy data in mathematical war games, lending fuel to conspiracy theorists). He wrote a paper on sociology, which Gentile had published after Ettore’s disappearance. He worked hard on theology, rejecting the “vulgar materialism of science.” He became an expert on the pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Strangely, in 1935 and 1936, Ettore even proposed to give a course at Via Panisperna. We know this because the paperwork has survived. Page 1 contained the syllabus (his 1932 article plus the second quantization of the electromagnetic field). Page 2 was meant to be filled out by Corbino, assigning credits to the course and making a lecture room available. But Corbino never followed through. Was Corbino’s lack of action malicious? Either way, Ettore’s proposed course would definitely have been too hard for the students.

The lines of the “obscure spiral” were now combined: a failed theory, a disastrous personal and family life, wrecked health, alienation from the scientific community. . . . Do we need more?

Just to make matters worse, in 1934 Ettore’s father died, hammering the final nail into his coffin of despondency. How badly did he suffer from this? In my research I often found that my interviewees used Ettore as a mirror onto themselves. But in this particular case I found someone who may instead mirror Ettore’s soul. The self-styled “last wheel of the Majorana cart”: Luciano’s third son Pietro, Fabio and Ettore Jr.’s younger brother. His father died before Pietro had a chance to get to know him properly. And it’s precisely in these waters that I found a reflection of Ettore’s soul.

SIXTEEN

Artichokes

On the Italian Riviera, near the French border—with the splendors of Monte Carlo not far off—is a shabby seaside resort that has seen better days. Once the playground of the Russian aristocracy and Alfred Nobel’s last home, Sanremo is now replete with modern bad taste mixed up with faded grandeur: a dodgy casino, a profusion of Russian prostitutes, beautiful crumbling hotels waiting to be merdified by the Hiltons of the world. Strangely, this is where I come to meet the last wheel of the Majorana cart: Pietro, Luciano’s youngest son. He’s led the life of a latter-day hippie: settling down meant opening a couple of bars in the Alps near the Austrian border (as far away from Sicily as is possible without leaving Italy, I note). He’s now retired from that. All his life he wanted to be an architect. So now he’s restoring a house, for himself, his wife, and his daughter to live in, one day.

Pietro and I drive out of Sanremo in a wreck of a car, past a sprawl of abusivi (illegal buildings) flanking greenhouses and agricultural patches. Artichokes and flowers are grown in fields overlooked by an ugly motorway, flying over the valleys on a concrete viaduct floating in noisy skies. But we’re headed for the misty mountains, and soon civilization peters out—the province of Liguria is crushed against the sea by indomitable peaks. As we hit fog banks, the road becomes rougher, eventually thinning to a mere walking trail. This is where we park the car.

Nearby, there’s a building site—the last house up the mountain. It’s his pet project. A mismatch of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century structures, the huge farmhouse has been left to go to ruin for over fifty years. He’s been lovingly fixing it up, using only original materials—the right mortar, the right bone pigments—some of which have been used since the Roman times. The work’s been ongoing for three years; he tells me he doubts he’ll ever finish.

The top floor is mostly done: There are no windows, but it’s fully painted and has a roof. Inside, there are no walls or stairs, but the balconies have been completed—my God, the views! The little top room, carved out of the slanted roof, is to be his bedroom, overlooking the entire universe. But nothing else—five floors arranged over two houses—has a destined function yet. “We’ll see what we’ll make here,” is Pietro’s attitude. Plumbing and electricity will be added later, too.

Climbing over a small bridge linking the two houses, we enter a small chapel, filled with rows of Formica chairs: He bought them from a cinema that went bankrupt (“Maybe we’ll make a home theater in the chapel”). The altar is flanked by two giant cacti that used to be in one of his bars (“I became attached to them”). There’s no plan, no order, no priorities. None of this “we’ll first finish this floor to live in, then we’ll do the rest”; none of “here will be the living room, there will be the kitchen.” He’s going at it as a whole, expecting the house to impose its beauty upon itself as it grows, determining its own functions: a new way of doing architecture. He clambers around ladders and scaffolding like a cat; in the dusk’s failing light, I stumble and almost kill myself a couple of times. I can see the beauty that is struggling to emerge.

It definitely runs in the family, I think, recalling Ettore’s 1932 masterpiece. This house is the best insight I’ve ever had into Ettore’s scientific mind, specifically his 1932 unfinished symphony. There are supreme pieces of work that just don’t make any historical sense—Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, or Ettore’s little gem, for example. They exist outside time, for no rational reason whatsoever. This house makes no sense, either. And like the Rite of Spring, or Ettore’s paper, it’s beautiful in a crude, primeval way.

“Now I know all the Majoranas are mad,” I comment as we prepare to leave. Pietro laughs with pride.

“My father was a puttaniere,” says Pietro, his appraisal of Luciano setting the tone for our conversation as we sit down at a seaside bar. It seems that Luciano introduced the whole young male family to the joys of sex, in the form of high-class prostitution—and not only that. I’m not sure Ettore and Salvatore qualified (perhaps they were too close to their mother for Luciano to have played it safe.) Pietro tells me that his father was also a playboy—he still sometimes meets old ladies who tell him they could have been his mother. Pietro then reveals a bevy of other scintillating details. For example, he explains that Dorina and Fabio Massimo slept in separate bedrooms. He provides extensive descriptions of the sexual mores at the vineyard of Passopisciaro. He tells me scandalous stories concerning the fauna that frequented Maria’s house in Rome. Here’s a man who doesn’t mince his words. I like that. He also has strong views on any matters related to Ettore.

He doesn’t impose these views on anyone—and so he’s totally devoid of arrogance. But he does state his opinions clearly and without doubt; a perfect antithesis to Ettore Jr.’s nihilism towards his uncle. Of course Ettore didn’t commit suicide in 1938: Sicilians just don’t do that; they love life too much. Of course Ettore’s tragedy was solitude: the generalized human inability to communicate, “out of fear, the irrational fear of exposing oneself.” Of course the cause of Ettore’s collapse between 1933 and 1937 was the death of his father. It’s obvious.

Fabio Massimo died in 1934, following a difficult period in Milan after some work-related problems in Rome. His death had a very strong effect on Ettore. For Pietro, there’s not a shadow of a doubt that this was the leading factor in his crisis. Pietro says that if Ettore could have communicated with anyone, it would have been his father alone. Dorina was too shallow and unyielding; his siblings too distant and self-centered. Ettore’s only source of human contact, of communication, was his father, Pietro tells me. And that lifeline disappeared in 1934.

Pietro lost his own father when he was four; he tells me that he hardly remembers Luciano. But his much older cousin Wolfgang-Fabio (son to Werner Schultze and Rosina) remarks that Pietro is just like Luciano, with the same mannerisms, language, and sense of humor. Before his hippie incarnation, Pietro was a timid kid with severe social problems. He says that the absence of his father was the key to his troubled years. When people talk about Ettore, they’re often echoing themselves, but Pietro, in his own tragedy, may well be reflecting Ettore’s feelings about the death of Fabio Massimo. Pietro’s eyes wet a few times as he admits to his very unhappy early days. He may now be terminally cool, in his pink jeans and antediluvian leather jacket, but he doesn’t bullshit himself—or me. He lived a very sad youth in the shadow of Luciano’s death.

Pietro and I drink freely, and the conversation lightens up again. If Luciano’s sense of humor was anything like Pietro’s, as suggested by Wolfgang-Fabio, I think I’d like to have met him. Pietro tells graphic stories about bad behavior during his brother Fabio’s wedding; he recounts even more obscene tales about the shooting of a film at Passopisciaro, scripted and directed by the Majoranas; and he provides a full account of how Luciano met his wife, Signora Nunni Cirino. He also paints an endearing picture of Maria and her unconventional drawing room at Via Salaria in Rome. Swearing was de rigueur—the kids loved it. One infallible regular was a famous painter who procured his models at the bus stop just outside. Imagine the pickup line “Can I paint you naked?” But it worked—and he did paint his models “after fucking them, and before introducing them to Maria’s soirees.”

Considering Pietro’s unusual openness, I’m not surprised that he is the only person I met who raised the issue of Ettore’s possible homosexuality. There is no hard evidence for or against it, but as with Segrè’s syphilis, if it were true, it would explain a lot. Pietro tells me a story that would illustrate much about Ettore, assuming he was indeed homosexual. By necessity, it would have to be of the closet variety, and this would have distorted his genius beyond recognition.

Pietro recounts that at one of his bars in the Alps there was a piano. One day a tramp walked in, ordered a drink, and asked if he could play. It was during a quiet hour, so Pietro thought, Why not? The tramp sat at the keyboard, and the next thing Pietro knew, he was left speechless by an outburst of Rachmaninoffian prodigy.

The tramp returned many times, always displaying the same remarkable metamorphosis from alcoholic loser to musical genius. Eventually Pietro became curious. Who was this guy? A misunderstood Mozart? Another cinematographic David Helfgott? After asking around the village, he finally discovered the story behind the genius-tramp. He was simply a man who hadn’t come to terms with his own homosexuality.

SEVENTEEN

Meanwhile, at Via Panisperna

While Ettore languished in the throes of creative failure, bereavement, a bad stomach, and an unused cock (whether for lack of a he or a she), life went on at Via Panisperna. Belatedly, Fermi had seen Ettore’s wisdom, duly pushing on to become the number-one expert in the field of neutrons and nuclear forces. And yet the Majorana curse was upon him: “Physics is on the wrong road” was Ettore’s pronouncement when Amaldi force-fed him the happenings taking place at Via Panisperna. These events would become Fermi’s terminal trauma, worse than his early scoop by Pauli. They concerned something of paramount historical importance: the fission of uranium. And the dark secret stored in the basement of Via Panisperna.

The incidents surrounding the discovery of the fission of uranium—the process behind the atomic bomb—could be used as a definition of fuck up. To understand how such a blunder could have happened at Via Panisperna in 1934, one must backtrack a few months and note that Fermi was then riding on a huge high. In such circumstances, people relax and lower their guard. The fuck-up can then detonate in their faces, unexpectedly and unchallenged.

The time was the academic year 1933-1934—just after Ettore retreated into his shell—and it could be called Fermi’s annus mirabilis, in analogy with Einstein’s 1905 and Newton’s 1666. He’d been severely stuck in his own prejudices up until then, and apart from Ettore, so had everyone else at Via Panisperna. As late as 1932, evidence in Fermi’s notebooks indicates that he didn’t believe in the neutron. Fermi had been marooned: Perusing his notes is an exercise in humility. How could someone who’d be so crucial to a scientific revolution be so far off at first?

In October 1933, the seventh Solvay Conference took place, ostensibly to resolve the mystery of the nucleus. Part of a series set up by Belgium industrialist Ernest Solvay, these exclusive invitation-only meetings gathered the top minds in physics.⁴⁶ Fermi was invited. Ettore wasn’t. But the congress was dominated by Ettore’s theory of strong forces, as reported by Heisenberg. What Ettore perceived as his 1932 failure—his unfinished symphony—passed unnoticed. This congress could have been a moment of triumph for Ettore, but by this time he was no longer in public circulation.

One wonders just what Fermi’s feelings toward Ettore’s success were, but in any case they had the right effect: They spurred him on to shake off his obstinacy regarding the neutron’s existence and to shift from atomic to nuclear physics. This unblocked his creativity and led to his best scientific period.

Fermi first set to work on his godson, the neutrino. In December 1933 he produced a landmark paper on beta decay, developing the tools still in use today for computing the probability of a beta transmutation, with the emission of an electron and a neutrino. To gravity and electromagnetism, Ettore and Heisenberg had added the strong force, capable of binding the nucleus together; Fermi now postulated a fourth force—the weak force—responsible for beta decay and the creation of neutrinos. With his theory he predicted a plethora of probabilities for “weak” processes: decay rates of isotopes, the inverse beta-decay process (later used to detect the neutrino), and others. The central constant in “weak theory” is nowadays called Fermi’s constant.

“A fantastic paper . . . a monument to Fermi’s intuition,” was the judgment of a major nuclear physicist decades later. And Fermi was very proud of his accomplishment, as he enthusiastically explained it to the Boys congregated in the Alps for a spell of skiing that winter. “I could hardly sit . . . bruised as I was from several falls on icy snow,” related Segrè. Needless to say, Fermi’s paper, “Tentative Theory of Beta Rays,” was rejected by the magazine Nature as “too remote from physical reality.” This irritated Fermi a great deal.

Next, Fermi steered the whole research at Via Panisperna to experimental nuclear physics, much to the consternation of Rasetti, who felt more at home with atomic physics. Overnight, Fermi converted from a “neutron denier” into one of its greatest authorities. Ernest Rutherford, the leading nuclear experimentalist, wrote to him, “I congratulate you on your successful escape from the sphere of theoretical physics! You seem to have struck a good line to start with. You may be interested to hear that Professor Dirac also is doing some experiments. This seems to be a good augury for the future of theoretical physics.” Thus Fermi embarked on the route that would lead him to uranium—and his biggest blunder.

In January 1934, the couple Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie accidentally discovered artificial radioactivity. As I explained earlier, isotopes existing in trace amounts in nature are unstable and decay into other elements with the emission of radioactive radiations: alpha, beta, and gamma rays. But by bombarding stable (i.e., nonradioactive) elements with alpha particles (obtained from naturally radioactive isotopes) the Joliot-Curies produced new, man-made radioactive isotopes. This was a dazzling discovery—yet another installment in the alchemical dream of transmutation. Yet a bad omen hung over the discoverers at once. “We are entitled to think that scientists, building up or shattering elements at will, will be able to bring about transmutations of an explosive type,” said Frédéric Joliot-Curie in his Nobel Prize address. He went on to express his fear of a cataclysm should these transmutations “spread to all the elements of our planet”—perhaps the first recorded statement of nuclear Armageddon.

After reading the Joliot-Curies’ paper, Fermi threw himself into the production of artificial radioactivity. The Joliot-Curies had used alpha particles as their bullets (which, recall, are made up of two neutrons and two protons); Fermi opted for neutrons instead. He was ridiculed by the experts (Otto Frisch labeled his experiments as “really silly”) because the neutron sources available at the time were much, much weaker. But Fermi realized that neutrons were vastly more efficient in producing transmutations. Alpha particles are positively charged, and so are all nuclei; therefore, there is an electric repulsion between the two, forming a barrier to be overcome before the alpha particle can penetrate the nucleus and cause a transmutation. No such barrier afflicts the neutron, because it is electrically neutral. Neutron sources were weaker, but their bullets much more effective. So Fermi gambled on neutrons.

The trouble was that the Via Panisperna group had no experience whatsoever in experimental nuclear physics. To make matters worse, Rasetti, Fermi’s main hand with experiments, was undergoing a crisis of scientific belief (the first of many.) On a whim, Rasetti had recently abandoned his experiments, to go on an extended holiday to Morocco “in pursuit of an elusive phantom, the hope of finding something, somewhere that would give him satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment,” according to Laura Fermi.⁴⁷ Undeterred, Fermi jumped alone into the dark.

It is at this point that I have to reveal the nature of the treasure locked in the basement of Via Panisperna. It was inside a safe, and the key was in the pocket of Professor Trabacchi. For medical purposes only, inside the safe lay one gram of radium, that important radioactive element first isolated in large amounts by Madame Curie. It was worth about 700,000 lire. By comparison, the annual equipment budget at Fermi’s disposal was 40,000 lire, already ten times the normal budget of other physics departments. It was out of the question for Fermi to buy this radium.

But radium gives off a gas called radon. Professor Trabacchi—reinforcing his nickname of the Divine Providence—happily allowed Fermi to pump the gas from the safe into his lab. With some clever adaptation, Fermi converted this radon into a good source of neutrons.⁴⁸ Fermi began bombarding elements with neutrons and by March 20, 1934, had achieved artificial radioactivity in aluminum. An urgent telegram was sent to Morocco, summoning Rasetti back to Rome. The Via Panisperna Institute had joined the nuclear race.

The Boys began a systematic investigation of the production of artificial radioactivity using neutrons. By midsummer, they’d produced no fewer than three-dozen new “artificially made” radioactive isotopes. But in the middle of so much mindless sweat, a drama occurred, requiring serious brain power. Accidentally, they hit on one of their most important discoveries, an essential tool in nuclear physics to this day.

One day, Segrè and Amaldi were performing an irradiation, obediently doing as they were told by Fermi, who was about to depart for a conference in London. They obtained the required result—a given transmutation that led to a gamma-ray emission—which Fermi duly communicated during his conference. But the next week, Amaldi repeated the experiment, just to make sure, and was embarrassed to find a totally different result. Upon being told about the discrepancy, Fermi assumed human error and was incandescent. As Segrè put it, “On his return to Rome he scolded us for our apparent carelessness. We were not only unhappy, but confused, because we could find no fault with the various experiments that gave contradictory results.”⁴⁹ Amaldi and Segrè were deeply hurt at having their ears boxed by the Pope, but even worse, Fermi—apparently not trusting them—set newcomer Bruno Pontecorvo on the case.

When Pontecorvo examined the problem, the mystery only deepened: He confirmed that the same target, when bombarded with neutrons, sometimes led to one type of transmutation, other times to another. He also observed the same phenomenon in other elements, not only in the case found by Segrè and Amaldi. Furthermore this was not the kind of randomness they’d come to expect from quantum mechanics, a randomness ruled by well-established odds and leading to repeatable experiments. This was total chaos without any pattern or rule. On Monday one result would be obtained, on Friday another. The outcome depended on which corner of the lab, by whom, and on which table the experiment was performed. Even quantum mechanics wasn’t this crazy. It looked as if there were ghosts at Via Panisperna.

For months they puzzled, seeking a control, a “placebo,” some sort of reproducibility in their experiments. They went through the dreadful game of perhaps this, perhaps that, perhaps something else altogether was changing every time they did their experiments. At some point in the cruel charade, they wondered whether their makeshift neutron source failed to keep a constant “power.” To test their hypothesis, they encased the source in lead, in the hope of slowing down the neutrons and obtaining a pattern of changes in their irradiations. Slower alpha particles are less effective in producing artificial radioactivity; perhaps a similar effect was present with neutrons. But lead had no effect whatsoever on their experiments. Whereas something else—and, infuriatingly, they didn’t know what—clearly did.

It was then that Fermi had a brainwave. One morning, during the examination season, when they were all very busy with chores, he chose on a whim to filter the neutrons with a block of paraffin instead of lead. No reason whatsoever, just a “why not?” To everyone’s surprise, the production of artificial elements markedly increased ! But this was deeply counterintuitive to them: With alpha particles, any filtering reduced their speed and therefore their ability to induce radioactive transmutations. Not so with neutrons, evidently. Why? Fermi went home for lunch plus a siesta.

When he came back, he had the explanation: They were being utterly stupid. Of course faster was better for alpha particles, because they had to overcome the repulsion from the nucleus. But neutrons felt no such electric barrier; and the slower they were, the longer they spent inside the nucleus, and so the higher their chance of causing a transmutation. (This is the sort of lateral thinking that would have caused no problem to Ettore—I note—but at least Fermi got there eventually.)

Fermi then realized that what was slowing down the neutrons was the hydrogen contained in the paraffin, and that some desktops in the lab were made of marble, others of wood, their hydrogen content thus being quite different. “Fantastic! Incredible! Black magic!” Fermi reportedly howled. In one stroke, two discoveries had been made: that hydrogen is the “moderator” of choice to brake neutrons; and that the slower the neutrons were, the more effective they were in producing nuclear reactions. The ghost at Via Panisperna had been exorcised—the experiments now made sense. And thus the Boys discovered slow neutrons, an absolutely essential tool in nuclear physics today, used in everything from weapons to nuclear-power stations.

What followed describes well the Boys’ hormonal state at the time. Leaping from the building, screaming and shouting, they went to test their new toy with hydrogen-rich water, using the largest volume of that fluid at hand: the fish pond in the courtyard (see Figure 17.1). Rasetti raised salamanders there, but now, without a second thought, they jumped in, submersing the target and neutron source to repeat the experiment underwater. The caretaker came out, protesting:

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Experiments,” was the reply.

The pond of the Via Panisperna Institute.

“But why here in the fountain? You’ll scare the fish, maybe they’ll die.”

But unaware that they were now probably condemned to die of cancer, the fish swam on unperturbed; it was the men who yelled and frolicked in the water who seemed to be on the verge of heart attacks. Their experiment had worked: Water slowed down the neutrons even further, increasing manifold their ability to cause transmutations.

Later, they went to Amaldi’s, whose wife had a typewriter, to compose a paper reporting their new discovery. Segrè recalled, “Fermi dictated, while I wrote; Rasetti, Amaldi and Pontecorvo paced the room excitedly all making comments at the same time.” According to Laura Fermi, “They shouted their suggestions so loudly, they argued so heatedly about what to say and how to say it, they paced the floor in such audible agitation . . . that the Amaldis’ maid enquired timidly whether the guests had all been drunk.”

Next morning, Corbino, more levelheaded, foreseeing the industrial applications of the discovery, suggested they patent it. “I can’t forget,” recalled Pontecorvo, “the sincere, childish and vocal laughter with which the suggestion of Corbino was received, who, seeing Fermi and the others laugh so much, observed brusquely ‘You are young, you don’t understand anything.’”

And they really didn’t. The only one who might have foreseen the implications of what had just been discovered was Ettore. But he had retired from the world.

During the maelstrom that was the Via Panisperna lab in that period, it was at some point decided to systematically bombard every element in the periodic table with neutrons, starting with hydrogen and helium and proceeding onward in an orderly manner. Tasks were distributed: Fermi did the calculations, organized the experiments, and led their execution; Amaldi prepared the “electronics” and the measuring devices; Segré was invested with the errand of procuring all the elements in the periodic table: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. In some cases, it was trivial to track down a given element; in others, it was a laborious job. Eventually, Segrè unearthed a theology student who collected elements as a hobby (it takes all sorts to make this world). As Laura Fermi described it, “When in going down his list Emilio reached cesium and rubidium (two soft, silvery metals seldom used in chemistry), Mr. Troccoli [the theology student] got them down from the highest and dustiest shelf, saying: ‘You can have these free.’”

The repetitive work began. To avoid contamination, elements would be irradiated by the neutron source at one end of a corridor and then tested for artificial radioactivity at the other end. If short-lived isotopes were produced, this involved a swift run down the corridor, and Amaldi and Fermi prided themselves on being the fastest runners. A Spanish professor, seeking to meet “His Excellency Prof. Fermi” was thus surprised to be nearly knocked down by Fermi, his lab coat flying out behind him, as he approached the sound barrier. “The Spanish visitor could not conceal the depth of his thwarted expectations,” according to Laura Fermi. One also wonders what Professor Antonino Lo Surdo thought of these athletics.

In general, neutrons cause light elements to become lighter, say, by emitting an alpha particle (their A decreasing by three and their Z by two; see Figure 17.1). This is possible because their nuclear charge is not too high (their Z—or number of protons—being low) so the electric barrier for the emission of a positively charged particle is not overpowering. But for heavier elements, with their larger Z and so larger nuclear charge, this is not possible, so that when they are hit by neutrons, still heavier elements are produced. The archetype involves the neutron being captured by the nucleus, leading to an isotope with the same number of protons but an extra neutron; this then undergoes beta decay; i.e., a neutron inside the nucleus converts into a proton with the emission of an electron and a neutrino. So bombarding an element with Z and A eventually produces another with Z + 1 and A + 1 (see Figure 17.2).⁵⁰ It all made sense and was consistent with the nuclear theory worked out by Ettore and Heisenberg. And so they proceeded, element by element, checking the predicted patterns, bored and slightly braindead. Until they finally arrived at uranium.

Figure 17.1: Neutrons running into light nuclei render them even lighter by stimulating the emission of an alpha particle. In the process, the nucleus gains a neutron but loses an alpha particle: Therefore its A decreases by three and its Z decreases by two.

Figure 17.2: When bombarding heavy nuclei with neutrons, a different process is preferred. The neutron is first absorbed, leading to a surplus of neutrons over protons in the nucleus. The intermediate isotope thus created then undergoes beta decay: One of its neutrons converts into a proton with the emission of an electron and a neutrino. So bombarding with neutrons an element with numbers Z and A eventually produces another with both Z and A increased by one.

Element number 92—uranium—is the last natural element of the periodic table (i.e., the one with the largest number of protons.) Nothing with a higher Z exists in nature, and it was thus expected that by bombarding uranium with neutrons, element 93 and possibly 94 would be produced.⁵¹ The political potential of such a discovery didn’t escape Senator Corbino. If it all followed the usual molds, a new element or elements would be produced, not merely radioactive isotopes of existing elements. Someone would have to christen the new entries in the periodic table: Just think of the PR opportunity!

Shortly after the first irradiation of uranium with neutrons, Senator Corbino gave a speech to the Academy of the Lincei, with the king and the press in attendance. Displaying his brilliant oratory skills, he announced the discovery of the new element(s). Even though he acknowledged Fermi’s “prudent circumspection,” he stated that as far as he was concerned, the “production of this new element is already securely established.” This set the press braying as usual. Add the reigning fascist regime and you shouldn’t be overly surprised by the headlines: “Fascist Victories in the Field of Culture” mooed one paper; “In the Fascist Atmosphere Italy Has Resumed Her Ancient Role of Teacher and Vanguard in All Fields” cackled another. One paper went as far as to report that “Fermi present[ed] a small vial of the element 93 to the Queen.” It was suggested that the new element be christened Mussolinium—but someone pointed out that, with the new element being so short-lived, this might be seen as an insult by the Duce. In the end the choice fell on Ausonium and Hesperium, derivative names for Italy, and thus suitably nationalistic.

The circus triggered by Corbino annoyed Fermi immensely: “I have seldom seen him in such a dark mood as after the speech made by Corbino” said Segrè later. First because Fermi didn’t like publicity, then because he was very methodical and wanted to make sure nothing had been overlooked. He spent several sleepless nights while Oscar D’Agostino, a chemist recently lent to him by the Divine Providence, performed the relevant checks. Weeks passed by, with Fermi scared to death that a major mistake might have been relayed to the press. Then, as Fermi’s notebooks reveal, he, too, felt sure they’d produced elements 93 and 94. As late as 1938, in his Nobel Prize speech, Fermi talks about this “discovery.”

The “fuck-up” was complete. Later, Fermi would be bitterly aware that, in spite of all his achievements, he’d missed the greatest discovery of all. Before a picture commemorating him at Chicago University, Fermi once said, “It represents a scientist who was unable to discover fission.” He also later admitted, “We didn’t have enough imagination.” For someone so traumatized by being scooped (and what it meant in the shadow of his dead brother), it must have been maddening. It’s not as if he didn’t have time to catch up with his error: It took almost five years for the issue to be resolved. And yet the writing was on the wall.

It’s no accident that uranium is the last element of the periodic table to occur naturally. Everything with a higher Z is extraordinarily unstable. So when a neutron is captured by uranium, nature prefers to do something dramatically different: The uranium nucleus breaks into two much smaller nuclei (krypton with Z = 36, and barium with Z = 56) releasing a large amount of energy. Crucially, further neutrons are released during this “fission” process, capable of restarting the process in an infamous loop called a chain reaction. The rest is history: The atomic bomb, nuclear power stations . . . the nuclear age, in summary, is epitomized by fission. First done at Via Panisperna: except that no one noticed.

It would be easy to blame D’Agostino—responsible for the chemical tests—but that wouldn’t be fair. D’Agostino’s tests were standard issue and were carried out scrupulously. But the problem is that in examining the decay products of an irradiation, the chemist wasn’t allowed to ask the general question, “What are they?” Instead he could only ask specifically, “Is it this; is it that?” And since no one knew the chemical properties of element 93, all he could do was to rule out that what had been produced were known elements. He checked the vicinity of uranium, for example elements 91 (protactinium), 90 (thorium), 89 (actinium), 88 (radium), and many others. He proved that these hadn’t been produced; and thus the argument in favor of element 93 strengthened. He didn’t check for elements 36 (krypton) or 56 (barium): Why the hell would anyone bother with that? It would contradict anything known in nuclear theory.

Well, in fact, someone did realize their fallacy straight away: Chemist Ida Noddack—by all accounts a Nazi and an unbearable person. In a paper published in a chemistry journal, she showed that the outcome of bombarding uranium could well be two pieces of comparable size, much larger than an alpha particle, but much smaller than “Mussolinium.” She was ignored by Fermi, to whom she sent her paper. Segrè would later admit, “The possibility of the fission of Uranium escaped us even though it was signaled to us by Ida Noddack. . . . The reason for our skepticism is not clear to me even today.”

Noddack was also ignored by all the other nuclear physicists. Fission simply wasn’t a physical possibility according to the understanding of the nucleus encapsulated in Ettore and Heisenberg’s theory of the nucleus. Ida Noddack discovered fission blindly where the others failed to see it because they had eyes. Ettore may have been the one exception. He was so disparaging of his own work—so aware of its limitations—that he may well have seen that the theoretical arguments were flawed . . . and the possibilities this opened with regard to uranium.

But Ettore was a recluse by this point, even though Amaldi kept him informed of these developments. It wasn’t until 1939 that Hahn, Meitner, and Frisch set the matter of uranium fission straight. Just think of the historical implications, had Ettore brought fission into the world—with all its applications—as early as 1934. It’s not surprising that conspiracy theories explain his disappearance by having him kidnapped by secret-service agents.

EIGHTEEN

The Crepuscule of Via Panisperna

Despite the uranium oversight, the work carried out by Fermi and the Boys in 1933 and 1934 is astonishing, the sort that requires a unique environment, realized as if by magic, an accident that occurs perhaps a few times in a century. But after such exuberance comes necessarily a hangover, a come-down. And by 1935, the Via Panisperna Institute was in a state of decline, the mood lethargic, in sharp contrast to the earlier overdose of enthusiasm. Segrè one day asked Fermi:

“You are the Pope and full of wisdom. Can you tell me why we are now accomplishing less than a year ago?”

Without hesitation Fermi replied,

“Go to library. Pull out the big atlas. Open it. You shall find your explanation.”

As legend has it, the atlas opened “of its own volition” on the map of Ethiopia. This was indeed the answer. Dark forces were in action that couldn’t be ignored.⁵²

Around this time, the Boys started to disband. Pontecorvo moved to Paris, Rasetti to Columbia, and Segrè—having tempered an adequate number of tuning forks—was rewarded with a professorship in Palermo. None would ever return, leaving Fermi and Amaldi to toil on their own. New hires—such as Giancarlo Wick—good as they were, didn’t quite re-create the original atmosphere. That unique state, “where two and two make more like ten” vanished, a prosaic four replacing it. They were still good; but they were no longer miraculous.

Then, on January 27, 1937, Senator Corbino suddenly died from pneumonia at the age of sixty-one. His unexpected demise left the Boys prostrated, and while they were grieving and making eulogies, no one had the presence of mind to initiate the political maneuvers necessary to install Fermi as his successor. Antonino Lo Surdo, therefore, had the last laugh in his feud with Senator Corbino, when the university rector—a stout Fascist like Lo Surdo—invoked an arcane piece of university legislation to bypass the faculty and appoint him Corbino’s successor. Even though Amaldi was given Corbino’s chair, Lo Surdo’s appointment was a “sign that Fermi’s fortunes were declining in Italy.” But the reasons ran deeper than Corbino’s death: The trouble was that the political situation was deteriorating dramatically. The Fascist joke had turned sour, was indeed not a joke at all now, if it ever had been.

It was oracular that that atlas had opened at the Ethiopia map (or perhaps it opened there from overuse). Fascism began as a populist movement, stirring national pride and promoting economic progress; but in 1935, it moved up a gear. The exaltation of imperial Rome was part and parcel of the fascist ideals, but this had materialized as nothing more than rhetorical bullshit. In October 1935, however, in an act of gratuitous belligerence, Italy invaded Ethiopia. There was little strategic or economic gain; a lunatic reenactment of the Roman Empire or a petty revenge seemed the only possible justifications.⁵³ The “gesture” was so ridiculous it would have been comical were it not for the numerous casualties, some horrendously gassed by Italian troops (in violation of the Geneva Protocol). But if the corpses of the heroes and their victims were a local catastrophe, there were also disastrous diplomatic effects.

The “Abyssinian Affair” put Italy at odds with France and England—its allies—and the League of Nations predictably imposed crippling economic sanctions. In dire financial straits, Mussolini responded with demagogy: With acts of extreme symbolism but little value, such as his appeal that Italian women voluntarily donate their gold wedding rings to save the motherland from bankruptcy. Women from all walks of life—including Laura Fermi—complied. Such gimmicks above all assured the tacit popular approval of the regime, despite its growing tyranny. No one dared to complain.

Mussolini and Hitler in joyous partnership, circa 1937.

Naïve, no doubt; but such regimes thrive on people’s sheep instinct combined with their fear of compromising their well being. And who can cast the first stone? Every time I see someone in our “democratic” world refusing to fight for justice (against a tyrannical boss, a big company, etc.) for fear of losing their comforts, I think, “You don’t know it, but in different circumstances you’d have accepted a job in Auschwitz.” Having met those who fought fascism in Portugal despite the constant threat of prison and torture, I never cease to be amazed at how “adaptable,” lacking in cojones, “normal” people can be. Fascism feeds on that.

Italy’s estrangement from its traditional allies meant that realignment with Germany was now inevitable, and it officially happened in October 1936. And this is when most of Mussolini’s aides began to think he’d gone soft in the head. Germany was Italy’s archenemy, until then to be opposed at all costs. Furthermore, such an alliance meant partnering up with Hitler, who had obvious imperialistic designs of his own. With the delusion characteristic of all dictators, Mussolini nourished the view that Hitler was his puppet. He was able to maintain this perspective while Italy fought side by side with Germany in the Spanish Civil War. But his fantasy ended sharply in 1938 with the Anschluss, or Austria’s annexation by Germany.

One day, Schrödinger—an Austrian—presented himself to Fermi in Rome in great disarray. He’d fled from Graz after the Anschluss, on foot and carrying nothing but a rucksack. He begged Fermi to take him to the Vatican to seek protection, which Fermi duly did. Schrödinger had antagonized the Nazi regime sufficiently to be in serious trouble, having resigned from his prestigious Berlin Chair when Hitler came to power. With the help of Irish prime minister Éamon de Valera, Schrödinger found solace in Dublin.

Italy had defended the Austrian border against Germany in 1934, and Mussolini regarded himself as Austria’s protector. When Hitler invaded without consulting him, everyone must have understood exactly who was in charge. Benito bit the bullet, and a new phase began in the balance of the Powers of the Axis.

Italian Fascism—with its idealistic streak—had been detached from the racism and anti-Semitism raging throughout Europe. Aware that he could now do whatever he wanted, Hitler requested that the German racial laws be adopted in Italy. Imagine the mess this caused for the state philosophers, including Gentile Sr.! Idealism precluded racism on the grounds that the essence of man is the soul, detached from the body and so from race. Two remarkable tasks were now posed to the fascist ideologues: first, a proof that the soul in fact had a race, contrary to previous assertions. Second, the even more ludicrous demand that they demonstrate that Italians from all provenances, including Sicilians and Sardinians, were Nordic Aryans.⁵⁴

The hoops they had to jump through to comply with the führer’s demands. . . . So far did they bend backwards to twist logic that it must have been universally obvious they were, in fact, bending over. The resulting literature is so ridiculous that in spite of all the pressure, few university professors could bring themselves to undersign it. Even those who did—among them the brain of fascism, Giovanni Gentile Sr.—expressed strong reservations. The corollary, “Jews do not belong to the Italian Race,” was the predictable mess of unenforceable laws. Every Italian is “a bit Jewish”; for example, Rasetti could be described as a borderline Jew. Pontecorvo and Segrè were fully Jewish, but none of the Boys was exactly pristine, with the possible exception of the Sicilians (including Ettore and Gentile), who are racially Arabic in no small measure, and thus “deplorably Semitic,” too.

These absurd laws would have surprised people were it not for the fact that they arrived amid a deluge of tripe, confirming that the great dictator Mussolini was well in the throes of insanity. There were now laws forbidding men from wearing ties, lest they might press on a given nerve and prevent them from aiming a gun properly. Bachelors were barred from certain public-service jobs (with the implication that they were necessarily gay). Of the three ways of saying “you” in Italian, the form “Lei” was legally banned.⁵⁵ Children of tender age were indoctrinated in the coincident virtues of reading books and shooting guns.

Hitler visited Rome in May 1938, when it was clear to all that Mussolini had become his bitch. Patchwork reconstruction of a dilapidated Rome led to an expressive popular poem:

Rome of travertine grandeur
Patched with card and plaster
Salutes the little wall painter
As her next boss and master

Fermi is reputed to have commented that Italy could now be saved only if Mussolini became overtly mad and went out to a major square on all fours barking like a dog. But Fermi was under attack, accused by the fascist press of “turning the Physics Institute into a synagogue.” His Jewish wife was baptized in a hurry, but her father (a Navy officer) was dismissed from service, showing that notice of her origins had been taken. So when Niels Bohr took him aside at a conference to inquire if this was a good time for him to receive the Nobel Prize (which would provide him with the necessary finances to escape Italy), Fermi accepted. And when he went to Stockholm to collect his award, never to return to Italy, the era of the Boys of Via Panisperna was formally brought to an end.

Just before their final sunset, however, an incident occurred at Via Panisperna that would have a dramatic effect upon Ettore’s life. At the start of 1937, shortly after Corbino’s death, a concorso—a competition—was announced for a cattedra in Palermo, where Segrè had moved. This was the first time, since Fermi and Rasetti had been appointed ten years previously, that a large-scale series of appointments was made. The process was to be characteristically simple: In Italy the winner is always known before any such competition starts, the rest being merely a bit of theater.

Whoever ranked first would take up the Palermo position. But second and third places would also receive an appointment, with bids to be made by universities across Italy. The expectation was for latter-day Boy Giancarlo Wick to come first, Giulio Racah from Florence to place second, and Giovanni Gentile Jr. third. Wick should stay in Palermo for at least a year (transferring later if he so wished), so that Palermo didn’t lose its new position. Pisa and Milan would provide for second and third places.

It’s not clear how much coaching was needed, but Ettore pulled himself out of the slough of despondency in which he’d been immersed for four years and decided to apply for the Palermo position. Some claim that Amaldi insisted repeatedly, others that Ettore’s application came as a complete surprise. Whatever happened, his application left those in charge of making a decision flabbergasted. In fact, it created severe logistics problems.

No one doubted that Ettore should now come first, but then if the previous ordering was kept, Ettore’s friend Giovanni Gentile Jr. would be left without a job. His powerful father would not be amused. Also, Ettore’s appointment to Palermo would be extremely awkward for Segrè, who hadn’t spoken to him since Ettore’s disgraceful 1933 letter from Leipzig. Could Ettore have been playing a prank on Segrè? He surely may have been annoyed by Fermi and Rasetti yet again making plans which excluded him. But why would he upset his friend Gentile?

Quite possibly he wasn’t trying to annoy anyone, and above all had strong personal reasons for applying. After four years hiding in his bedroom, he may have launched a desperate attempt at reconciliation with the normal world, severing his suffocating relations with mother and family. Ettore took great care with the preparation of his CV: The draft has survived and we see that much thought went into it. For example, he crossed out his “Dr.” title, replacing it with “Prof.” He even submitted a new paper in support of his application. This—his last—paper, has left us reeling about the neutrino to this day.

On October 25, the circus began in earnest. At 4:00 pm, a commission assembled consisting of Fermi, Carrelli, Lazzarino, Persico, and Polvani. This panel had been selected by the minister of education from an informative list, on which each name was followed by the date the individual joined the Fascist Party. In the initial roll, one can find Ettore’s uncle, Quirino, but he was crossed out to avoid a conflict of interest. After “exhaustively exchanging ideas,” the commission unanimously deliberated that Professor Majorana had a national and international scientific standing of “such resonance” that he should be appointed to a new chair to be established in Naples “by exceptional merit” and independently of the concorso. The competition was thus suspended until the case could be reviewed by the minister.

The term “by exceptional merit” had a technical meaning. It was an instrument of Italian law which permitted the appointment of an outstanding candidate to a professorship, dispensing with the usual formalities. It had been used a couple of years before to allow Marconi—an autodidact who’d never been part of academia—to be appointed to a chair in Electromagnetic Waves at the University of Rome. It would have been embarrassing to see a Nobel Prize winner, devoid of academic training, fail the exams.

The minister of education—perhaps after some oiling up by Giovanni Gentile Sr.—duly ratified Ettore’s appointment at the University of Naples. The initially planned course of events could now resume, and when the concorso commission met for a second time, Wick was appointed to Palermo, Racah to Pisa and Gentile Jr. to Milan. Order was reestablished, with everyone suitably accommodated. Fermi was happy with the outcome but felt intensely annoyed by the shoddy administrative work (for which he may have blamed Ettore). In what I’m told is one of the most illegal things that can be done in Italy, he renumbered the second meeting as number one, thus removing the first meeting from the records.

Ettore was delighted with his new job. On November 16, 1937, he wrote to his uncle Quirino: “I’ve laughed a bit about the odd procedures in my appointment, which I didn’t even suspect. I hope that I’ll truly get to Naples.” And to Gentile, on November 21: “I’m in great relations with Carelli. . . . Even Segrè and all the others have been very nice. I’m surprised, in whatever concerns me, with your doubts regarding my good stomach, in a metaphoric sense. Pio XI is very old, and I have received an excellent catholic education; if on the next conclave I’m made a Pope by exceptional merit I’ll accept at once.”

With retroactive effect from October, Ettore was bestowed with a highly prestigious “VI grade A” chair at the University of Naples, on 29,000 lire per annum, a larger-than-normal salary. And thus began his final stage on the bright side of the moon.

NINETEEN

Ettore’s Neutrino

What did Ettore pull out from his drawer to win the concorso? Nothing less than the “little change he’d set aside in the hope of becoming Rothschild” (as he’d written), the appendix to his 1932 article that he’d left to rot for five years. At long last, he bothered to bestow this wisdom upon the world, as part of his last attempt to join reality and be normal—when he patently wasn’t. We are now ready for Ettore’s neutrino; I make no apologies for the detour.

Ettore’s 1932 work—his infinite tower of particle states—was perceived by many as a dead end, not least by Ettore himself. But even admitting that its story is hardly finished, it’s undeniable that it led to a major insight into the neutrino—as a mere, trifling offshoot. Fermi placed Ettore in the same category as Newton and Galileo—I’d have added Einstein. Such people have a knack for being right even when they’re wrong. Einstein missed the prediction of the cosmological expansion—the Big Bang—by fudging his gravity theory with the infamous “cosmological constant,” or energy of the vacuum. Eighty years onward, we’re sure that the universe is expanding—in that respect Einstein was wrong—but also that there might be something similar if not identical to vacuum energy presiding over this expansion. Even when he was wrong, Einstein turned out to be right in some sense. The same may be true of Ettore and his disagreement with Dirac.

Ettore never got over his 1933 disappointment regarding Dirac’s negative-energy sea and the antiworld. The paper he submitted for the concorso, “Symmetrical Theory of the Electron and Positron” opens with the barefaced line, “The interpretation of the so-called ‘states of negative energy’ proposed by Dirac . . . is not completely satisfactory.” He acknowledged the positron; however, he bypassed the sea of negative energies whenever he could: The neutrino being a case in point. He hoped that his “purely formal” construction might help future generations to address all particles without Dirac’s sea of negative energy. For someone so self-destructive and pessimistic, it’s remarkable that Ettore had such a distaste for negative energies.

In order to understand Ettore’s response to Dirac’s theory, it may be useful to appeal to a visualization of the antiworld due to Richard Feynman and Ernst Stueckelberg. Alice uses a mirror to access an alternative version of our world, and her tripping method leads to the notion of chirality. What Feynman and Stueckelberg realized is that antiparticles and negative energies could be understood by appealing to yet another tripping technique.

Consider a world that’s like ours but where time goes backward. That is, imagine that the time-flow in your consciousness remains unchanged, but that everything else is ruled by a reversed arrow of time. This is the premise in Martin Amis’s amusing but ultimately sobering novel Time’s Arrow. Amis’s novel begins with its main character waking up from the “blackest sleep” to find himself in hospital surrounded by doctors. A few days later, the man is taken home in an ambulance, abandoned in the garden by paramedics, and an incredible world is revealed: a universe of “diametrical mistakes.” Language makes no sense. Songs sound utterly stupid and films have the most absurd plots. Lightning rods emit huge sparks toward the clouds during storms. A comprehensively disgusting description of a visit to the bathroom is included, complete with a depiction of the act of flushing the toilet backwards in time.

In Amis’s reverse world, love affairs begin with rows, leading to happy times and then a gradual estrangement. Train tickets bear the name of the starting point, not the destination, and are dispensed by garbage bins. Creation is easy (whole cities spring into being during earthquakes); destruction is laborious and protracted. A reverse of moral values is in place: Kind people take money from the church bowl, for example. Hospitals are places where the most atrocious crimes are perpetrated, the victims brought already in poor health, but then cruelly damaged further by doctors and nurses, to finally be dumped in a dreadful state in the middle of a street. The fact that the main character is a doctor leads to a breakdown between himself and his conscience (doubling as narrator), which can’t cope with the slaughter in the emergency room. Until one day something dramatic happens; and the world around this man starts to make sense.

Figure 19.1a: A depiction of a negative energy train going from London to Paris. The train leaves at noon and arrives at four pm (the time difference between France and Britain is irrelevant for the argument).

Feynman realized that Amis’s reverse world is the haunt of antiparticles and negative energies. Dirac’s negative energies can be seen as positive energies going backward in time, and vice versa. Suppose that a negative-energy train goes from London to Paris, leaving at noon and arriving at four pm (see Figure. 19.1a). All we know is that at four pm, at a train station in Paris, negative energy in the form of a train appeared. But from the point of view of someone on the platform, negative energy appearing is equivalent to positive energy disappearing. Thus the picture is equivalent to “a positive-energy train left Paris at four pm.” Likewise, at noon, a negative energy train left London, and this can be seen as a positive-energy train appearing. Our negative-energy train trip can therefore be understood as a positive-energy train leaving Paris at four pm and arriving in London at noon; i.e., going backward in time (see Figure 19.1b).

Figure 19.1b: The situation is equivalent to a positive energy train going backwards in time. Such a train leaves Paris at four pm and arrives in London at twelve noon. To understand this, note that the departure of a negative-energy train is the same as the arrival of a positive-energy train (in both cases, the energy in the station increased.)

If instead of a train we consider an electrically charged particle traveling backward in time, we interpret it “forward in time” as a particle with opposite charge. If a cosmic-ray positron hits a detector, the detector gains energy and positive charge. This is equivalent to the detector losing negative energy and negative charge; i.e., emitting a negative-energy electron. Except that this particle is now traveling backward in time, toward the supernova where it was born, the womb that serves as its deathbed, according to the backward arrow of time. Supernovae no longer pollute the galaxy with high-energy particles: Instead, they Hoover up negative-energy particles.

Figure 19.2: In Feynman’s picture a positive-energy positron (top) is equivalent to a negative-energy electron going backward in time (bottom).

Dirac’s negative-energy particles transplanted to Amis’s world yield the antiworld. And so Feynman proclaims positrons to be negative-energy electrons going backward in time (see Figure 19.2). An electron is now a particle that has its meals like any civilized human being, eating her soup and meat, and finishing with a dessert and a glass of spirit. A positron is a twin particle that begins her dinner by throwing up her food, then processes and repackages the vomit, taking the outcome to a shop to be “promptly and generously reimbursed” for all her efforts.

According to Feynman and Stueckelberg, when a positron and an electron annihilate, in effect we have only one particle. An electron went to the place where a large amount of energy was emitted in the form of light—exactly twice the amount of energy corresponding to the mass of the electron, as computed with E = mc². What happened at the annihilation point? The electron not only shed the energy in its mass but stole an equal amount of negative energy. Thus, twice the energy present in an electron was emitted. The electron then took the negative energy and started going backward in time—we see it as a positron. The annihilation process is like an electron pulling a U-turn down the stream of time (see Figure 19.3a and 19.3b).

Figure 19.3a: When an electron and a positron annihilate, in the far future we have two photons but the original two particles have disappeared.

Figure 19.3b: But the same process can be seen as an electron reversing down the stream of time. The electron and positron present in the remote past are then interpreted as a single particle, which underwent a change in the orientation of its time’s arrow.

Alice’s and Amis’s methods of tripping interact even beyond the worse combinations you may hear from street junkies. You might think that the two should never be taken together, but in fact, particles going backward in time are necessarily pushed into Alice’s mirror wonderland. Recall that right-and left-handed particles are so defined depending on how they spin with respect to their direction of motion. But the velocity of a particle doesn’t change in Amis’s world, because velocity is the distance traveled divided by the time elapsed. Both become negative in the backward world (distance from A to B counts as minus the distance from B to A), so the particle’s velocity hasn’t changed. In contrast, its direction of spinning has changed.

Thus, by going backward in time, we also jump through the mirror. A left-handed particle becomes a right-handed antiparticle and a right-handed particle a left-handed antiparticle. If you do Amis, you have to do Alice. This darkly mirrors the antimoral that assists the world going backward. It’s not only left- and right-handed people that swap in Amis’s world. The kind old man, when reversed, steals toys from children and takes them to the store for cash. Pimps, however, generously provide for their charges, also curing them with magic flicks of the wrists, miraculously erasing the bruises and cuts the doctors inflicted on them.

What happens if the antiworld meets the neutrino? First, let me give you Dirac’s version of the story. During beta decay, a neutron decays into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino. Protons and neutrons were known to belong to a class of particles capable of experiencing strong nuclear forces, called hadrons. Electrons and neutrinos stood aside—they didn’t feel the strong force—and belonged to a separate class called leptons. If one believes that the total number of leptons must remain the same, then the neutrino emitted in beta decay must be an antineutrino, so that it counts as minus-one lepton particle. There were no leptons before the beta decay, so if in the end an electron was emitted, then a minus-one lepton must also be present: the antineutrino (see Figure 19.4). Such was Dirac’s perspective, and the only way to enforce the prejudice that the total number of leptons must be conserved.

Figure 19.4: In beta decay à la Dirac, for lepton number to be conserved, the neutrino emitted must in fact be an antineutrino; i.e., a neutrino going backward in time. The electron and neutrino’s arrows then flow continuously from one to the other, just as in a creation or annihilation process. In fact, the process can be seen as the creation of a lepton antilepton pair, in many ways similar to the creation of an electron and positron.

Dirac’s view of the neutrino, however, had a major flaw. The neutrino is maximally chiral: It can only be left-handed, with no mirror image present in nature. Due to the way Amis and Alice interact, the antineutrino must then necessarily be right-handed, with no left-handed antineutrinos present in nature. Both neutrino and antineutrino are Draculas: If they look at themselves in the mirror, they see nothing. They’re Dracula and anti-Dracula, because no right-handed neutrinos or left-handed antineutrinos exist.

But why are there no right-handed neutrinos, and why no left-handed antineutrinos? Dirac’s theory has “slots” for these types of particle, but they are never filled. It makes space for them, but they don’t take it up. Why?

The mystery was solved by Ettore. His proposal for how the neutrino reacts to the antiworld differed completely from Dirac’s. If a particle is charged, it clearly must be different from its antiparticle, because if we make it go backward in time, its charge reverses. But if a particle is electrically neutral, or charge-free—like the neutrino—the story is different. We may then insist that a particle going backward in time is different from its forward version, just as Dirac did. But it isn’t necessary.

Figure 19.5: The Majorana neutrino doesn’t know past from future, because it flows down the two conflicting arrows of time. Therefore the Majorana neutrino is its own antiparticle.

Ettore proposed that a neutrino is indistinguishable from an antineutrino, that particle and antiparticle are the same. He boldly asserted that a neutrino going backward in time is the same as a neutrino going forward in time. That what you call a neutrino is in effect a quantum superposition of particles going both forward and backward in time, in equal measure, or with equal probabilities, so that there’s no asymmetry. And you thought Schrödinger’s cat was schizophrenic, unsure about life and death. Ettore’s neutrino is worse: a psychotic superposition of conflicting arrows of time made possible by the quantum ability to superpose opposites.

There is no arrow of time for a Majorana neutrino, because it contains within itself both time directions (see Figure 19.5). Majorana music might be defined as all songs that sound the same if played forward or backward. Odd music, one might think, but equally pleasing or displeasing in our world or in Amis’s. Ettore’s neutrino treats the two arrows of time democratically: It’s ambidextrous in time. It simultaneously throws up and eats its meals. A Majorana neutrino flushing the toilet defies imagination.

The only change for a Majorana neutrino going backward in time is its handedness. A left-handed Majorana neutrino becomes right-handed. The mystery of the unoccupied states in Dirac’s perception of the neutrino is at once solved. There are no empty slots in Ettore’s theory. What you see is all there is: one slot for a right-handed neutrino, another for a left-handed neutrino. Make time go backward, and they just interchange.

The neutrino is still maximally chiral, but only because of the way it interacts with other particles. In beta decay, only right-handed neutrinos are emitted, whereas in inverse beta decay only left-handed neutrinos can be used as bullets. So there’s handedness, but only in the way neutrinos talk to the world. Majorana’s neutrino isn’t a Dracula. If the left-handed neutrino gazed at a mirror, it would see a right-handed reflection. Particle and antiparticle are the same, but the neutrino does have a mirror image.

This designer clock illustrates well the interaction between time reversal and parity. It’s twenty-four past three.

Lepton number is not conserved in Majorana’s theory, because the lepton number of the neutrino is zero. But this has never bothered anyone, because lepton-number conservation is a prejudice rather than a law. Majorana neutrinos can annihilate themselves. They also have several other oddities. But it’s not easy to distinguish them experimentally from Dirac neutrinos. In fact, the constructions proposed by Majorana and Dirac are both realized in nature for other neutral particles which we know to be nonfundamental. The neutral kaon is a Dirac particle, whereas the neutral pion is a Majorana particle. The current score is 1-1, but this was a friendly match. With regard to the neutrino, the question is wide open.

Ettore admitted that an experimental choice between his option and Dirac’s was not available, but this was twenty years before the neutrino was even detected. Later, “in the 50s and in the 60s the opinion was frequently expressed that neutrinos a la Majorana, although beautiful and interesting objects, are not realized in nature,” as Pontecorvo wrote in 1982. But Pontecorvo went on to stress that things had changed, declaring the “question raised by Majorana” to be the “central question in neutrino physics.” On March 26, 1938, Ettore disappeared, but not before leaving us this central problem. We’re fortunate enough to live at a time when the controversy is about to be settled.

It was in this wild frame of mind that Ettore went to Naples in 1938: Having won his exalted position “by exceptional merit” with a paper proposing the Majorana neutrino, a particle for which the arrow of time doesn’t exist—even though time flows, but in both directions at once. How befitting, given what was to come.

In Ettore’s neutrino world, people both age and become younger at the same time. They first see the light of day soon after leaving a grave and a womb. Rivers stream from mountains to sea and from sea to mountains; but there’s only one water, flowing without whirlpools or obstructions. The traffic goes both ways down the alley of time. Majorana neutrinos remember both their past and their future in a deluge of nostalgia and déjà-vu.

Suicide isn’t a possibility in Amis’s world: You have no choice but to eventually vanish into your mother. In Ettore’s world, suicide is and is not an option. We’re outside the duality of choice and imposition, ordering and disordering, positive and negative energy. When you look up at the sky, light leaves your eyes toward the stars but also springs from the cosmos. Tales begin with happy ever after, but also with a prince going hunting in the forest. Plot? You wanted a plot? Ettore’s neutrino is like losing the plot.

Vanishing and appearing are one. Ships simultaneously leave wakes and cover their tracks as they progress along the seas. Welcome to Ettore’s world, revealed just before he went to Naples—his last home on this side of reality. Assuming reality has sides.

TWENTY

The Quiet Before the Storm

In the first days of 1938, just after Epiphany, Ettore arrived in Naples, that exuberant city split between extremes of luxury and squalor, one quarter grotesquely peopled by very mature prostitutes, the next replete with ostentatious villas overlooking the gulf and surrounded by colorful flowers. “See Naples and die,” goes the double-edged adage; in the old days Naples was the summit of the rich person’s European tour—but also where many a genteel traveler died from disease or knifing.

Ettore went to Naples, and “he went to Naples willingly,” as his sister Maria stressed in a TV interview many years later. He seemed upbeat, even enthusiastic, probably realizing that this was his last chance to rejoin ordinary life and break away from his family. He took up lodgings at one hotel, then moved to another, then yet another. He paid a visit to his boss, Professor Carrelli, and they instantly became friends, going together to buy his new office furniture (gracefully paid for by the university).

However, Ettore was not so keen on the formal pomp of an inaugural lecture. But the powers that be insisted: On Thursday, January 13, he had to deliver “La Chiamata” or the “Lectio Magistralis,” as they called it in Naples: a lecture with no students in attendance but before the rector and the most important staff. As per custom, the newly appointed professor had to show off his ability to pontificate. The tradition was hated by all and was abandoned in the humanities only well into the 1990s. But in physics, Ettore was the last appointee who had to endure it. In spite of his repeated requests for reserve, his whole family turned up. His lecture, on the foundation of quantum mechanics, was a success.

Ettore’s registration form at the University of Naples. Health: somewhat delicate.

In the period that followed, we learn from his letters that he was slightly disappointed by what he found in Naples. “The Institute is reduced to the person of Carrelli, the old helper Maione and the young assistant Caccemo. There’s also an old Professor of terrestrial physics, who is most difficult to locate.” He tellingly misspells the name of the young assistant (Cennamo). I doubt he deliberately antagonized anyone, but the meager staff was comprised solely of experimental physicists, mostly of the classical persuasion, at that. He must have turned on his snobbery from day one.

He also discovered that he had only five students—not unusual in physics in those days; Rome had about twelve. And “it was in front of this audience of vaguely terrified youths that I presented Prof. Majorana,” as Professor Carrelli related. “After which he started at once with his lesson.” Looking at his lecture notes, we can’t help feeling awe but also an element of the laughable. His students simply didn’t stand a chance of understanding a word of it. He threw at his poor pupils an up-to-date course full of recent discoveries in quantum field theory and mathematical physics. It’s an amazing course, the sort we provide nowadays—some seventy years later—as an optional subject for elite final-year students. I’m sure no one back then had a clue what he was talking about or could possibly have appreciated the value of his efforts.

Still, Ettore wrote that he was “happy with the students, some of whom seem resolved to take physics seriously.” Given the size of his class, he lectured in a small room—an auletta—situated on the ground floor of the institute. He entered from a lateral door giving onto a long, dark service corridor. With the students already installed in their seats, he arrived “silent and serious, not looking at anyone.” He would climb up to the cattedra and without preamble start his lecture. His face “usually so gloomy then brightened up.” The blackboard filled with formulae, his fluid, steady writing assisting an even sharper mind. Judging from his notes, the explanations he presented were original, modern, and crystal clear.

One of the last photos of Ettore, circa 1938.

But often no one understood him—and he realized it. He then stopped, smiled, “forgot perhaps the great scientist that he was,” and tried to help the students, seeking alternative, simpler explanations, even leaving the cattedra in his efforts to make himself understood. His students are unanimous in saying that although they couldn’t follow him, “Professor Majorana was very generous and big-hearted . . . always tried to help those around him.”

And so, after all those years locked in his room, Ettore settled into a routine away from his family. He led a quiet life of hard work and tranquility. In fact, there’s very little abnormal in what is documented of this period. He wrote that he found Naples a bit odd because of the “scarcity of cars.” (!!!!) His letters to the family are full of platitudes and details of practical chores. On February 23, 1938, he wrote to his mother in his trademark deadpan, “I have a discreet room; today they’ll give me a better one overlooking Via Depretis from where I’ll be able to see Hitler passing in three months. Are you cured from your cold? Perhaps I shall visit during Carnival.” On March 9, so close to his final crisis, he wrote again to his mother, “Here the weather is very beautiful, ideal to sail in the gulf. . . . I shall perhaps visit on the weekend.”

Chilling, if we reread this with the benefit of hindsight. He won’t see Hitler passing on Via Depretis in three months, and he knows it. “Sailing in the gulf” will soon be dressed with a different, macabre meaning. At this point, he had already made his “decision by now inevitable.” In fact, he had even confessed it to someone. He had also begun taking care of the logistics, all of a sudden withdrawing five months of salaries he hadn’t previously bothered touching and asking his mother for his full share of their bank account.

On the surface, however, everything looked incongruously normal in Ettore’s life, just like the quiet before a storm. Carrelli reported that he seemed very busy, “working on something absorbing, which he preferred not to talk about.” He lectured in the morning on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays but rarely put in an appearance at the institute otherwise. He worked hard, alone in his hotel room, or so everyone thought.

Then on Saturday, March 19, six days before D-day, he sent a bland letter to the family cancelling the visit he had promised the week before. He stated that he couldn’t come because he had “business to attend on Monday at the names registry and elsewhere.” He sent a telegram to ensure no one was waiting for him in the evening, and assured the family that he would visit “for sure” on the following Saturday. There is nothing unusual in his handwriting or style, and the family saw nothing strange in it. What a masterpiece of deceit!

His family expected him a week later. Which is, of course, when it happened, the run of events kicking off on the morning of Friday, March 25, when against his habits, Ettore visited the university on a day he didn’t lecture. There he met one of his students, Gilda Senatore.

Gilda . . . a woman doing physics in 1938?

Oh, yes—I forgot to mention one little detail. In a deeply chauvinistic country and at a time when women weren’t supposed to go to university, let alone study physics (recall Maria Majorana’s experience), four of the five students who attended Ettore’s course were women. And the last person he willingly met was one of them.⁵⁶

These days, Dr. Gilda Senatore is best known for being the last person to see Ettore Majorana—or at least the last one he saw of his own accord—but the story of her life is interesting in itself.

When I meet Gilda in Naples, at the respectable age of ninety-four, she’s still a force of nature: very talkative, extremely articulate, with remarkable lucidity. She’s fond of purple prose and thumps her fist on the table with remarkable vigor (the first time she did it, I started with surprise). She holds my hand and looks me in the eyes frequently. Apart from the inevitable eccentricities of a ninety-four-year-old, she is in superb form.

The profile of Dr. Gilda Senatore, at the age of ninety-four.

Born in Brazil of Italian parentage, Gilda spent her childhood shuttling between São Paulo and what she terms “the jungle,” as the family followed her father, who worked in the mining industry and had to spend months on end in the wilderness. As we talk over lunch, I surmise that she still retains the fondest memories of these “undomesticated beginnings.” She confesses to loving snakes even after reporting several chilling encounters⁵⁷; she excitedly recounts how she’d vanish from the house to chase huge lizards in the forest with her Indian friends; she cherishes telling me, “I was breast-fed by an Indian woman, so I became a little savage.” Perhaps due to these early experiences, she became a rebel as she grew up. This trait was to have a powerful effect on her destiny.

It must have been a shock to young Gilda when at the age of eight she was transplanted to Cava de’ Tirreni, a tiny village south of Naples, and suddenly demands that she behave like an European were sternly made of her. She responded by adding an intellectual element to her brattish ways, making a nuisance of herself at school. She dropped ink on her immaculate white school uniform just to see the beautiful fractal develop, then asked why the fractal was the way it was, what light was made of, etc., etc., etc. . . . pestering the teacher with science questions he couldn’t answer. Impertinences so unbefitting a young lady that her teacher punished her with a pair of donkey ears; to which she replied, “O burro és tu,” amusing herself to death when the poor man reported to her father her “peculiar fondness for butter.”⁵⁸

From the level of her questions, it’s obvious that she was a physicist in the making. But with the air of the motherland, her father turned into a severe traditionalist, becoming a major hurdle for her talents. According to Gilda, he vented his view that “all women in my family can either be housewives or seamstresses.” Gilda was not interested in either. And so determined was she to study physics at university that when her father threatened to disown her for her stubbornness, she retorted that she was ready to be thrown out. It can’t have been an easy decision and all these years later, when I tell her the story of Maria Majorana’s failed attempt to go to university, she becomes very agitated, stamping the floor for emphasis and thumping heartily on the table.

In the end, matters were made simpler for Gilda by the intervention of an illuminated uncle (a top doctor in the region), who offered her housing and paid her fees while she studied. She still had to give private lessons to fully support herself, but she did manage to attend university.

At university, Gilda informed Professor Carrelli that she felt honored to be offered the chance to study with such an eminent physicist, but unfortunately she couldn’t care less about experimental physics, Carrelli’s field of expertise. Theory, mathematics, and modern physics were her interests. Carrelli, half amused and half annoyed, passed her on to his colleague Professor Majorana.

Which is where presenting another facet of Gilda’s person becomes absolutely indispensable. How shall I put it?

I don’t want to diminish the fact that young Gilda Senatore was very intelligent and had a strong, resolute character. That is a fact, and I couldn’t stress it more. But it is politically correct crap when you go around talking to intellectuals who know and have studied her story, and they all fail to mention a very important little detail. A crucial piece of the story. Absolutely essential. It took an old-style Italian professor⁵⁹ to take me aside and break the news to me:

Gilda Senatore was a bombshell of a woman. The type that stops married men on the street even in the company of their wives, causes lethal car crashes with the casualties going to heaven still smiling—a female typhoon! All these years later, she still elicits comments such as the unnamed professor’s: “As a man something inside you broke wild when you saw her; your heart started to race; you lost your head completely.” She was, as they used to say in old-fashioned Italian, a vampa: a heat wave.

Is it un-PC to point this out? Being attractive hardly precludes being clever, for a man or a woman. In fact, Gilda herself is as proud of her juvenile beauty as she is of her intellect. When we met, one of the first things she told me was her “three measures” when she was young (bust, waist, and hips). But such is current Italy.⁶⁰

Now we all know the troubles Ettorino had with women, the obsessions and complexes that vexed him. It must have made for some amusing viewing to watch the spectacle of Ettore entering the auletta only to find that four out of his five students were nubile young women and that one of them was terminally attractive. It’s a measure of his remarkable talents that he managed to fill the blackboard with the intricacies of quantum theory while his mind may well have been elsewhere. And it’s significant that the only student mentioned in Ettore’s last letter to Carrelli is Sciuti, the only male, who by all accounts had been totally irrelevant to him.

Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that Ettore almost avoided Gilda Senatore. As Gilda comments, “He walked glued to the walls, like a shadow. Even the janitor commented on this.” It’s obvious that the whole department was affected by her, but no one more so than Ettore, with his patent need for love, repressed below so many layers of self-deprecation and low self-esteem. She must have represented the only plank of salvation possible in his sea of desperation. As his eponymous nephew said, “Love would have made all the difference.”

Gilda was kind to him in a totally innocent way. But needless to say, he was far too shy to voice his feelings. He must have blushed, played the innocent love-struck boy, but no more. More generally he refused all contact and communication, with her or with anyone else. He was very solicitous in helping his students and her in particular, but he’d refuse anything in return, any form of affection in repayment for all he was giving them. “He was a very solitary man,” Gilda sums it up. And so they hardly ever talked to each other. Until the day Ettore disappeared.

On the morning of Friday, March 25, 1938, Gilda Senatore went to the university to attend a lecture on terrestrial physics, after which, as she often did, she remained in the lecture room to study.

Suddenly she heard her name being called:

“Signorina! Signorina Senatore! . . .”

She raised her head and saw beyond the lateral door, still in the access corridor, Professor Majorana, that taciturn lecturer who never addressed any of his students and never turned up on the days he didn’t lecture (of which Friday was one).

A bit taken by surprise, she didn’t move, waiting for him to enter the room and talk to her. But he didn’t budge either, expecting her to come to him. And when she didn’t, he backed off slowly.

Something made Gilda get up at once. She ran to the doorway and then down the penumbra of the corridor. She quickly caught up with him and asked anxiously:

“What is it, Professor?”

Ettore stopped and looked at her fixedly. Something was obviously wrong. Gilda can’t quite explain what, even after all these years and knowing now what happened next. But he just said:

“Here!” and placed a large box in her hands. “Here, Signorina! Will you please keep these papers for me?”

Startled, she took the box and began to seek an explanation. But he cut her short with a gesture, adding gently:

“We’ll talk about it later.”

And without letting her speak, he disappeared down the corridor, briefly waving her a goodbye.

She stayed there, frozen, wondering what to do with that box in her hands, while Ettore moved away, his reality already disintegrating. Later she will talk about this event very extensively: in TV interviews, in various writings, to me. And the major inflection patent in her tone is guilt: unexplainable, unjustified guilt, of the sort that is not appeased by others insisting that it wasn’t her fault. Guilt for not having stopped him, for not having done something to help him. But, as she puts it herself, he wasn’t susceptible to receiving. “Prof. Majorana liked to give generously, with simplicity and humility,” she says. “But he would shy away as soon as anyone tried to give him anything.”

I don’t know what she thought she could have given him, when she reported these tragic moments so many years later. But even knowing full well how inaccessible he was, she still feels she could have done more, done something to stop him.

“Perhaps he wanted me to say something else to him, to extend a hand, to help him out.”

Because he must have been wretched, miserable, depressed to the point of desperation. A drowning man flinging his arms out of the water one last time.

“But he didn’t give me time.”

And thus began the storm.

TWENTY-ONE

The Search Party

What could have happened to Ettore after he met Gilda Senatore? He posted his letter to “Dear Carrelli” and must have written the letter a la famiglia left in his room. He then had plenty of time on his hands until 5:00 pm, when according to the receptionist, he left the Albergo Bologna. It’s a short walk to the port, from where the boat would depart at 10:30 pm. Did he have dinner? How did he fill these fraught hours?

The boat is about to leave and from the upper deck, some ten meters above the water, I appreciate what a drop it is. The water is filthy, awash with garbage and dead fish. Not a nice plunge, but one would likely wait for cleaner seas. The boat whistles noisily and slides away from the pier as I retrace Ettore’s steps almost exactly seventy years on. Tirrenia, the company that took Ettore, is still in business. Admittedly, the trip is now made by a ferry carrying trucks and cars, but I still find it vaguely damning that it takes longer than it did in Ettore’s day.

As we leave the harbor, we feast on great views of Vesuvius. How ironic that someone born in the shadow of Etna would leave reality under the quiet watch of another famous volcano. This one isn’t as active as Etna, but is far more dangerous and unpredictable. Ask the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum who died buried by ash in AD 79, when the volcano most famously erupted. Since then, eruptions have been sparse but vicious; for example, in 1631, ash from an eruption fell as far as Istanbul, 1,200 kilometers (about 750 miles) away.

Vesuvius in the distance, as the Tirrenia ferry bound for Palermo departs from the port of Naples.

Fermi was quoted (by Carrelli) as saying, “With [Ettore’s] intelligence, if he decided to disappear—or make his body disappear—he’d have succeeded.” Mussolini’s police chief, Arturo Bocchini, commented in response to Ettore’s vanishing, “Corpses can be found, it’s the living that disappear.” But one of the most far-fetched explanations I’ve heard for the lack of a body is that, having sailed to Palermo and back, Ettore took the train to Vesuvius and threw himself into the crater. As we enter high seas, I note that he could have accomplished the same effect with much less effort. In front of me on the boat is a man-at-sea alarm. A sailor once told me that should someone fall overboard, whoever raises the alarm has to keep pointing at the spot where the person fell in. Otherwise, with no reference points, by the time the boat is turned about, it might as well have gone around the globe.

My mind wanders irrelevantly and mathematically as I consider what a truly two-dimensional setting the sea is. Getting lost on land, in no matter what labyrinth, is always one-dimensional and infinitely simpler. I see a mouse crossing the deck, and as I turn a corner, the full brunt of the sirocco pushes me off balance, making me slide on the wet deck. A puerile thought crosses my mind: Maybe Ettore just fell in by accident. In the distance, I see the lights of other ships. My mind wanders further.

And then I get a glimpse of what could have happened to Ettore on that anguished night, as he embraced his inner troubles. Maybe he didn’t fall in by accident, but life might have intervened. It is known that the boat he took from Palermo was carrying an entire battalion returning from great conquests in West Africa. Imagine the din! In fact, I don’t need to imagine, courtesy of a school trip, the teachers oblivious to their charges running riot and alternating screaming with serial vomiting (it only takes a critical mass of one to start a chain reaction, unlike with uranium).

There was I, trying to summon Ettore’s tortured soul after he left Gilda Senatore, instead finding myself wondering if I should throw a couple of the noisy brats overboard. I might get some peace, and in the bargain test my theory that their bodies would never be found.

In an analogous environment, back in 1938, it would have been quite difficult to commit suicide (unless he jumped ship just to get away from the racket). Maria talks about a decision triggered by circumstance, “At dawn he was seen at the bridge,” she said in Bruno Russo’s documentary. “Dawn, as everyone knows, is the most delicate moment for those considering suicide. I am sure that Ettore threw himself into the sea, taking with him all the weight of his anguish and his atrocious doubts.” But circumstances could equally well have conjured against it.

As the night unrolls, things quieten a bit on the boat, but never completely. I go to the bar and am gifted by serendipity: A TV set is blaring a moronic documentary titled Did Hitler Have the Bomb? Answer: no—after an hour of dim commentary and dramatic music, and just before the presenter is teleported out of the program. A funny coincidence . . . did Heisenberg and Ettore have more in common than we know? Heisenberg was certainly perilously close, at least conceptually, to the bomb, and this only a few years after that day in March 1938.

Back on deck, I realize what a gloomy figure I must cut: pensive and stark, staring at the sea. Maybe the insomniac brigade is worried I might be contemplating suicide. A girl comes out to smoke and waits to be chatted up. I move to the rear. What a sad bastard I must look, refusing to play the game of life, shouting and fucking, throwing up against the wind. I watch the wake for a long time, the cigarette butts flying past me into the night, like fireflies from Mars. In our world of the “normal,” anyone who thinks is likely to appear suicidal. And yet, suicide or not, we will all be there one day, not just Ettore. We are all the same, only in different seasons.

Ettore was seen by Gilda on Friday morning, and then the factoids begin. Factoid number one: He boarded a ship to Palermo and then returned to Naples. This is known for a “fact” because, upon request from the family, Tirrenia located the tickets. Fact? Wrong. Factoid. Tirrenia merely said they recovered his tickets: No one actually saw them. Even today, in the age of computers, you should see the royal mess that pervades their ticket collection.

Then there are his letters. He posted one to Carrelli in Naples and left another in his room. The day after, in Palermo, he wrote a second letter to Carrelli on Albergo Sol letterhead, informing him of his change of heart. He rarely wrote on letterhead, so it looks as if he was trying to make a point. It’s alleged that this letter proves he did arrive in Palermo, but again we are in the realm of factoids. It is his hand writing on a Palermo hotel letterhead, but one could imagine (admittedly forceful) ways in which he could have produced this letter without ever reaching Palermo.

If he was indeed in Palermo, then I can see why he sent a telegram to his Naples hotel stating, “Please keep my room.” They hadn’t seen him for a few days, and apart from the danger of giving his room away, they might have gone in, opened the letter to the family, and raised the alarm.

But on his alleged trip back from Palermo, something very close to fact did occur, at least if you believe Tirrenia’s records. As chance would have it, Ettore shared a cabin with a Palermo University mathematician, Professor Strazzeri. An Englishman, Charles Price, occupied a third cabin berth. The latter was never traced, but the former answered an inquiry from Salvatore (enclosing a photo of Ettore). Professor Strazzeri replied that “it is my absolute belief that if the person who traveled with me was your brother, then he didn’t kill himself, at least not before the arrival in Naples.”

Upon closer inspection this, too, could be a factoid. Professor Strazzeri didn’t talk to Ettore and could not, therefore, be sure that it was him. His account is also confusing; he says that the so-called Charles Price “spoke Italian like us, people from the South, and I assumed he was a shopkeeper or below, in short, someone without the refinement of manners that results from culture. . . .” How to explain this, since Price was English?

One possibility is that Tirrenia was mistaken, and Ettore wasn’t in that cabin. A theoretically more elegant explanation comes from Sciascia, who argued a “third man” scenario. “Since Prof. Strazzeri exchanged few words with the man supposed to be Charles Price and none with the presumed Ettore Majorana,” he wrote, “it’s a reasonable hypothesis that the man who didn’t speak, identified later to Strazzeri as Majorana, was in fact the Englishman; whereas the one he was told was Price was instead a Sicilian, a Southerner, the shopkeeper he appeared to be and who was traveling with Majorana’s ticket.” This explanation implies that Ettore remained in Palermo and gave up his ticket. It’s contorted, but as Sciascia points out, it avoids the conspiracy of turning Price into a Sicilian passing himself off as an Englishman and following Majorana, “whence the myth of the Mafia trafficking in physicists as it traffics in women.”

But there are worse factoids, such as the story of Salvatore and Luciano, already looking for Ettore, being accosted in Palermo by a stranger who told them: “I know who you are and who you’re looking for; the friends of the friends are at your disposal.” I don’t need to translate the euphemism. A few days later, as legend has it, they received a complete report of Ettore’s hour-by-hour moves in Palermo, sadly ending with his departure to Naples. “I am sorry to be unable to do more to help a man who has brought honor to our island,” the stranger reportedly said. When I confronted Fabio with this story (presumably the report would still be with the family), his surprised face said it all.⁶¹

Alarm bells started ringing at top volume on Monday when Professor Carrelli sought out Ettore unsuccessfully and sent news to the family. On Tuesday—lecture day for Ettore—he had to tell the students that the course was cancelled. Imagine the gossip this must have sparked, the extravagant explanations the students would have produced. Another of Ettore’s pupils, Nada Minghetti, stated in an interview that when Ettore didn’t turn up on Saturday, they were all delighted. It was a sunny day, and they were most happy to get a day off. It was only on Tuesday that the rumors started to spread, and gradually Nada realized that something serious had happened (I doubt Gilda Senatore ever thought otherwise). It was also on Tuesday that Salvatore arrived in Naples. He went to Ettore’s lodgings at Albergo Bologna. It must have been eerie to enter his room: empty and silent; on the desk a letter “to the family.” The room of a man who has abandoned the world.

Later, Luciano arrived in his car and the search began. Police and family worked independently but interacted. The family never believed Ettore committed suicide; the police, on the contrary, were certain he had. They placed a photograph of Ettore in the La Domenica del Corrieri under the rubric “Chi l’ha Visto,” “Reporting Vanished People.”⁶² At first, Luciano and Salvatore thought he was still in Palermo, but then the evidence reversed to Naples. In addition to Professor Strazzeri’s account, they received a report from the monks of San Pasquale a Portici near Naples. Then from a nurse who had treated Ettore and saw him between the palace and the gallery, coming from Santa Lucia. And then there was the priest of the church of Gesú Nuovo in Naples who swore he’d seen Ettore in his church in early April, begging to be admitted to a monastery.

All this got on Luciano and Salvatore’s nerves—and thus the “search party” began. They scoured the Campanian countryside searching for Ettore in monasteries and peasant dwellings. These searches continued for over a year, from hamlet to hamlet and monastery to monastery. They didn’t give up until Luciano, obviously distressed, one day ran over a little girl with his car. He was apparently very affected by this accident, and that’s when he realized that enough was enough. The same level of commitment cannot be attributed to the police.

Initially, the police took a casual attitude towards the disappearance, believing it to be a clear-cut case of suicide. But then the relevant strings were pulled, rendering inappropriate their unconcealed lack of interest. Ettore’s friend Giovanni Gentile Jr. implored his powerful father to intervene. Senator Gentile obliged and went straight for the jugular: He contacted Arturo Bocchini. You should perhaps be made aware of what this meant.

The architecturally rather odd Church of Gesú Nuovo in Naples, where Ettore allegedly made an afterlife appearance, requesting “an experiment of religious life.”

All totalitarian states have a special police to “defend the state,” spying on all activities, terrifying everyone, and torturing and killing anyone who fails to be cowed. In practice, this means nothing but legalizing and using the services of the usual psychopaths and other thugs to be found everywhere. Germany had the SS and the Gestapo; Portugal, the PIDE; Italy, the OVRO. Arturo Bocchini was head of the OVRO in 1938. He was the sort of man who could legally have anyone killed if he so wished; who could find out who had farted anywhere in Italy and beyond.

At the behest of Senator Gentile, Bocchini received Salvatore and ordered a dossier on Majorana to be opened. The contents, still on file today, are a masterpiece of deliberate incompetence. Regardless of Senator Gentile’s efforts, clearly Ettore was a low priority for OVRO. For the powerful political police, it was merely a matter of humoring the Majorana family, in deference to Senator Gentile. The facts on file are vague and careless. They ignore claims that Ettore had been kidnapped by foreign powers,⁶³ a matter falling squarely into their remit. Layers of blue, green, and lilac writing color-code, according to hierarchy, the reports documenting the diligences, or lack thereof, of the state police regarding Majorana. They don’t even bother getting the dates right. It’s blatant that no one cared.

A couple of pages from Ettore’s secret police file, remarkable for being so uninformed.

Later, Fermi and Dorina petitioned Mussolini himself. Fermi’s letter opens with “Duce!” the equivalent of “Führer.”⁶⁴ Dorina’s letter instead addresses the “supreme inspiration of all the Justice.” Hypocritically, she claims that Ettore had “always been balanced and the drama of his soul and nerves is therefore a mystery.” She insists he had no suicidal “clinical or moral precedents.” On the contrary, given his life of study and hard work, she claims that Ettore should be considered a “victim of science.” She notes that Ettore’s passport would run out in August and entreats the Duce to step up the searches. “Excellence, [my son suffers from] a disease caused by noble studies, perhaps perfectly curable but destined to worsen without remedy if left untreated; only Your powerful intervention can decide on the fate of the searches and the life of a man.”⁶⁵

The folklore has Mussolini shouting to Bocchini, “I want him found!” extending a commanding arm and an accusative finger to emphasize the order.

Recall, if you may, that these events took place after the catastrophic vertex of fascism, beyond the point of no return, an alliance with Hitler already in place, racial laws being implemented, the aftershocks of a devastating war in Ethiopia still reverberating, only a year or so from all-out cataclysm. Bocchini must have thought, “Oh no . . . there goes that lunatic again.” He wasn’t going to endure another of His Excellency’s eccentricities. As far as he was concerned, Ettore had obviously committed suicide.

A year later, on April 4, 1939, Ettore’s file is closed, with no comment other than: “Archive and strike off.” Two years later, Bocchini was poisoned by Mussolini for openly opposing the alliance with Nazism.

Gilda Senatore was ill for most of the rest of 1938, so she didn’t regularly turn up at the university. She only found out much later that the university had lost all hope of seeing Ettore return and that it was preparing to replace him. All the while, she kept the box of notes Ettore had left her, waiting for him to return. But of course he never did.

She was so ill that she only graduated in 1939, a year after her colleagues. Her father, predictably, didn’t come to her graduation. But her kind uncle did. Of her colleagues in Ettore’s class, only Sciuti became a physicist, in Rome. Gilda also wanted to pursue a career in physics, so she began work with Dr. Cennamo, the assistant professor whose name Ettore misspelled in his earlier letter about Naples. For a while, Gilda taught at the University of Naples. Then she became engaged to Cennamo and later married him.

I understand that she had a very tough life during the war, which she doesn’t want to talk about. Painful memories she’d rather not mention, of the times bombs fell in Naples like rain. She’s very much the survivor, but still a traumatized survivor. After the war, her career derailed. She never returned to her job at the university. Carrelli apparently didn’t approve of married couples on his staff. She had five children; her youngest daughter is just like her.

At some point after she became engaged to Dr. Cennamo, Gilda mentioned Ettore’s box of papers to him. It was the first time she had talked about it to anyone; you can see her dilemma, either way she was betraying someone. Alarmed, Cennamo ordered her to give him Ettore’s box so that he could consign it to Carrelli. He was merely playing by the book: The questura had named Carrelli as the official custodian of Ettore’s belongings in Naples. Reluctantly, her heart full of misgivings, Gilda gave away the treasure entrusted to her by Ettore. And whatever was in that box, trifling or exceptional, science or poetry, related to the neutrino or to love, it was never seen again.

In the background a fireplace is ablaze. It feels cozy, and we are in the Tuscan countryside. It’s February 1990, and the old man who talks to the camera in Bruno Russo’s documentary won’t live much longer. He smokes a rollie and enunciates his words clearly, gripping us with his remarkable storytelling. His eyes gleam incongruously in his aged, wrinkled face. It’s Giuseppe Occhialini, the famous experimental physicist, notable for the discovery of the positron (with Anderson and Blackett) and the pion. He met Ettore Majorana only once, quite by accident, when his ship stopped in Naples in January 1938, en route from Rio de Janeiro (where he was teaching) to Trieste. He had a whole afternoon to kill and paid a visit to Professor Carrelli. Then something happened which he would never forget.

As fate would have it, he nearly missed Carrelli, catching him just as he was leaving for lunch. But the professor received him cordially, postponing his meal and showing him around the institute, chatting about their current work. At some point a youth arrived, whom he took to be a student. “Dark eyes, dark hair,” he remembers. He was flabbergasted to be introduced to Professor Majorana, whom he’d always admired as a genius. Eagerly, Occhialini had exclaimed, “But I’ve always wanted to meet you!”

In his Tuscan home the old man takes a puff from his cigarette and pauses to collect his thoughts. The ash at the end of his cigarette is getting perilously long and we can’t help being distracted by it. Is it going to fall and burn him? But it doesn’t, as the old man tells us very carefully how Ettore had responded to his enthusiasm. Smiling at the esteem bestowed on him by Occhialini, he said, “It’s good you came now. Because had you waited another few weeks you would not have found me here.”

The ash is now surreally long and crooked, perched at the end of his cigarette, and there’s another pause in the old man’s speech, this time much longer. His eyes dampen; he takes a series of puffs. At last he begins to talk again: He explains how he had understood at once, that Ettore’s tone had struck a chord in his soul. He relates how when he was eighteen, he’d also contemplated suicide. And that he’d been moved to confess his own experience to Ettore.

When the camera that had closed on his face shows him again from afar we see that the ash from his cigarette is gone, doubtlessly fallen on him. But his jumper is not in flames as he informs us of Ettore’s astonishing reaction to his confidence. Ettore said, “Look my dear Occhialini, there are those who talk about it and there are those who do it. For this I repeat that if you had arrived a few weeks later, you would not have found me.”

Professor Carrelli was nearby doing something else, but he soon came back and they all had to go their separate ways. Occhialini tried to arrange to have lunch later with Ettore, but he had an appointment and couldn’t accept the invitation. They said their irrelevant ciaos of the world and parted forever.

The old man spent that night on the deck of the ship sailing to Trieste, thinking over his moments with Ettore. Months later, he heard what had happened. And like Gilda Senatore and others who interacted with Ettore in his final period, his most obvious feeling is guilt, no matter how senseless and absurd. He remembers those moments “like one recalls when one met a girl and fell in love for the first time,” a recollection made of “indelible ink,” that stays with you forever and can be summoned at will. And he feels remorse.

By now he’s using the ashtray, still chain-smoking. “We have all met complete strangers on a train who told us incredibly intimate things for no reason. We didn’t meet for very long, but I felt that we were very close. And in that phrase ‘there are those who do it’ I felt the utter misery that was going through his soul.” He feels like “a clown, someone who deigned to talk about suicide without truly meaning it to someone who did mean it.” And when he heard the details of Ettore’s scomparsa , he couldn’t help thinking of Jack London’s Martin Eden and his “death by water.” The obsession with the sea mingled with that for death.

Like Martin Eden, Ettore was a good swimmer. His “watery embrace” would have been a slow and gradual diffusion into nature. If Ettore belonged to “those who do it,” he went back slowly “by water” to the great dance of the cosmos, where time flows in both directions, as for his neutrino, back and forth, forth and back, to-ing and fro-ing. . . .

Colors and radiances surrounded him and bathed him and pervaded him. What was that? It seemed a lighthouse; but it was inside his brain—a flashing, bright white light. It flashed swifter and swifter. There was a long rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast and interminable stairway. And somewhere at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.

PART TWO

AFTERLIFE: THE DARK MATTER

TWENTY-TWO

Pagliacci

We can only laugh at the ordeal Ettore inflicted on the university’s administration, following the desertion of their “appointment by exceptional merit.” Despite Carrelli’s note to the Magnificent Rector, written within a few days of Ettore’s stunt, it wasn’t until August 16 that the university formally acknowledged his disappearance, confirming to the ministry that no salaries had been drawn since February. A replacement position in theoretical physics was requested and expeditiously approved by the minister to “support the teaching of the important discipline.” A “removal order,” however, was needed before they could begin getting through the red tape for a replacement. This was only signed, reluctantly, on December 6, quoting “abandoning office for more than ten days without justification” as the case for Ettore’s removal.

Hilariously, the removal order was not accepted by the Court of Accounts, whose final approval was necessary to unblock the money allocated by the ministry. In Kafkaesque style, the court requested that Ettore himself sign an acceptance of his removal, confirming in writing that he had disappeared “without justification.” The ministry and university countered in bureaucratic deadpan, stating that such a document, while of unquestionable value and importance, regrettably could not be provided. Wonderfully, they substantiated their declarations, not with an official police report, but with two newspaper clippings (one suggesting that Ettore disappeared to seek spiritual improvement). This was deemed acceptable by the Court of Accounts, but the decree still wasn’t validated until September 1939 and even then committed finances only for a temporary replacement, lest Ettore return. That the war broke out in the middle of these shenanigans didn’t help, but it’s still extraordinary that Ettore’s position in Naples was only readvertised circa 1950, more than ten years after his disappearance.

Martin Eden’s body would never have been retrieved: “The lights of the Mariposa were growing dim in the distance, and there he was, swimming confidently, as though it were his intention to make for the nearest land a thousand miles or so away.” A well-timed jump and Ettore would have joined the food chain long before anyone had a chance to find his body. What a simple explanation: Why, then, all this insistence on mystery, the belief that the body would necessarily have been restituted by the sea if he did commit suicide?

The leading “suicide theorist” is Bruno Russo, the man who produced by far the best documentary on Ettore (featuring the unique interview with Giuseppe Occhialini at the end of the last chapter). We have arranged to meet at Café Caprice near Piazza Duomo in Catania, and the city feels like an oven by 10:00 am when I leave the hotel. The day before, a 45° C heat wave triggered a state of emergency in Sicily, Calabria, and Puglia, with raging fires, power outages, and people collapsing everywhere. Blissfully unaware, I first spent too long on the beach and then climbed Etna, possibly with mild sunstroke. Now I feel awful, but it’s too late to cancel.

I arrive at the café with Russo’s book on Ettore in hand and do a few laps hoping to be recognized. A waiter approaches me, and I say I’m looking for a friend. He replies, smiling, “Maybe he disappeared,” using the same verb everyone uses with respect to Ettore. I wonder if it’s a jest—Ettore’s picture is on the cover of the book. In fact, it’s the picture edited from the photo of his father’s wake that Fabio had shown me.

Finally someone comes toward me: “Professore Magueijo?” It’s “Professore Bruno Russo.” He cuts an odd figure, with a straw hat over a wet handkerchief falling on his forehead. He has a tumbled mop of wild gray hair and is wearing an incongruous combination of sandals and shorts with a formal shirt. At his suggestion we sit down inside, where the air conditioning should keep us cool; almost at once the lights go out. Waiters bring candles to the tables, making it look ridiculously romantic, but the temperature climbs ruthlessly, and soon we’re both sweating profusely.

God, I hate people with a theory. They are all exactly the same. They all ridicule other people’s theories on the grounds that they’re based on a “biased selection of the data” or on “data that’s clearly fake”; whereas, of course, their own theory is not. They all dismiss some facts and overemphasize others; then accuse everyone else of doing precisely that. They all recite a carbon copy of the same speech. In Russo’s case, suicide acts as the editor of reality. Ochiallini considered himself a clown after his exchange with Ettore on suicide: He had high standards. The same modesty is sadly not present in Professor Bruno Russo.

His conversation reminds me of Michelangelo Antonioni films: reams of pretentious, French-imported, intellectual bullshit. He’s one of those people who can’t chat. When he takes the conversational floor, he keeps it for a quarter of an hour in a speech organized like a lecture. Things happen for three reasons: First [five minutes], second [five minutes], and third [final five minutes], and you’re expected to reply in the same format. Interruptions are not tolerated. If something catches your attention, he brushes it aside until his lecture is finished, after which he says, “Tell me!” By which point you’ve totally forgotten, or couldn’t care less, about whatever it was.

We talk about Ettore’s personality and his passions outside science. He plays down Ettore’s enthusiasm for Pirandello. For him, instead, Ettore’s interest in Schopenhauer is the imperative clue to everything. A long lecture on pessimistic philosophy inevitably ensues, under extreme heat! Fucking metaphysics in 45 degrees Celcius, 113 Fahrenheit. . . .

Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy, in the words of Russo, revolves around the scalene triangle of life, pain, and will. Life is equated with pain because it is also identified with will: blind, irrational will. But wanting something entails its absence and, thus, unrealized desire, which causes pain. Each desire come true only incites new unsatisfied desires, “unquenchable will” leading to further, inexhaustible pain. Thus man, by living and willing, is sentenced to eternal suffering. Worse: As an individual, he is condemned to a war without truce against other individuals, as their unsatisfied wills clash interminably, in a world full of strife and suffering. Is there any salvation on offer, then?

Not really. Unless you count negation of life as a solution. A Buddhist element now comes into the equation, as asceticism—the nirvana—is envisaged as, if not deliverance, at least the best man can hope for. If one is stricken by the abhorrence of being, and repudiates the world, the will, and all desires, then there’s a glimmer of hope.

Is suicide then approved as a form of negating life? You will be thrilled to learn that Schopenhauer’s answer is no, except when suicide is achieved by starvation. Suicide as a desperate emotional act is condemned (as an acknowledgement that the will is still throbbing.) But if deliberate death results from a negation of will, including the will to eat, then suicide is fully endorsed. Wonderful stuff, I think. Just what I needed to hear, in sweltering heat, drenched in sweat.

Yet the conversation gets still grimmer, “deep” in the intellectual Francomerde sense of the word. The café is walled in mirrors and someone takes a flash photo, making Russo jump with a start. I repress some laughter. He talks about the obscure spiral, illumination by death, suicide as the essence of existence. Unsurprisingly, his best-loved physicist is Ludwig Boltzmann, who hanged himself in the beautiful bay of Duino, near Trieste, while his wife and daughter were having a swim. I consider exhibiting my impeccable credentials: I was born in a region with one of the highest rates of male suicide in Europe. People think Sweden holds the record, but they only have the reputation (Ingmar Bergman is in part to blame). In fact, Alentejo’s suicide rate in some categories is about twice that of Sweden’s.

Nothing to be proud of, and come to think of it, I doubt Russo would have been overwhelmed. The Alentejo tradition is to hang yourself from a cork tree—not very classy. Besides, motive-wise, I imagine he’d be more interested in the Swedish variety of suicide: existentialist, first-world, well-fed (so that starvation can be an actual choice), driven by the abstract and the conceptual.

With great difficulty I finally steer the conversation into the concrete world only for derision to be poured all over me. He accuses everyone who looks at reality—the logistics of Ettore’s disappearance—of trying to write a giallo, a thriller, which for such an exalted intellectual is like a venereal disease.⁶⁶

“Laughable, laughable . . . that story of the passport he took with him, so that he couldn’t have committed suicide. How do they know that he took it? Because they couldn’t find it afterwards. Now I don’t know how it was in 1938, but I can tell you that when I visited Majorana’s house in Rome there was a mess, but such a mess . . . that I can’t see how anyone can rule out that the passport has been there all along.”

He also finds “laughable” the claim that Ettore was a happy person—allegro. “One day you crash a car, the next day you’re allegro.” I tell him that it sounded like a hell of a party. He snorts. He won’t admit any coloration other than dark on Ettore. It occurs to me that he’s the one who is being simplistic, who is trivializing behind a veneer of existentialist intellectualism. But he prides himself on being the only author to have made a proper “map of [Ettore’s] existential path,” of his “free choices.”

“There is coherence in people you can’t avoid. Do you love the sea and then go on vacation to the mountains? Of course not: People are just not like that. Ettore had an obsession with the sea all his life, since he was a child. His life was meant to terminate in the sea.”

Out of boredom I decide to play a little game: to pretend I have a theory. I’ll edit the facts, accuse all others of doing what I’ve done, and claim I’m the only one who has accounted for a complete reality. The theory: that Ettore was a closet homosexual (something that only Pietro mentioned seriously). I disregard the evidence to the contrary. I then emphasize Ettore’s religiosity (feelings of guilt, need for redemption, conservative morals, etc.) and his attachment to a domineering mother (I throw in some Freudian fakes for good measure). And presto: There you have another theory—the Ettore-is-a-poofter-in-the-closet theory.

Of course it’s a joke, but he takes me seriously. He lists the full arguments against it: that Ettore was attracted to women, the letters to Gastone Piqué, and so on. I argue that the facts he mentions are obviously a cover-up. But where is your evidence? It would have been destroyed. But how? Blah, blah, blah. . . . This goes on for a while (I’m enjoying playing Ettorologist) when he finally shouts in exasperation:

“Then why don’t you say that Ettore was a pedophile? Or that he was sexually attracted to ninety-year-old women?”

I nearly piss myself laughing. And he smiles too, for the first time. By this point I know I shouldn’t like this guy, but I’m warming to him. I switch off my tape recorder; he relaxes and becomes quite a reasonable person. He forgets his existentialist agenda and we talk about the making of his excellent documentary, the remarkable interviews he so timely caught. By the time we part, the stiffness in our earlier conversation is gone. God, I hate people with a theory. They’re such nice human beings otherwise.

The fact is that all Ettore theories explain only a subset of the data, but that has to be the case for any consistent theory, because the data is self-contradictory. So either you ridicule all theories—suicide, flight to Argentina, reclusion in a monastery, kidnap by aliens—or you embrace self-contradiction. I prefer the latter. There’s nothing wrong with inconsistency when that’s the only way to capture reality.

Russo’s suicide theory is not ridiculous, but it is just a theory and therefore limited. It’s undeniable that suicide was not alien to Ettore’s psyche. Many years before those stark days in 1938, while walking with his friend Gastone Piqué along Via Cavour, Ettore reportedly sighed,” How sad it must be to live if one is very sick! I can’t conceive that one continues to live if one is so ill.” With his severe ulcer, these feelings could have resurfaced. But more serious are his tempestuous relations with the family, his mother in particular. Most suicides I have encountered are acts of raw revenge on those left behind. No one says so, out of charity.

TWENTY-THREE

A Pirandellian Intermezzo

Suicide, however, is only one possibility. There’s a good reason why the Suicide Party likes to discount the Pirandello influence on Ettore and overvalue his interest in Schopenhauer. Schrödinger was also a one-time Schopenhauer admirer: in the aftermath of the Great War, while he was undernourished and battling tuberculosis. But later the traitor changed his philosophical tack, once his health improved and he embarked upon the long chain of unbridled sex affairs that characterized his life. Without knowing it, Schrödinger’s existence became somewhat Pirandellian.

Luigi Pirandello was born in the aptly named Agrigento suburb of Kaos in 1867. He is perhaps best known for his plays, but he was also a prolific writer of short stories and novels. His works feature a staggering array of delicious characters: monomaniacs, cuckold fetishists, blasphemers—a zoo often identified with the Sicilian human fauna. My favorite of his creations is the man who can’t start a conversation without bursting out in laughter—for being unable not to conjure up the image of his interlocutor taking a shit.

In 1904 he wrote The Late Mattia Pascal, today compulsory school reading in Italy. One, No One and One Hundred Thousand is another of Pirandello’s novels contemplating the same obsession: vanishing and identity change. It’s not new, this thing of disappearing in Sicily. It’s been said that many are, have been, and will be the mysterious disappearances in Sicily. Andrea Camilleri’s La Scomparsa di Patò recounts the story of an Easter performance of the Passion of Christ,⁶⁷ during which the amateur actor playing Judas disappears through the stage trap before hundreds of spectators, never to be seen again dead or alive. In Australia they call it “going walkabout”; in the hands of Pirandello, Sicily meets the outback.

Pirandello is the pinnacle of Sicilian literature, and there’s nothing more Sicilian than cuckolding and vanishing. I doubt Ettore had much to do with the former, but he loved Pirandello. Did Ettore, in his final act, plagiarize his beloved author?

The character Mattia Pascal is a poor devil, the loser who gets the wrong end of the stick in a quintessentially Pirandellian multicornuto web. A crook has financially ruined his family; to get revenge, Mattia doubly cuckolds the crook (wife and niece). When the scandal breaks out, he finds himself forced by honor to marry the crook’s niece, beforehand betrothed to his best friend (an idiot who’s nonetheless dear to him). His new wife and mother-in-law then make his domestic life hellish. He gets by, playing the fool, because he’s madly in love with his baby daughter, born in the meantime. But when by a stroke of fate his beloved mother and daughter simultaneously die, he can’t take it anymore. Maddened by bereavement and directionless, Mattia leaves the town on the sly, intent on moving to America, Argentina perhaps, to start a new life.

But as he drifts he ends up in Monte Carlo’s famous casino. Mattia has never played roulette or any other such game, and out of curiosity buys a book to learn the rules. Providence, having taken his loved ones, cynically begs to assist him as he tries his hand at the game. In an unlikely series of lucky strikes, he becomes immensely rich. A bit bewildered, Mattia decides to return home, determined to recover his lost property and put his life back on track.

On the train home, however, something ghastly happens: He picks up an abandoned newspaper and reads notice of his own suicide. The decomposed corpse of a drowned man has been found in his town, and since Mattia had gone missing and was known to be depressed, it didn’t take much for the whole town to attribute the corpse to him.

At first he’s indignant, and thinks of going back to confront those who so easily recognized him in a corpse. Then, with his pockets stuffed with cash, he has second thoughts. He hates his wife and still owes money to the crook. Here is indeed a chance to start anew. And thus he makes a clean break with his past by inventing an alter ego—Adriano Meis—with the looks of a German philosopher and an alternative biography passing through Argentina, conveniently having no living relatives in Italy. For months Mattia leads a nomadic life of pleasure, journeying throughout Europe, impersonating the wealthy Adriano as he moves from hotel to hotel. His identity is never questioned.

His own self, Mattia, is left to remain officially dead. Far away in his home town, no one contests this alternative reality.

But as time passes, the orgy of freedom begins to lose its appeal. Adriano feels lonely and in need of settling down but realizes that he can never own property or have a family. Meaning to acquire a sedentary life, he takes up lodgings with a Roman family, full of eccentrics who are happy to welcome him as one of them. He is contented until he becomes aware of the dodgy dealings that go on in the house: séances and spiritualism, thievery interweaving with the afterlife and illicit sex. His nightmare is compounded when he falls in love with his host’s daughter, but because he’s officially dead, he can never marry her. It’s as if he kisses her “with the lips of a corpse.”

When her much-hated brother-in-law robs him of a large sum of money, he finds himself in an impossible position. He cannot report the theft to the police, because he doesn’t officially exist. But worse than that, by not doing so he mortally offends his loved one, who frantically wants the family to get rid of the rogue. She confronts him, but he can’t explain himself. Desperate, Adriano goes for extreme measures. In a double-crossed deceit of reality he fakes the suicide of his alter ego, leaving his coat and hat by a Roman bridge, a suitable suicide note folded in.

The only flaw is that he takes all his money with him. A bit like what happened with Ettore. And in these pages, Mattia gives us what could be great insights into Ettore’s “afterlife,” should he have plagiarized Pirandello: his curiosity for what those left behind were now thinking, for what the press said about him and what the police might have done. “Bustle, amazement, morbid curiosity of strangers, hasty investigations, suspicions, wild hypotheses, insinuations, vain searches; my clothes and books examined with that consternation inspired by objects belonging to someone who has tragically died.”

But, unlike (possibly) Ettore, Mattia isn’t only faking a suicide: He’s expunging his alter ego by suicide in order to resuscitate his real self, officially dead by suicide! He returns where he can never return. After his family has recovered from the shock of seeing a ghost, it emerges that his wife is now married to his best friend—whom he’d cuckolded in the first place. A glorious mess. Furthermore, a legal technicality would nullify the second marriage and force him to take back his ex-wife.

For a while, he toys with availing himself of the law, exacting a wild revenge upon those who were so keen to see him in that corpse. But then he meets the baby daughter born to his wife and friend while he’d been away. He remembers his own dead daughter, whom he loved so much, and his heart softens. In the end he lets the happy family be, for which, of course, he has to remain officially dead. Which he willingly does.

The only dark cloud for Mattia is the tombstone in the local cemetery with his name carved upon it. He regrets its existence not because he finds it gruesome, but because someone else really is dead underneath it. Perhaps the dead man has a family somewhere, not knowing where he is or what happened to him. God knows what extremes of despair drove the man in his tomb to commit suicide.

Mattia feels sorry for him, and on Sundays leaves flowers on his own tomb.

TWENTY-FOUR

Don’t Cry for Him, Argentina

The Argentine theory of Ettore’s disappearance was put forward by Erasmo Recami and has its source in Carlos Rivera, a Chilean physicist at the Catholic University in Santiago. Picture the man, sitting alone at a table of the Hotel Continental in Buenos Aires, bored to death. To kill time, he scribbles a few mathematical formulae on the paper tablecloth.

“I know someone else in the habit of writing equations on the tablecloth,” the waiter tells him, bringing him down to Earth with a start. “It’s a client who comes here to eat, sometimes just for a coffee. His name is Ettore Majorana, and he was an important physicist in Italy a long time ago. But he’s been in Argentina for many years.”

It’s 1960. Ettore would have been fifty-four.

With perfect idiocy, Rivera doesn’t follow up the lead there and then. True, the waiter had no idea how to find this Ettore-who-wrote-formulae-on-the-tablecloth, but he could at least have noted the contact details of the waiter. As it was, when the clue was properly followed up later on, not even the waiter could be traced.⁶⁸

This was not the first time that Ettore had haunted Rivera in Buenos Aires. Some ten years earlier, in 1950, en route to Germany, he was staying at a small family hotel owned by a certain Signora Talbert. Again he was writing equations, this time on a pad of paper in his room. His notes concerned the Majorana statistical laws, and that’s what he’d penned in glaring capital letters at the top of the page. Signora Talbert was hovering in the background doing the cleaning, when she suddenly exclaimed:

“Majorana? But that’s the name of the famous Italian physicist who’s very good friends with my son. They see each other all the time! He doesn’t do physics anymore; like my son, he’s an engineer now. He left Italy because he couldn’t stand Fermi, an impossible fellow. He said he didn’t even want to hear his name!”

A phone call from the son providentially discontinued the Signora’s chattering and when she returned to the room she was uncomfortable, withdrawn, and refused to continue the conversation.

When Rivera seeks out Signora Talbert in 1954, he finds the hotel boarded up. The neighbors tell him that one night mother and son disappeared without notice and were never seen again. They were renowned anti-Perónists, and Rivera (along with many future sources) blames their disappearance on the “Perón purges.” Rivera even speculates that Ettore could have met the same fate.

After Rivera’s testimonies and their popularization in the press in the mid- 1970s, sightings of Ettore in Buenos Aires spread like the plague. The leading proponent of the Argentinian theory became physicist Erasmo Recami, who found further traces of Ettore in Buenos Aires. Take, for example, the widow of the Guatemalan writer Miguel Asturias. Meeting Recami in Taormina, Sicily, Signora Blanca de Mora says without ado:

“But what’s the big deal about Ettore Majorana? In Buenos Aires everyone knew him. I met him often at the house of the sisters Manzoni, descendents of the great novelist.”

She alleges that one of these sisters, Eleanora, a mathematician, even dated him! But Eleanora is dead, and attempting to verify this testimony quickly becomes a comedy of errors for both Recami and Maria Majorana. Eleanora’s sister, Lilo, has moved to Caracas, her address is found but then lost together with all traces of her. Then Lila, Blanca’s sister, who was closer to the events, is brought into the correspondence. She admits to knowing Ettore, then takes it all back and refuses to put anything into writing, thereby making the story even more suspicious.

Recami broaches the matter with the authorities in 1979, but by now we are in the era of Videla’s military dictatorship, and he encounters a wall of silence. The head of the Physics Department at Buenos Aires University promises to help “within the limits prescribed by the law.” He then proceeds to deny the existence of the Hotel Continental in Buenos Aires, a noted landmark: a bit like denying the existence of elephants at the zoo while standing before their cage. Maybe by denying reality in such a blatant way, he was sending Recami a ciphered message: “Don’t believe anything I say; my words are being censored.”

Who was this Ettore Majorana? A figment of the imagination of frenzied women? A psychopath?

There is no Majorana in the Buenos Aires phone book, but in 2007 there were twenty-nine Maioranas, sixty-one Maioranos, two Mayoranas, ten Mayoranos, and one Maoirana. Some people can’t spell. When I told Fabio that there were some one hundred Majoranas living in Buenos Aires he grinned mischievously before asking:

“And you think they might all be Ettore’s children?”

As it happens, there is a district of Buenos Aires called Palermo. I stayed there when I visited. The city’s Italian heritage is reflected everywhere, but they write “ñoquis” for “gnocchi,” and “al pomodoro” becomes “con tomatitos.” I’ve always been fond of these cultural distortions: In England anything cooked with tomato is “à la Portuguese”; in Italy “alla Portoghese” signifies leaving a restaurant without paying the bill. It looked as if there were far more women than men on the streets, but it could have been just my impression. There weren’t that many casualties in the Malvinas/Falklands war.

The Argentinean Palermo is a very fashionable place to be, full of posh restaurants and designer-clothing shops, more so than the Sicilian Palermo. With Ettore in mind, I set off through the city, toward the center, seeking out the locations where he’d been sighted. First, the Hotel Continental. How could anyone deny its existence?

Founded in 1927, the hotel is housed in an impressive building with nine floors, on the wedge formed by a wide diagonal avenue intersecting a grid system, a sort of Broadway of Buenos Aires. Fernlike bundles of leaves hang from the cacarandá trees outside. It’s hard to see exactly what the hotel would have looked like in Ettore’s time, but it must always have been grandiose. Today it’s too business-oriented for the likes of Ettore and me. The meeting rooms have names like Portfolio, Concepto, Estratégia. Artsy-fartsy decor attempts to hide the nature of the clientele. If you’re polite to the servants, they’re completely taken aback with surprise.

Down the road, at number 671, is the Ministerio del Interior (Registo Nacional de las Personas), just the place to ensure you know your identity. By the entrance a tramp is eating food laid down directly on the ground. Still further down the avenue is the Plaza de Mayo, where the eponymous madres congregated at one time to complain about the desaparecidos—the disappeared ones. Maybe at the Ministerio they were so busy forging identities for runaway Nazis that they lost the identities of other people. Ettore’s mother should have come here to complain, too. The Catedral Metropolitana provides an island of peace—until you have to shake off the beggars and pickpockets. Tourists let pigeons shit on their heads for the sake of that perfect photo to send home.

I went to the hotel dining room, where Ettore had been sighted, and ordered an eccentric meal of oysters (hot and cold), a glass of white wine, and nothing else. There was I, a single man sitting at the Continental’s dining room, writing formulae on a paper pad, like “Ettore” and Riviera did on the tablecloth more than half a century ago. Back in the 1950s, the tablecloths may have been made of paper, but nowadays they’re fine soft leather—you’d certainly be thrown out if you wrote on them. Discretion was the word of the day among the waiters. They didn’t look at what I was writing; the service was impeccable. (A lone man in a restaurant writing notes—they probably thought I was a quality-control agent hired to evaluate waiter performance; a concomitant display was put on.)

My mind wandered, assisted by the wine and a pervading lassitude. And that’s when I had a perfect vision of who this Buenos Aires “Ettore” might have been. A poem was already lodged in my mind:

I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.

Fernando Pessoa is one of the most famous Portuguese poets, but he published almost nothing while still alive. Among the papers he left behind when he died, a large number of poems were found, attributed to a variety of what he called “heteronyms” . . . not exactly pseudonyms because he was them; not mere alter egos, but the result of a case of “multiple personality disorder” that entered the history of literature in a spectacular way. Three of these heteronyms wrote outstanding poetry: Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, and Alvaro de Campos; but there were half a dozen others we don’t know much about because they were revoltingly mediocre. Pessoa would arrive at his local café and inform his friends who he was on that particular day. According to his friends, he didn’t need to. It was obvious.

Some of the heteronyms “died” before Pessoa’s death in 1935, but others were allegedly still “alive” and could have attended his funeral. Ricardo Reis, for example, went away to Brazil while Pessoa was still alive and was never heard from again. It can be said that Pessoa brought the concept of ghostwriter to a new level.

Like “Ettore” at the Continental, Pessoa sat alone in restaurants but asked for the table to be laid for two or three and for wine to be poured for his invisible guests.⁶⁹ I once saw a guy in a restaurant sitting alone at a table set for a large party, keeping up an animated if silent conversation, his gestures and soundless laughter revealing when a particularly witty joke had been told, the wine flowing freely. He wasn’t disturbing anyone else, but the owner still called the police and had him ejected. I never patronized that restaurant again.

And that is where my mind drifted, in the dining room of the Continental, when I saw before me this “Ettore” of Buenos Aires. Truth and myth, life and death, the boundaries of the self, or the lack thereof. . . . Could the Argentine Ettore have been impersonated by a mythomaniac?

In José Saramago’s book, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, that Pessoan heteronym returns from Brazil after Pessoa’s own death. One night, in his large Lisbon house, Ricardo Reis wakes to the sound of footsteps. He gets up to find a man sitting in his living room. He sighs with relief:

“Ah, it’s you . . . what a fright you gave me! I thought it was a ghost.”

Fernando Pessoa is smiling back at him.

The Pessoan irony of the Argentinian theory. . . . The possibility that somebody may have impersonated Ettore in Argentina, possibly as innocently as Pessoa impersonated his ghosts. But an impersonator choosing for an alter ego a man who has disappeared? What genius! Pirandello and Pessoa would both have been impressed.

Something else not quite right about the Argentinean theory is the notion that Ettore became a “desaparecido” during the Perón purges. Everyone I talked to (right and left wing) said that this is a conspicuous anachronism. In the 1950s, during Perón’s first reign, people were jailed, maybe even roughed up. Abducted and killed, no. It may have happened in a couple of cases, but no more. Not to the tune of 30,000 as during the Videla’s “dirty war” of 1976 to 1983.

At the Buenos Aires book fair a “comrade in arms” of my anarchist days comes to meet me. We haven’t seen each other for over twenty-five years.

“Remember me?”

“ . . .”

At last I shout his name. We hug as he smiles, embarrassed. It turns out that it’s not his real surname, just a decoy necessary during the dictatorship days but which he no longer uses.

Later we meet in Palermo. A massive thunderstorm is raging. I hear insistent mewling, but can’t locate its source. Finally, through the corner of my eye, I glimpse a spot moving high above the ground. It’s a black cat, moving with great purpose along ledges and roofs. They’re lucky, I’m told. Lightning strikes the building opposite, creating a great commotion.

My friend has changed dramatically since the days he slept on the streets and sold fake jewelry in Algarve. He grunts with appreciation as he browses designer clothes flashing from the elegant shop windows. He’s dressed in the same refined style, unlike me. I poke fun at him. He defends himself:

“That’s not capitalistic! It wouldn’t cost that much to dress the whole working class like this.”

The night unrolls, the Malbéc flows. He tells me how sexually demanding Argentinean women can be (details provided) but that it suits him well. He’s on a playboy-style vacation from his girlfriend of more than thirty years. I remember her very well from their Portuguese days.

I knew that they’d been in Portugal as exiles, that she’d been a “desaparecida” before they ran away. She’d been abducted by the state police and for many months he couldn’t even find a record of her existence in jail, not knowing if she was dead or alive. I recall her telling me why she’d chosen Portugal for her exile. It was a matter of superstition.

One night they collected her and her mates from the cell, made them dress in rags, and shoved them into a truck. For a long while they were driven deep into the countryside. Finally they arrived at an old warehouse in the middle of nowhere. It had all the symptoms of the “standard,” and they prepared for the merciful bullet.

Inside the warehouse there were seats and a movie projector. They were made to sit, the lights went out, and they were shown a documentary on Our Lady of Fátima, the Madonna who appeared to three little shepherds in Portugal in 1917. And then they set them free.

As the evening unfolds, my friend’s mood changes. Comments on passing beauties have now given way to stories about atrocities. I try to curb the Malbéc (he’s had a triple bypass operation recently), but it’s too late. At a furious pace he tells me of the people taken at night and what happened to them, of the castrations, rapes, sophisticated tortures; of the pregnant inmates who were made to have their babies, so that they could be taken away and given up for adoption to sterile military couples; of when it was logistically impossible to kill so many people, so they started dropping planeloads of them, drugged and loaded with sandbags, straight into the sea.

“Nowadays, if you want to insult someone in Argentina really badly, you call him milico—a military. It’s worse than hijo de puta.”

As his rage surges, his slurred speech spirals toward the fixed point, the thing he’d been thinking about all along. By now he has tears in his eyes. He wipes them with the napkin.

“You know they gave her electric shocks in the vagina. . . .”

I don’t feel I have the right to ask him to stop, to spare me the unspeakable. I let his fury and tears take their course, torrents of gruesome details pouring out, feeling less and less capable of any distance. I find myself saying, in my Borat-style Spanish:

“That a curse be upon those fuckers!”

He pauses at long last. An incongruous smile appears on his face and he says:

“Well it is. After the pregnant inmates’ scandal came out, all their teenage offspring started to ask for DNA tests, not believing it’s their real parents.”

We laugh, hysterically. I suppose that’s the evolutionary purpose of laughter. Laughter, sometimes, is not funny.

The storm is now gone, and above the square we can see the stars in a limpid sky. Perched on the roof opposite I spot the same black cat I’d seen earlier in the evening, still broadcasting to the entire universe. Although I’m sure Ettore was never in Buenos Aires, except in a Pessoan sense, a powerful vision comes to my mind. In that vile world my Argentinean friend evoked, live forcible desaparecidos, people who disappeared without any real mystery, other than that of how certain “human” beings can accumulate so much filth in their minds. Ettore’s story, in this context, is like a manifesto of freedom. A statement of liberty. “I shall be a desaparecido of my own will. A decision I’ve taken because I wanted to. Because disappearing infused sense into my life, in all the inscrutability that sense can have. Because it spared me the atrocities a normal life might have forced upon me.”

The cat mewls high on the roofs; a beautiful orange moon has come out. They’re lucky, no doubt. Black cats are lucky.

TWENTY-FIVE

They Thought the Sun Was Sick

After Ettore’s scomparsa, the neutrino—Ettore’s brainchild—went on to become a major player in particle physics. Throughout the 1950s it engendered respectable research, earning many a Nobel Prize. First neutrinos were actually “seen,” thanks to ghostbusters Reines and Cowan with their Project Poltergeist; no longer was the neutrino a mere theoretical expedient, as when Pauli first conceived it. Then the neutrino’s parity-violating properties were exposed by Lee, Yang, and Wu. The neutrino was chiral. Reality was stranger than fiction.

From then on, new facts about the neutrino regularly emerged. But calamities never come singly. Electrons and neutrinos belong to a family of particles dubbed leptons (particles that don’t partake in strong nuclear interactions). This family was about to expand.

Already in the 1930s, physicists examining cosmic rays (including Ettore’s five-minute friend Occhialini) had discovered a background of particles no one had anticipated. Among these some behaved just like the electron-positron duet in the reactions they caused: They had to be leptons. However, the new particles were much heavier than electrons or positrons: about two hundred times so. They were baptized “muons,” and it wasn’t until the 1940s (largely thanks to old Boy Bruno Pontecorvo) that scientists realized that the muon was partnered with a “muonneutrino.” In fact, the muon and its muonic neutrino were perfect replicas of the electron and the “electron-neutrino” as far as their reactions were concerned. In the same way that a neutron could decay into a proton, releasing an electron and a neutrino, heavy nuclear particles produced in cosmic-ray showers could decay by emitting a muon and a muonic-neutrino. Fermi’s weak force drove all these leptonic processes.

Later, in the age of giant particle accelerators, a third generation of leptons was exposed. In 1974, the group at SLAC accelerator, Stanford University, discovered the tauon, yet another facsimile of the electron, this time 3,500 times heavier. Having seen the pattern before, no one doubted that a tauon-neutrino should then also exist. But the tauon-neutrino wasn’t actually detected until 2000, at Fermilab. The complete lepton family had now arrived.

Electrons, muons, and tauons had their corresponding antiparticles: the positron, the antimuon, and the antitauon. As for their neutrinos, that depended crucially on their being Dirac or Majorana, and the issue remained open. Dirac neutrinos have distinct antiparticles; Ettore’s don’t. The fact that neutrinos were now known to come in three types didn’t change the outlook.

The neutrino has always lent itself to drama: You should therefore not find it totally unexpected that in this golden age of neutrino discoveries something catastrophic happened. It didn’t come from particle accelerators or nuclear physics labs, but from the sun. If you’re against nuclear energy, you should be campaigning against the sun: It is a nuclear device. And in the same way that nuclear reactors on Earth had been used to unveil the neutrino, the sun became a major asset for neutrino physicists. But something disastrous was found in the 1960s regarding the neutrino output of the sun.

The sun is nothing more than a natural nuclear power station, and as such it releases an abundance of neutrinos; indeed, the sun emits many more neutrinos than it does particles of light. Its nuclear reactions take place deep in the solar core, and the energy they release takes millions of years to reach the surface to be shed in the form of light. But because neutrinos are so tenuous and ghostly, they stream out of the sun in a matter of seconds, thereby offering us a real-time X-ray picture of the inner workings of the sun, ultimately allowing us to predict how its surface will shine in a million years.

In the late 1960s, John Bachall set out to compute the neutrino flux emanating from the sun, assuming basic nuclear physics and astrophysics. He then asked an experimental friend, Ray Davis, to detect these neutrinos and verify that it all checked out. It was a hard experiment because neutrino interactions are so rare. So to be certain the reactions he saw were not caused by mundane “ambient” radioactivity, Ray had to shield his apparatus very cautiously. He performed his experiments a few thousand feet underground in a mine in South Dakota. Only neutrinos can travel down that far; cosmic rays and other sources of interference are absorbed by the kilometers of rock above. Ray filled a container carried into these depths with six hundred tons of cleaning fluid, knowing that when a neutrino hits chlorine, the chlorine converts into radioactive argon gas, which he could measure.

John computed that Ray should see ten such events per week, all things considered (flux of solar neutrinos, probability of a conversion, and amount of chlorine.) Ray, instead, saw an average of around three: week after week, consistently, in clear defiance of John’s prediction.

When John and Ray hit the world with this surprising news, they were met with disbelief. If you can’t understand why, take a moment and consider the cheek of these two guys. One was 100 percent sure he knew how the sun worked and therefore how many neutrinos it emitted. The other claimed he could tell ten atoms apart within six hundred tons. And when he found three atoms instead, he was sure he hadn’t missed the other seven. Bachall and Davis had found a serious discrepancy between theory and experiment and wanted the world to address it. Not very surprisingly, they got a lot of hostile response instead.

At first, scientists blamed the experimentalist (always the easier scapegoat on such occasions): There had to be something wrong with Ray’s apparatus. The BBC Horizon programs of the 1970s make for some amusing viewing nowadays, when they featured reputable physicists lightly dismissing the whole thing, asserting that sooner or later the missing neutrinos would be found. But Ray Davis was sure of his experiment and stuck to his guns. He knew that if he had made a mistake and not properly shielded his device from ambient radioactivity, he’d be seeing an excess, not a deficit of neutrino events.

So then they blamed the theorist. Of course, John Bachall didn’t know what he was talking about—how could someone be so sure about the workings of the sun, such a complicated thing? Physicists thus played at ridiculing the theorist; the more redoubtable proposed alternative models of the sun, providing concrete new calculations of the neutrino flux. But the sun really isn’t that complicated and the variant models all gave the same neutrino flux, which seemed extraordinarily robust to details of solar structure. The only alternative solar models that produce fewer neutrinos were extreme and contrived, and were quickly ruled out by helioseismology—the study of solarquakes—an impressive method for obtaining information about the sun’s internal structure.

In between these two groups inescapably sat the alarmists—the wacky cults fond of eschatological prophecies. Perhaps the sun is shutting down. Maybe we were seeing a third of the expected neutrinos because only a third of its usual nuclear reactions were taking place at the solar core. The energy currently being released at its surface came from reactions that took place a million years ago. If only a third of these nuclear reactions were now taking place at the Sun’s core, then its energy output would decrease to a third over the next million years. Think of the dramatic implications on Earth! The end of the world is nigh.

The answer, however, was much simpler. The clue? The number three. The sun was emitting three times fewer neutrinos than it should. Not two, not five, but three.

The solution to the solar neutrino problem, as it happens, is vital to the controversy opposing Dirac and Majorana neutrinos—and the issue at its center concerns the neutrino mass.

But what is mass? The term has multiple meanings, both colloquially and in physics. Informally, mass means “amount of stuff” and weight is used to measure it. They’re conceptually different: Mass means “resistance to acceleration” or inertia, whereas weight is the ability to excite gravity. But to make a long story short, the two concepts—mass and weight—can indeed be used interchangeably (the long story being Einstein’s theory of general relativity).

Something else that can be confused with mass is energy, as you might have guessed from the famous equation E = mc². According to this formula, energy—the ability to change the world—is equivalent to mass. The exchange rate is very large (the square of the speed of light), but again relativity conjures up the unification of seemingly different concepts. By adding energy to an object, you imperceptibly increase its mass: Something hot is “heavier” than something cold. And, likewise, mass itself constitutes a huge reservoir of energy, as nuclear physics and the world of particle annihilations spectacularly illustrate.

Weight, mass, and energy are thus equivalent within the framework of relativity. However, there’s one important distinction: “mass” versus “rest mass,” or “energy” versus “rest energy.” Motion is a form of energy,⁷⁰ so E = mc² implies that objects in motion are heavier or more massive than those at rest. In fact, that’s why you can’t accelerate an object to the speed of light: Its mass would become larger and larger, resisting the acceleration more and more. The mass of an object becomes infinite as it approaches the speed of light, and you simply can’t summon enough force to push it all the way up to the speed of light.

Rest mass is the mass (or energy) displayed by an object even when it’s at rest. The rest mass represents the object’s “internal” energy, which it preserves when it’s still, but which can be released by chemical or nuclear reactions. Particles with a rest mass can never move at the speed of light (they’d acquire infinite “moving mass” in the process). Conversely, particles that do move at the speed of light (like the photon) must have zero rest mass. A particle moving at the speed of light doesn’t have infinite mass because its rest mass is zero, or rather the particle can’t be seen at rest. Its energy derives from motion alone. Particles that move at the speed of light do so for all observers and are pure motion.

The world of particles is thus neatly divided between particles with zero and nonzero rest mass. Dropping the qualifier “rest,” particle physicists talk about massless and massive particles. The former move at the speed of light for all observers, the latter for none. The proton and the electron are massive, the photon is massless. How about the neutrino? According to the “standard model” of particle physics, developed in the 1960s, the neutrino is massless. But what if the standard model were wrong?

It’s historically curious that neither Pauli nor Ettore ever assumed the neutrino to be massless. If the neutron was proposed by Ettore as a “neutral proton,” required to bind the nucleus, the neutrino was envisaged as a “neutral electron” necessary to enforce energy conservation in beta decay. The neutron mass is only slightly different from the proton mass, but it was quickly realized that the neutrino mass had to be much smaller than the electron mass (for reasons to be made clear very shortly). Still no one assumed its rest mass to be zero.

Due to a number of mathematical problems, however, the new generation of neutrino physicists in the 1950s and 1960s posited that the neutrino moved at the speed of light and that its rest mass was zero. The only voice of dissent was Bruno Pontecorvo. He may not have been given a nocturnal induction exam by Ettore, but he surely came from the broadminded environment of Via Panisperna. There, no one had taken the neutrino to be massless.

But in 1967, Pontecorvo proposed something brutally insane, crazy beyond belief. At the time it was already established that neutrinos have “flavors.” This is a technical term in physics (not gourmet cuisine) referring to the three different generations of leptons discovered. The electron, muon, and tauon neutrinos can be seen as different “flavors” of the same particle. Pontecorvo knew that quantum mechanics is intrinsically odd—the Lord is malicious—and that sometimes different types of quantities we’re accustomed to measuring simultaneously become incompatible in quantum mechanics, ruled by mutually exclusive uncertainty. Position and velocity comprise one example, as I’ve explained before. If you know the exact velocity of a quantum car, you can’t know where it is (it must be in a quantum superposition of being at all locations). If you know its position, you have no idea of its speed. So position and velocity in quantum theory are “observables that don’t align”: They can’t be measured at the same time. Pontecorvo proposed that mass and flavor do not “align” for neutrinos.

This meant that if you knew the flavor of a neutrino, you couldn’t know its mass (you must be in a quantum superposition of different masses); if you knew its mass, you couldn’t know its flavor. Such a “mixing” of flavors and masses had a radical repercussion. If an electron neutrino is a superposition of different mass states (with well determined ratios), these masses will move at different rates through space. Thus the amount of the different masses will change as the neutrino progresses in space and time. And as the proportions change, so does the neutrino flavor: an originally “sweet” neutrino quickly turns “sour,” then “sweet” again—and so on, in a phenomenon called “flavor oscillation.” An electron neutrino oscillates into a muon and tauon neutrino as it moves, due to its funny kind of mass (see Figure 25.1). The rate at which the oscillations take place depends on the difference between the various mass states and something Pontecorvo dubbed the mixing angle. For typical values, the oscillations complete a cycle every few kilometers.

Figure 25.1:

Pontecorvo oscillations. As the neutrino moves in space, it oscillates between being an electron neutrino, a muonic neutrino, a tauon neutrino, then back again.

For a while, physicists continued to play the blame-the-experimentalist, blame-the-theorist, blame-the-sun game regarding the solar neutrino puzzle. But in the 1980s and 1990s, a Japanese group studying neutrinos produced by cosmic rays in the atmosphere found a similar discrepancy. They were also seeing fewer neutrinos than they should. The particle created by Pauli to account for missing energy was itself showing a knack for going missing. And when a larger Japanese experiment confirmed yet again a generalized neutrino deficit, physicists realized the game was over. It was time to start blaming the particle itself for the anomalies.

It was at this point that Pontecorvo’s idea—largely disregarded up until then—began to gain respect. Pontecorvo had suggested that not only did the neutrino have a mass, but also that its mass states didn’t align with its flavor states. As a result, an electron neutrino oscillated into a muon neutrino, which oscillated into a tauon neutrino, and finally back to an electron neutrino to restart the cycle. Ray Davis’s solar neutrino experiment was only sensitive to electron neutrinos. No one had objected because the sun can produce only electron neutrinos in its nuclear reactions. But what if neutrinos oscillated? Two-thirds of the emitted electron neutrinos would on average be lost to muon and tauon flavors as they moved toward us. This would solve the solar neutrino problem. It was just a matter of putting three and three together. Three generations or flavors; three times fewer neutrinos seen (see Figure 25.2).

Figure 25.2: The (electron) neutrinos produced by the sun oscillate en route to Earth. Since the oscillation period is a few kilometers, and they came from a much broader region at the solar core, at any place on Earth we see on average a third of the total solar neutrino output in each flavor: electron, muon or tauon.

It was a disarmingly simple solution to the solar neutrino conundrum, but there was only one way to verify that it was indeed the correct answer: to devise an experiment that could detect all three types of neutrinos. SNO—Solar neutrino observatory—started running in 1999, three kilometers (almost two miles) underground in a mine at Sudbury, Canada. It’s now the cleanest environment in terms of ambient radioactivity in the whole solar system. You need to shower and decontaminate yourself thoroughly before they’ll let you anywhere near. It was in such an exclusive location that physicists waited for ticks in their detectors, signaling the catch of another neutrino of any flavor coming from the direction of the sun.

The answer provided by SNO was unambiguous: Taking into account all types of neutrinos, the sun was in fine health, thank you very much. John Bachall’s calculation was correct: The flux of solar neutrinos was as predicted. And Ray Davis was measuring things right, too. He just wasn’t seeing all the flavors that issue from the sun because he had restricted himself to electron neutrinos. The sun creates only electron neutrinos in its reactions, but it just so happens that Pontecorvo’s wild guess hit the spot. Neutrinos have mass but their mass states don’t align with their flavors, and so the flavors oscillate.

As a result, a third of the solar neutrinos arrive on Earth as muon-neutrinos, and another third as tauon-neutrinos. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. And this one couldn’t be more relevant for the outcome of Ettore’s story.

TWENTY-SIX

The Sign of the Beast

It may seem inconsequential to give the neutrino a rest mass for the sake of saving the sun, but in reality the neutrino mass is crucial to Ettore’s theory. Should the neutrino be massless, then the Majorana neutrino would be observationally indistinguishable from its alternative, the Dirac neutrino. Were it not for the neutrino’s inability to move at the speed of light, Dirac versus Majorana would be a matter of taste, like supporting different football teams or belonging to different religions.

Recall that the controversy hinges on how the neutrino reacts to Amis’s backward world—its behavior under a reversal of time’s arrow. Dirac’s neutrino in Amis’s world becomes a distinct particle, the antineutrino. Ettore’s remains the same because Majorana neutrinos already experience a quantum superposition of the two arrows of time. If the neutrino were massless, it would move at the speed of light, and time doesn’t pass for such particles. The faster something moves, the slower time flows. It grinds to a halt for particles moving at the speed of light, so that massless particles like the photon live outside time. If the neutrino were massless, it wouldn’t feel the flow of time, and there could be no distinction between indifference or not to time reversal. The neutrino must be massive for there to be antagonism between Dirac’s and Majorana’s proposals.

That the neutrino mass doesn’t vanish was proved incontrovertibly by the various experiments that established neutrino oscillations (a process that also happens in time, and so requires nonzero rest mass.) In 2002, Ray Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba (representing the Japanese group) won the Nobel Prize for this discovery. The path toward the detection of Ettore’s neutrino was now open.

As early as 1935, Maria Goeppert-Mayer realized that beta decay could exist in a form where two coincident decays happened inside a nucleus. Two neutrons inside the same nucleus could simultaneously, and as part of the same process, convert into two protons releasing two beta rays and two neutrinos. The process is very unlikely and Goeppert-Mayer computed its probability using Fermi’s theory of weak interactions (the one famously rejected by Nature magazine). She found that it was exceedingly rare because it involved two simultaneous interventions of the weak force. The rare decay was unimaginatively christened “double beta decay.”

Because the process is so much rarer than single beta decay, it can only be observed if single beta decay is not possible for a given nucleus. If single beta decay can occur, it completely swamps the double version, releasing beta rays much more copiously. But for some nuclei, single beta decay is forbidden (say, by the energy available or by the need to conserve spin), while double beta decay is allowed. One then has a chance of observing the rare process without the loud noises made by the beta stampede of its more frequent version. Double beta decay was finally observed in the laboratory in 1986.

Barely had Ettore left the world when in 1939 scientists realized that another type of double beta decay was possible. Usually one expects two neutrinos to be emitted along with the two beta rays. Wendel Furry proved that it was possible for such a double beta decay to occur without the emission of any neutrinos provided the neutrino was of the Majorana variety. “Neutrinoless double beta decay” is effectively a double beta decay process in which the two neutrinos that would ordinarily have been emitted annihilate each other. It can only happen if the neutrino is Majorana and has a mass. In fact, the probability of neutrinoless double beta decay is related to the neutrino mass according to a well-established formula. The larger the neutrino mass, the more probable is neutrinoless double beta decay.

But this is killing two birds with one stone! If neutrinoless double beta decay is observed, we will know that the neutrino is Majorana and what its mass is. By contrast, Pontecorvo-style oscillation experiments give us only the mass differences between the mass states plus an angle, quantifying their misalignment with the flavor states. Double beta decay makes Ettore’s idea a choice method for weighing neutrinos, explaining its current popularity with experimentalists.⁷¹

Figure 26.1: A Feynman diagram depicting the interaction of two electrons, via the interchange of a virtual photon.

To understand interactions between particles, and the rare type of decay that may reveal Ettore’s neutrino, we must once again appeal to Richard Feynman’s lurid imagination. Not only did he propose that antiparticles are particles going backward in time, Amis-style, but he found an inventive and pictorial way to explain forces and decays. He invented the concept of virtual particles, promoting them to the intermediaries of interaction. He also crafted a useful tool for visualizing quantum processes nowadays called Feynman diagrams.

According to Feynman, when two electrons come together and electrically repel, they do so by exchanging a virtual photon; that is, a photon that’s not quite real—virtual light. This is the kind of dark illumination a sun wearing sunglasses would shed: not “free light,” not light you’d ever see. Rather, it’s an obscure sort of light that is permitted only by the fuzziness of quantum mechanics, allowing energy to fluctuate at random for short periods. The virtual photon emitted by the electron isn’t allowed by the conservation laws of classical physics and should never have been emitted. But quantum mechanics turns a blind eye . . . if it’s not for too long. Long enough, however, for the virtual particle to carry energy and momentum between the two electrons, which thus repel (see Figure 26.1).

Figure 26.2: The Feynman diagram of an electron-positron annihilation (this is a refinement of Figure 19.3b). Not only does the electron pull a U-turn down the stream of time (to become the positron it annihilates), but it becomes a virtual electron while the photons are being emitted at A and B.

The Feynman diagram of an electron-positron annihilation is also enlightening. As I said earlier, in the Feynman picture of the antiworld, an electron-positron annihilation is like a single particle pulling a U-turn down the stream of time. If a positron is an electron going backward in time, an annihilation is like an electron reversing in time, providing you with the positron you thought you’d started with. Under closer inspection, however, the process involves this “single particle fits all” becoming a virtual particle for a short while (see Figure 26.2). The annihilation releases two photons, at A and B. Traveling between these two points we find a virtual particle, not permitted by classical physics. It can be seen either as a virtual electron travelling from A to B, or as a virtual positron travelling from B to A. The virtual electron is like a moment of “neutral” before the electron engages the full reverse down the stream of time, to become the positron it annihilated.

Virtual photons explain the electric forces between charged particles, and virtual electrons can appear in the Feynman diagrams of annihilations and other quantum processes. And many other virtual particles explain all types of forces, decays, and interactions, including the weak and strong nuclear force. If you think this is crazy, take note of the following: Feynman diagrams can be rigorously and mathematically derived from quantum theory; and they can be employed to predict particle interactions to a ridiculously high standard. Some particle physics quantities have been predicted to one part in 10,000,000,000 by Feynman’s calculations.

In particular, Feynman diagrams can be drawn to explain beta decay. In beta decay diagrams, if the neutrino is seen à la Dirac, it must have an arrow like the electron, to distinguish between particle and antiparticle. For lepton number to be conserved, in beta decay an antineutrino must be emitted, so that the arrows flow continuously from the neutrino to the electron (recall Figure 19.4). Normal double beta decay is just two such disconnected diagrams happening at the same time (see Figure 26.3). If the neutrino is Dirac, there’s no way of connecting the two diagrams, say, by linking the neutrinos (forming a virtual line between the two decays,) because their arrows would clash. A emits an antineutrino and wants it to be absorbed by B. But this would mean B emitting a neutrino, whereas instead it emits an antineutrino (see Figure 26.3). Neutrinoless double beta decay is therefore not possible in Dirac’s picture.

Figure 26.3: Double beta decay with neutrino emission is just two disconnected diagrams for beta decay happening at the same time. If the neutrino is Dirac (as in this figure) it has a definite arrow and so a clear particle-antiparticle nature. Therefore it’s impossible to connect the neutrinos coming from A and B to make them virtual and achieve neutrinoless double beta decay.

The story is altogether different with Majorana neutrinos, explaining Wendel Furry’s insight. In Feynman diagrams Ettore’s neutrinos are represented idiosyncratically because they flow both ways in time, representing particle and antiparticle in one. Thus they’re represented as lines with arrows pointing both ways (recall Figure 19.5.)

Figure 26.4: But Majorana neutrinos are “bi-timal”: Their time flow, or their particle-antiparticlecontrol, goes both ways down their lines. Thus the two beta-decay diagrams can be linked via a virtual neutrino without a clash. The neutrinoless double beta decay is the hallmark of the Majorana neutrino.

We can now see why neutrinoless double beta decay is possible should the neutrino be Majorana. Because the time flow, or the particle-antiparticle control, goes both ways down their lines, we can link the neutrino lines belonging to the two diagrams without a clash (see Figure 26.4). The Majorana neutrino can annihilate itself, and effectively that’s what happens inside the diagram of neutrinoless double beta decay. It’s the sign of the beast: of Ettore’s beast. And that’s how one hopes to bring it to light.

So here’s a blast from the past. Even as we delve into twenty-first-century neutrino experiments, we return to where it all started: the spectrum of beta decay. Physicists work by analogy, so it’s interesting to find out what was on their minds during those days long ago when Pauli and Ettore were first messing about with neutrinos. When I started my physics studies, it was firmly believed that the neutrino was massless; but at its inception, in the 1930s, it was never meant to be massless. It was quickly realized that its mass had to be much smaller than the electron mass. Still, no one assumed it to be zero. But how did they know that the neutrino mass had to be so small?

Recall my early diagram, showing how the energy “spectrum” of beta rays pointed Pauli toward a third man, the neutrino: the carrier of vanished energy. You had two nuclei with different masses, the daughter being lighter than the mother by ΔM. This means that an equivalent energy E (equal to ΔMc²) was available, and should by rights have been carried by the electron; i.e., the beta ray. The expectation was for the beta ray spectrum to be a sharp line around this energy, which was the same for each mother and daughter pair (see Figure 26.5). Instead the beta ray spectrum showed a range of possible energies, all smaller than this amount, following a smooth line (see Figure 26.6).

Energy conservation was salvaged by Pauli’s proposal of the neutrino. The observed electron spectrum revealed that the electron was sharing the available energy with a mystery particle—invisible, intangible. Near point A of the spectrum, the neutrino carried all the available energy, E, so there was nothing left for the electron. Near point B, the electron instead carried the lot, the neutrino being left with nothing. In between, they’d share energy E. Right?

Almost. Point B, the “end-point of beta decay,” as we call it nowadays, represents the minimum energy that can be given to the neutrino (it is the maximum energy we ever see the electron carrying). This is only the full E if the neutrino is massless, because then you can give it an energy as close to zero as wanted. But if the neutrino is massive you have to give it at least its rest mass. Therefore the maximum you can give the beta ray is not E, but E minus the neutrino rest energy (E ν = mνc²); see Figure 26.7.

Sounds easy? Let me put the picture to scale (see Figure 26.8). To this day no one has measured the neutrino mass using this method. We do know, however, that it has to be much smaller than the electron mass, indeed at least a million times smaller, because the end-point of beta decay is very close to point B.

Figure 26.5: The expected spectrum of (single) beta decay, before physicists were forced to face up to the neutrino.

Figure 26.6: The spectrum of (single) beta decay as it was observed. At point A, the neutrino carries all the available energy (so that none is left for the electron, or beta ray.) At point B, the neutrino carries none.

Figure 26.7: A correction for what happens at B, given the neutrino rest mass (and so its rest energy E ν = m νc².) The neutrino must carry at least this energy, so the beta ray can never absorb all the available energy. The end point of beta decay, in principle, would offer us a method to measure the neutrino mass.

Figure 26.8: In practice the story is quite different.

Figure 26.9: The spectrum of double beta decay with production of neutrinos. When the energies of the two electrons (beta rays) are added up we observe a curve starting at zero and ending at the available energy minus twice the neutrino mass (since we must now feed two neutrinos).

Figure 26.10: The spectrum of neutrinoless double beta decay, instead, reproduces the expectation for the spectrum of beta decay before the neutrino entered the picture: a sharp line centered at the available energy.

But in this context, the spectrum of double beta decay is precisely a combination of the energy spectrum scientists expected to see in 1930 and that which was in fact observed. Life is a long circle. If double beta decay occurs with production of neutrinos, when we add up the energies of the two electrons coincidentally emitted we get a smooth spectrum, starting at zero and ending at the available mass-energy ΔM minus twice the neutrino mass (see Figure 26.9). But if no neutrinos are emitted we get, of course, what was expected before Pauli was forced to dream up the neutrino: a sharp line at the available energy (see Figure 26.10). Ironically, the signature of the Majorana neutrino is precisely what physicists expected before they knew about neutrinos—because it marks beta decay without them. Majorana’s neutrino leaves its mark by not being emitted, because it self-annihilates, thus failing to imprint on the spectrum the energy deficit which revealed the neutrino in the first place.

It’s bizarre that the sign of the beast is self-annihilation. Ettore’s neutrino is the most self-destructive particle in the cosmos—like its creator.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Ettore Majorana™

In 1966 Edoardo Amaldi wrote The Life and Work of Ettore Majorana. In 1974 director Leandro Castellani shot a film on Ettore and published Dossier Majorana. In 1975 Leonardo Sciascia wrote his classic La Scomparsa di Majorana. Ettore’s letters and documents were published by Erasmo Recami in 1987. Since then, Italian books on Ettore have sprouted by the dozen. If you add the hundreds of newspaper articles putting forward conspiracy theories, plus TV documentaries, comics, and novels, Ettore can hardly be said to lack an afterlife. The search for neutrinoless double beta decay can only envy such a level of attention.

Many have tried writing about Ettore in fiction format. It has always been disastrous: In a fictional world the temptation to invent answers is just too great. In trying to speculate beyond the facts, Ettore always becomes a Mickey Mouse character. In L’inglesina in Soffitta he inexpertly has sex with a Scottish spy girl (in Italian novels British women are invariably portrayed as the ultimate tarts, which is, of course, unfair.) In a French book he runs away to Argentina where he becomes a family man; one of his daughters is named after Maria.

Then there are the “real-life” stories purporting to solve Ettore’s mystery. A prime example: Signorina Tebalducci, a Florence lady who claimed in the Italian press to have dated him. According to her, it was not a happy affair even by the standards of the day (when vaginal penetration had to be preceded by a blessing at the altar). Ettore didn’t speak much, and whenever things became interesting in the slightest, a group of “foreign-looking men” would turn up, take him aside and talk for hours, completely ignoring her. After discussing the matter with a brother in the Carabinieri, the signorina concluded that she was being used as a “schermo,” a statement that underlies the theories portraying Ettore as a spy, kidnapped by the enemy in 1938.⁷²

The mathematically oriented clochard who once lived in Mazara del Vallo.

Ettore’s brother Luciano vigorously dismissed this story, stressing that Ettore had never been to Florence. But Signorina Tebalducci performed a remarkable public utility service. She filled in the gap that other accounts of Ettore leave wide open: his private life. A lie is certainly less infuriating than a void.

Personally, I like to collect Majorana conspiracies the way others collect stamps: There are nearly as many. My favorite concerns “l’omu cani,” Sicilian for “man-dog.” In 1940 a drifter appeared in Mazara del Vallo, in southern Sicily, not far from the setting of the detective Montalbano stories. The self-named Tommaso Lípari claimed to come from Africa and carried with him a profusion of bags. He never begged and didn’t accept money, slept in a cave at a nearby ruined castle, and kept his distance from everyone. He chain-smoked, crafting his cigarettes from butts he picked up from the ground. And he could do cubic roots in his head.

One morning in 1973 the man-dog appeared dead. “Natural causes” was entered in the official report. To everyone’s surprise his funeral attracted “notorious VIPs” (excuse the euphemism). It further transpired that Signore Lípari had a deep scar on his right hand (not necessarily associated with crashing a vehicle) and wore a bracelet with Ettore’s birthdate engraved on it. But what set imaginations alight was that the case attracted the attention of anti-Mafia hero Paolo Borsellino.

Borsellino was born and raised in the Palermo district of La Kalsa, where they tell tourists not to go, and had been a childhood friend of that other anti-Mafia hero Giovanne Falcone. Aware of their surroundings, they put themselves through law school, so that one day they could cripple the Mafia. The results are well-known: They now have an airport named after them. Both died from car bombs. The blast hitting Falcone opened a ten-meter-deep crater, and the highway had to be redesigned. You can’t run away from death, but you can be prepared for it. Falcone and his wife decided not to have children because they didn’t want to leave orphans.

Borsellino concluded in his report that Signore Lipari was not Ettore Majorana. Unwittingly he cast the Mafia aspersion on both.

Whoever the man-dog was, people missed him when he died. In Mazara del Vallo he’s still invoked by adults to frighten misbehaving children. If someone goes mad people say that “he’s become worse than the man-dog.” And if you need a cubic root evaluated, things have never been the same.

This is only one of the theories in my collection, and to be honest most strike me as disingenuous: nothing like a good conspiracy to attract attention. There are exceptions, of course; sometimes they’re just so alluring. I can’t forget the conversations I had with my friend Professor Francesco Guerra who, having spent hours scorning Ettore theories, couldn’t resist telling me his own.

He found a letter from Florence physicist Gilberto Bernardini to Ettore’s friend Giovanni Gentile Jr. The letter is not dated, but practical details included place it around May 1938 (it refers to a trip Gentile would take to Germany in June 1938). It’s a reply to an earlier letter from Gentile (presumably reporting on the events of March) and opens with “As you can imagine, the news about Majorana has filled me with great joy. It’s not a pretty thing, perhaps, but it’s not as tragic as we had imagined. We can all be happy about it.”

If this letter was indeed penned in May 1938, how can we interpret it? No two ways about it. Obviously Ettore didn’t commit suicide (not as tragic as they had imagined). He did something not very “pretty” (ran away from his family and responsibilities), but it could have been significantly worse (i.e., suicide). They’re all well aware of his fate, and can be “happy about it,” even filled with joy.

Unfortunately it’s not so obvious. The dating is soft. The letter could also have been written at the end of 1937 (the practical details referred to can be accounted for in other ways). In which case the letter simply refers to the mundane shenanigans of the concorso (not very pretty to suspend it, but they all got accommodated in the end). But one can’t suppress a glistening in the eye. This letter embodies the lingering sensation that friends and family know what happened but aren’t telling. My sincere congratulations to them.

But these somewhat measured conspiracy theories pale in comparison to the all-out flights of lunacy. That Ettore’s family is cursed; that aliens have abducted him; that he ran away to the center of the Earth via Etna, where he’s working for the benefit of humankind. Shall we ratchet it up a notch in abject insanity? If so, let’s indulge in an Internet myth I’ve added to my collection: the “curse of the Majoranas.”

During recent restoration works in the Steri (the ancient Palermo headquarters of the Inquisition) a variety of graffiti emerged from beneath four centuries of plaster, left by inmates due to be tortured and killed. Some of them were signed by Paolo Majorana, who was there in 1681. Understandably, his graffiti contain nothing but gritty curses.

In a certain town in the middle of Amazonia political and economic life is controlled by the Majoranas. The family patriarch has been nicknamed Majorana, O Mafioso, and many people who’ve been aggrieved by his prepotencies have admitted that they’re too scared to take their cases to the police. Instead they’ve resorted to good old-style Brazilian voodoo.

On November 12, 2003, a group of Italian Carabinieri were killed by a suicide bomber in Nassiriya, Iraq.⁷³ Among the fallen heroes was Orazio Majorana. The premature death of Orazio affected the family enormously, but no one more so than his brother, as chance would have it, named Ettore. Ettore Majorana became a vocal pro-peace activist, denouncing the hypocrisy of Western intervention, and demanding the recall of all Italian forces. But after a flurry of political activity, young Ettore buckled to depression, never quite getting over his bereavement. A few months later, the twenty-two-year-old modern Ettore Majorana appeared drowned. Close friends believed it was suicide, but no one really knows. This creates a bizarre parallel between the two Ettores: one left apparent suicide notes but no corpse; the other a corpse but no suicide notes.

Pizza Ettore Majorana: Buffalo mozzarella, fresh mushrooms, Parma ham, rocket, “grana” cheese, and tomato.

The fact that none of these three Majoranas is related to our Ettore hasn’t stopped abundant Internet literature from uniting them under the “curse of the nuclear physicist,” the “curse of the Majoranas,” and their evident relation to the “curse” of a certain combustible baby. Perhaps in this context it’s not so odd that a scientific article appeared on the WEB archives stating that Ettore had placed himself in a quantum superposition of dead and alive, like Schrödinger’s cat. And that another article associated his name with a neutrino device capable of deactivating all the nuclear weapons on Earth.

But then, by now Ettore has become a trademark. He has a pizza named after him. He’s a hero in comics, surrounded by cats in the fifth dimension. People manage to keep a straight face while arguing over who owns the copyright to his suicide notes. Ettore has fallen prey to those who insist they have exclusive rights to his soul, those who allege they own the patent for oral sex.

What is it, boys? What are you mewling at?

There’s no one there. . . .

He doesn’t need neutrinoless double beta decay for anything. In the vast seas of the subculture, his afterlife is in full swing.

TWENTY-EIGHT

A Vote of Silence

But we’re close to the end: Shall we step back down a few notches in lunacy? Something akin to an answer is expected, after all. So let me tell you the Majorana fable closest to my heart. A Vote of Silence. I’m an atheist, but still I find it irresistibly beautiful.

One evening in the 1960s, the novelist Leonardo Sciascia was having dinner at a Roman restaurant with Emilio Segrè and writer Alberto Moravia, among others. The conversation touched upon the atomic bomb and Segrè, in good Basilisk style, boasted of his participation in the Manhattan Project. It was at the height of the cold war, with the phantom of global destruction hanging over the world, and such lightheartedness was even more pathetic than irresponsible. Sciascia, who had the hot blood of all Sicilians, shouted verbal abuse and attempted to physically assault Segrè. Moravia had to restrain him lest Emilio end up with his spectacles crushed into his nose. And it was during this mealtime incident that Sciascia—an antinuclear activist—first conceived the notion that scientists are evil. From direct contact with a Dr. Strangelove.

As Sciascia read about the politics and science behind the making of the atom bomb, he developed his views further. As he learned more about those who made the bomb and their dilemmas of the soul—or lack thereof—he became convinced that scientists like Fermi, Segrè, and Oppenheimer were actually clinically mad. But then he stumbled upon Ettore. Immediately Sciascia realized that he was different. Ettore had a soul. His life wasn’t just science without any padding of humanity. Sciascia began collecting documents on Ettore’s life obsessively. He speculated that Ettore being a Sicilian—a nation that copiously produced artists and writers but no scientists—may have had something to do with it. Sicilians are superstitious and despise science. A Sicilian scientist had to be different from the others.

Some time later, Sciascia was reading a newspaper while relaxing at a café. His mind was fluttering away when he came across an article reporting that one of the pilots who dropped the bomb had subsequently joined a monastery. And that’s when he had his sudden vision, his burst of insight! Of course that’s what happened to Ettore. In 1938 he’d seen what the world was coming to, and unlike the others he couldn’t shake off responsibility. He cherished his freedom and didn’t want to be a mere robot programmed to inaugurate the nuclear nightmare. So he’d sought refuge at a monastery.

Unlike other Ettorologists, Sciascia never claimed to have holy fire spewing from his ass; indeed, he rejected the label of “theory,” deeming his views on Ettore “a mixture of history and invention.” Ettore, in his mind, became symbolic of the scientist who refuses to give up choice, who repudiates being a cog in a political mechanism.

“I have no doubt that Majorana would have participated in the Manhattan Project.” This is Professor Francesco Guerra’s opinion.

“Why?”

“Out of curiosity. He’d have wanted to know if the physics of a chain reaction really was possible.” I suppose this is why scientists look so deranged to the rest of the world; and the man in front of me is the nicest person one can think of.

I have no doubts that Ettore would never have participated in the Manhattan Project. Even before moral issues are brought into the picture, he could never be part of a group. Any group. It just wasn’t in his nature.

Maria Majorana explained long ago how the family repeatedly petitioned the Pope for information on Ettore, always receiving no reply. Certainly if Ettore did join a monastery (as suggested by several clues gathered by the 1938 search party), that must have left a paper trail, which may eventually resurface from that black hole called the Vatican. And Sciascia himself found a scent of Ettore at a monastery in Basilicata.

The first glass of wine I ever drank was in the grounds of a Carthusian monastery near Evora, Portugal. My uncle had a friend who worked at the attached farm, and we were invited for lunch. Befittingly for a vineyard that produces some of the best nectar in the world, the only drinks available were tap water and wine. My uncle asked that I be given water (I was seven or eight) but when the meal arrived this offended the farmers’ aesthetical sense so much that they insisted on supplying me with a robust glass of wine.

None of this veneration of the sublunar world is permitted on the other side of the wall, in the monastery itself. A vow of silence is observed. One of my earliest memories is the sound of their bells tolling at three or four in the morning calling the monks to their prayers. The monks are divided into brothers and fathers (or choir monks); the brothers are allowed meager contact with the outside, but the fathers are totally detached from it. Choir monks spend their days in spiritual exercises: praying, meditating, and studying.

It was in one of the monasteries of this order that Sciascia found the evidence he didn’t need for what he was happy to see as a metaphor. “Perhaps someone in this place was able to avoid betraying life by betraying the conspiracy against life,” he writes, describing his visit.

He finds the peaceful and tidy cemetery, row after row of past monks orderly arranged in their final launch pad to Heaven; but no inklings as to Ettore’s location. A Dutch monk shows him around, insisting that the order has no famous writers or scientists to boast of. This contradicts the story that led Sciascia there, a friend who visited in 1945 and vividly recalled being told that there was among the choir monks a famous scientist.

But as Sciascia follows the monk through the austere citadel he admits:

“I have no wish to ask questions, to verify. I feel implicated, compelled to respect a secret. . . . On the threshold, as I take my leave, the Carthusian asks:

“‘Have I answered all your questions?’

“ . . . I asked but a few. . . . But I answer:

“‘ Yes.’

“And it’s true.”

Could Ettore have guessed what was about to befall the world? Almost certainly yes, and this merely adds another stratum to the crisis that hit him from 1933 to 1937 and finally unwound itself in those stormy days in March 1938. Ettore had a tradition of spotting what the other Panisperna Boys couldn’t and they did achieve the fission of Uranium in 1934, having inflicted cancer on the poor goldfish of their pond. Ida Novak, in Germany, understood it in 1934, so why not Ettore? But unlike Novak (who was a chemist), Ettore would also have been aware of the prospect of a chain reaction and the formidable energies that could be released.

Whether he foresaw Armageddon is another matter. But he was so depressed in those years—possibly, or even probably, for other reasons—that any human extrapolation he’d make from such a discovery would have to have been pessimistic. I don’t believe that the bomb was the cause of Ettore’s depression, but I do think that it was one among many culprits. Enough to turn the wildest epicure into a monk, if you want my opinion.

The ending of the film I Ragazzi di Via Panisperna re-creates Sciascia’s vision almost to the letter. Recall that in the film Ettore withdraws from the world, becoming a peasant at a bucolic Sicilian farm south of nowhere. Fermi visits him ostensibly to beg his assistance. He’s carrying a notebook, “Uranium” embossed on its cover.

When they meet the scenario is surreal. We see Ettore ambling through the dilapidated farmhouse, hefty chandeliers hanging from the branches of a palm tree that grew embedded in a neoclassical reception room. Birds fly freely indoors. Ettore receives Fermi warmly, but replies to his requests for help with “I don’t occupy myself with that anymore.” His statement echoes an utterance from Arthur Rim-baud, the teenager who changed poetry forever but never wrote another verse after he turned twenty.

Ettore then mentions Galileo’s classic “Il Mondo Mobili,” which proposed that the Earth orbits the sun and led to his troubles with the Inquisition. “I like Galileo because he was afraid,” says Ettore (what could he have been thinking when he said this?). Fermi responds with the banality that the truths discovered by Galileo are universal facts and would always have been found, if not by Galileo, then by someone else. Ettore sniggers:

“We only find what we want to find.”

A bewildered Fermi leaves his uranium notebook next to a pile of loquats and they part forever.

That night, Ettore can’t sleep. The scene is almost mystical, flooded by Sicilian a cappella songs, with their Arabic inflexions and extraterrestrial rhythms. Amid nightmarish flashbacks of his mother forcing her Ettoronzo to perform circus tricks before visitors, he sweats and is delirious, then gets up flushed and distraught. With a violent sweeping gesture he makes space on a messy desktop and opens Fermi’s notebook. Effortlessly, he solves the enigma of uranium, and then—predictably—he burns his work.

After Ettore vanishes in March 1938, Fermi travels to Naples and learns from Carrelli that two days before evaporating, Ettore had drawn five months of salary from the university cashier. Among Ettore’s belongings, spread out by Carrelli on a table, Fermi recognizes “Il Mondo Mobile.” Lost in its pages is a picture of Ettore. At the gates of a monastery.

From the picture Fermi locates the monastery, where he meets a monk well acquainted with Ettore. But Ettore, the monk says, has left.

“Have I arrived too late?”

“We can’t measure the time of God with our laws.”

The monk gives off a clear whiff that he knows Ettore’s whereabouts but won’t talk. Before Fermi takes his leave the monk gives him a book. It’s his uranium notebook, which Ettore had asked the monk to return to its rightful owner, should he ever visit.

Soon afterward, Fermi moves to the United States with his family. As they cross the Atlantic, one night Fermi is so upset he’s insomniac. He goes out to deck to watch the sea, and Laura joins him. Fermi invokes Ettore’s memory, praising his gifts. Laura observes:

“Ettore had exceptional qualities. But in other ways he was handicapped. He lacked the most basic common sense. He couldn’t have ended up in any other way.”

“So you too believe that he committed suicide?”

“I want to doubt, but can’t.”

And then Fermi’s final words, closing the film, drop out:

“Ettore wanted to disappear. But even in that, he was a genius. He wanted to disappear leaving us the uncertainty of not knowing whether he’s dead or alive. So that, whatever happened to him, effectively he is alive. We’ll always feel as if he’s looking over our shoulders, judging us in everything we do. Imposing on us the impossibility of ignoring our conscience.”

A shame that, in reality, Ettore’s shadow didn’t prevent Fermi from helping to build the bomb. As Pirandello so characteristically put it, “The dead are the pensioners of remembrance.”

EPILOGUE

Mediterranean Whales

After Ettore’s disappearance, all the characters in this book had distinguished lives, even if not always for the best reasons. If Ettore didn’t commit suicide, he must have enjoyed reading about them in the papers.

Ettore’s friend Werner Heisenberg has sometimes been accused of knowing more about Ettore’s fate than he ever let on. Some even claim that Ettore rejoined Werner in 1938 to give him a helping hand. Because something remarkable happened to Heisenberg six years after Ettore visited Leipzig. He was rehabilitated by the Nazi regime.

In 1933 Heisenberg had opposed Deutsche Physik, leading to a major schism in the regime. God knows what pressures he was under when Ettore visited. He was inevitably against equating relativity with “Jewish physics” and other such imbecilities. But at the same time he was a right-wing ultranationalist and must have been pained at being rejected by such a pro-German movement as the Nazis. By comparison his collaborator Pascual Jordan was enjoying life as a Nazi storm trooper. Ambivalence and a certain jealousy must have been Heisenberg’s feelings toward the regime in the period between 1933 and 1938. Regrettably, his bond to his country and its people was indeed tantamount to a bond with the Nazis.⁷⁴

So in 1939, when the Nazi establishment finally ruled in his favor and against Deutsche Physik, he jumped with open arms at the offer of leading the German atomic project—the so-called Uranium Club.

Figure E.1: The mysterious process that takes place when uranium is bombarded with neutrons: The neutron is absorbed and a much distressed nucleus splits into two roughly equal-size pieces.

Later Heisenberg justified himself by saying that under the prevailing winds he was certain Hitler would win the war and Nazism become an unavoidable nuisance. He only wanted to safeguard the values of science and culture under the order of the “Thousand Year Reich.” Poor excuse. Particularly as this was not about Greek philosophy and the solipsism of quantum mechanics—he could have been the reason Hitler won the war. Asked by Hitler’s advisers how big the new bomb being built by his club would be, he replied, “The size of a pineapple” (strange choice of fruit). If Signorina Tebalducci got it right, Ettore was much involved in the fruit salad.

Uranium, I don’t need to tell you, went on to become a major character in this play. Ida Noddack was right when she argued in 1934 that bombarding uranium with neutrons need not produce heavier elements. Instead it causes a dramatic fission into two much smaller pieces (krypton with Z = 36 and barium with Z = 56), releasing a large amount of energy (see Figure E.1). The process was only unambiguously revealed in 1938 and 1939 by Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, and Fritz Strassmann. Lise Meitner was an Austrian Jew, in a serious predicament after the Anschluss, forcing her to do a runner to Sweden while this important discovery was being made. Thus both sides of the conflict knew about the new phenomenon at first hand.

Yet, uranium had a panoply of further twists in store, and we shouldn’t criticize Fermi too hastily for having missed them. The Boys, of course, had been wrong, but in 1934 nothing heavier than an alpha particle had ever been chipped from a nucleus. Moreover, this made complete sense using the nuclear theory of Ettore and Heisenberg, which everyone revered at the time. A full revision of nuclear theory was required, and I have to wonder how aware of this Ettore might have been, so critical was he of his own work.

Figure E.2: A revision of nuclear theory was required in order to accommodate the possibility of fission: the liquid drop model.

In the end, the new theory was provided by Meitner’s nephew Otto Frisch and the not-so-senile Niels Bohr. Surprisingly, uranium behaves like a “liquid drop” when fission takes places (see Figure E.2). But even with this extraordinary revelation, the mystery wasn’t fully solved. Fission was confirmed independently by several groups but the full fission dataset was self-contradictory, particularly concerning the dissimilar actions of fast and slow neutrons. Even the identity of the two fragments wasn’t fully clear (they eventually turned out to be krypton-92; i.e., with A = 92, and barium-141). Uranium was a real mess.

Physicists puzzled and scratched their heads . . . until Niels Bohr—again!—had an epiphany (obviously Carlsberg is good for you). Playing a game of analogies with other elements and the behavior of liquid drops, Bohr remembered that uranium exists in nature as a mixture of two isotopes: about 99.3 percent has A = 238 (Uranium-238) but 0.7 percent has A = 235 (uranium-235). He then understood in a flash that when uranium is bombarded with slow neutrons—such as those first exposed at the Via Panisperna pond—it is the minority component that undergoes fission.

This means that three neutrons had to be emitted; just count the neutron and proton content of mother and daughter nuclei (see Figure E.3). To Bohr’s shock, he realized that these neutrons were then free to restart the process, hitting other uranium nuclei and initiating a chain reaction: 1 fission, 3 fissions, 9, 27, 81, 243, 729, etc. . . . (see Figure E.4). All that was needed was to purify the minority isotope of uranium and to work out the “critical mass” for a chain reaction. The path to Little Boy—dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945—had been unveiled.

Figure E.3: The minority component, uranium-235 (92 protons and 143 neutrons) hit by a neutron splits into krypton-92 (36 protons and 56 neutrons) and barium-141 (56 protons and 85 neutrons.) This leaves three spare neutrons, which are emitted.

Figure E.4: The leftover neutrons released by each fission are now free to attack new uranium-235 nuclei to induce further fissions and more free neutrons, sparking off a chain reaction.

Figure E.5: Nonetheless the process long suspected by Fermi also occurs. Uranium-238 does follow the pattern predicted by Ettore’s theory. It absorbs the neutron to then undergo beta decay into neptunium. A few days later, neptunium, in turn, beta decays into plutonium.

Yet, there was a second, even more incredible twist in the uranium plot: Mussolinium exists. Although fission is the main interaction channel, when uranium- 238 is bombarded with slow neutrons it does undergo the process Fermi had suspected since 1934 (see Figure E.5). Ausonium and hesperium are nowadays called neptunium and plutonium. The first decays into the second in a couple of days, but the latter survives tens of thousands of years (but not billions of years, which is why we don’t see it in nature). The “explosive” news was that plutonium, like the minority uranium-235, undergoes fission and chain reaction. When it turned out to be easier to produce plutonium than to purify uranium-235, the route to Fat Man—dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945—was also found.

Which takes us back to Fermi. By 1938, with the racial laws in full swing, life in Rome had become untenable. Learning that he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize, Fermi spent the rest of that day buying expensive watches, as an unobtrusive way to transfer wealth abroad. He went to Sweden with his wife and children to collect the award and then on to an “extended” visit to the United States. He never returned. His father-in-law died in the holocaust. The Fermis resented Italy forever.

Nomadic years followed, as the Fermis remained refugees never sure of their future. Enrico even buried his Nobel Prize money in the basement of his house in New Jersey, not trusting banks not to freeze his assets. He continued his nuclear physics research, first at Columbia, then in Chicago, finally catching up with fission. And thus he became embroiled in the Manhattan Project.

There was never any synergy between Fermi and the United States army. When a first meeting was arranged to raise the army’s awareness of the new weapon, Fermi was announced as, “There’s a wop outside.” More insulting were the ridiculous questions he had to field from the generals. “How can an energy source possibly burn no oxygen?” But “how easy would it be to load the magazine of a rifle with uranium?” And just “how practical would it be to join two subcritical uranium masses to produce a supercritical explosion in the middle of a battlefield?” Meanwhile, Heisenberg was discussing pineapples with a more sympathetic audience. Fermi was quoted as saying, regarding the United States army, that “even if we present them with a ready-made nuclear weapon on a tray, the chances are fifty-fifty they’ll still get it wrong.”

Fermi didn’t believe Bohr’s hypothesis that it was uranium-235 that underwent spontaneous fission with slow neutrons. He was wrong. But it was both a strength and a weakness that Fermi was so pigheaded, because his alternative line of research would prove very fruitful. He set about searching for a chain reaction using unpurified uranium. The critical mass was huge and it would never make a bomb; however, Fermi hit upon the idea of building a “reactor” instead. And after much work he succeeded. Crucially, he found the right neutron moderator—the substance used to slow them down—choosing graphite instead of the more obvious heavy water (i.e., water containing hydrogen with A = 2, or deuterium). He requisitioned enough graphite to supply the entire United States with pencils for a year. But it was far simpler than the complex purification process of heavy water, which the Germans were pursuing.⁷⁵

In a victory of ant over grasshopper, criticality was achieved on February 12, 1942, at 3:25 pm, in what became the first nuclear reactor. The “pile” had been built at the University of Chicago (in a squash court under the football stadium) without much consideration for safety. Fermi was sure that he could control the chain reaction and avoid a disastrous meltdown by judicious use of his beloved slide ruler. Italian pomposity has ever since compared Fermi to Prometheus, who harnessed fire; but I prefer the parallel with his housewife mother, who built her own pressure cooker.

Still, why would a nuclear reactor be so useful at a time of war? This is where the unexpected avenue to Fat Man opened up. A reactor of unenriched uranium had its chain reaction powered by the minority uranium component, but the slow neutrons also interacted with the majority uranium-238. In the process they produced copious transmutations into plutonium, which had a low critical mass for a chain reaction. Here was a choice method to industrially produce large amounts of plutonium, which could then be turned into bombs.

There is little evidence that Fermi ever felt guilty about what he’d done. Later, after the bombs were dropped in Japan, Oppenheimer is reputed to have said that he only felt sorry they hadn’t been used in Germany. No comment, one way or the other, ever emerged from Fermi. He only regretted he’d missed the fission of uranium while in Rome: It humiliated him to his grave; but he was insensitive to more moral pains. He died of stomach cancer, possibly from radiation exposure, at the age of fifty-three.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be so judgmental—those were hard times. And it’s true that the Allied nuclear project was spurred on by the knowledge that the enemy was active in the field. In 1940, Heisenberg understood the physics of fission better than Fermi, in particular the question of uranium isotopes and what to do with plutonium. But in the end he was beaten by a small detail: the neutron moderator. Slowing down neutrons was essential for the success of a reactor. Heavy water was the German choice,⁷⁶ but purifying heavy water is hard (there’s a lot of water available, it’s true, but there’s a lot less heavy water in natural water than there is uranium-235 in natural uranium). Heisenberg never got anywhere with his “uranium machine” apart from an accidental chemical blast (some compounds of uranium are chemically very explosive). The German army at once congratulated him on his success—before he admitted what had actually happened.⁷⁷

Indirectly, however, Heisenberg was essential to the success of the Allied atomic project. Seeing a difficult but open trail leading to the bomb in 1941, he went to consult Bohr, his mentor and father figure, in Copenhagen. Unfortunately, long gone were the days when they roamed the mountains discussing quantum mechanics—Bohr was openly anti-Nazi, as well as half-Jewish. They went for a walk in the park, so that their conversation wouldn’t be bugged. There have been so many contradictory accounts of this meeting that it’s pointless to present any one version. Did Heisenberg ask Bohr for help? Did he try to get intelligence about the other side? Did he promise Bohr that Germany wouldn’t attempt the bomb in exchange for similar assurances from the Allies (suggesting a worldwide physicist strike)? Whatever happened, Bohr was furious and the two had a massive spat. Most likely it was all a big misunderstanding; Heisenberg certainly had to mince his words. But the effect was to convince Bohr (a pacifist) that Germany was close to the bomb, which made him go through the roof and pressure the Allies to move for ward.

Two years later, Bohr was evacuated by the RAF to join the Allied war effort.⁷⁸ A Mosquito bomber, capable of flying at high altitude, was adapted to carry him in its bomb bay. Unfortunately, Bohr forgot to turn on his oxygen and fainted, forcing the pilot to fly at sea level, at grave risk of interception. The plan was to open the bay and let Bohr parachute into the North Sea should the plane be shot down. He’d then be rescued by commandos. In the end no one noticed the Mosquito and this wasn’t necessary. When he traveled to the United States later that year, Bohr saw that his words had been heeded. Nuclear weapons would soon be built.

Physicist Rudolph Peierls said of Heisenberg, “He had agreed to sup with the devil and perhaps found that there was not a long enough spoon.” These were the barbed fruits of quantum mechanics and nuclear theory—but such were the times. I doubt Ettore linked up with Heisenberg or was kidnapped by the Allies. He must have been the only one of the Via Panisperna Boys who was spared tough decisions; all the others must have felt the lack of a long enough spoon. But they reacted to it very disparately—and some of the divisions were unavoidably provoked by the issue of race.

Emilio Segrè, for example, married a German Jewish woman who narrowly missed the holocaust. The two lived in Palermo after he was appointed there, but when the Italian racial laws came into force, Segrè was summarily dismissed. Fortunately this happened while he was visiting and being courted by Berkeley University, so all he and his wife had to do was stay put in California.

During the war, Segrè became a leading figure in the Manhattan Project. After the early “oversight” at Via Panisperna, it’s one of the little twists of fate that he was one of the official discoverers of plutonium, or Mussolinium, as it might have been called. New elements seem to have been one of his life’s obsessions: Before plutonium he discovered the first artificial element, technetium, and he also discovered astatine. In Los Alamos he distinguished himself by proving that Thin Man (a plutonium gun bomb) wouldn’t work; and thus Fat Man was built, saving the United States from the embarrassment of a fizzle over Nagasaki.

After the war, he identified the antiproton, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1959. He returned to Rome in 1974 where he had a reputation for bragging moronically about his participation in the Manhattan Project. He died at the age of eighty-four, not before having Ettore’s famous letter to him published in the press.

With utter chaos developing in Italy, Edoardo Amaldi came to the United States in 1939 in search of a job. It didn’t work out, and he ended up weathering the war with his family in Italy. After the war, with the Boys disbanded, and in the position of being one of the few physicists without undue fascist associations, he found himself the natural carrier of the beacon—much diminished but not yet extinguished—left by Corbino and Fermi. He was a cofounder of CERN, of which he was president, and he also founded the Italian physics funding body and national laboratory. He spent his later years campaigning for nuclear disarmament, dying at the age of eighty-one in Rome, where he kept his cattedra for forty-one years.

Perhaps more interesting is the later life of Franco Rasetti. Already dissatisfied with physics (as attested by his trip to Morocco during Via Panisperna’s moment of glory), Rasetti became outright disgusted by his colleagues’ involvement in the war effort. He was invited to work on the Manhattan Project, but refused on moral grounds. He pointedly fell out with the rest of the Boys and after the war vehemently opposed all scientific involvement in military technology. When asked why, his standard reply, according to several sources, was, “Because war is stupid.”

Rasetti eventually moved to Canada—that eternal refuge of the sane—until he abandoned physics altogether. Like many other physicists of Ettore’s generation (such as Max Delbruck and Francis Crick, of DNA fame) he moved into biological sciences after the war, becoming first a botanist, then a geologist and paleontologist. He lived to the age of one hundred, dedicating himself “with much satisfaction” to the Cambrian paleontology of Canada, United States, and Sardegna, the botany of the Alps and the Italian orchidaceas. His old-age letters belie a disenchantment with the world and a soft cynicism that must have brought him closer to Ettore than they ever were at Via Panisperna.

In contrast to Rasetti, Ettore’s best friend, Giovanni Gentile Jr., would die very young. He went to Milan as part of the same concorso that sent Ettore to Naples. From then on he was very depressed, possibly because of his friend’s demise, but also due to a liaison with a much older woman who wasn’t kind to him. He was Ettore’s age almost to the day: They often joked that they were twins. He didn’t vanish, but it’s a sad coincidence that he died (of an abscess and subsequent septicemia) at just thirty-five: in March 1942—four years almost to the day after Ettore’s disappearance.

His premature death at least meant he didn’t have to witness the end of fascism and the fate of his father, the brain of the regime. With the 1943 downturn in Italy’s war fortunes and her subsequent invasion by allied forces, Mussolini tried—and failed—to stand up to Hitler and sign a peace treaty. In July 1943, with bombs already falling over Rome, the Italian king finally intervened, recouping his long-lost power and ordering the arrest of Mussolini, to the great joy of the Italian people. The new Italian government then signed a peace treaty with the allies and declared war on Germany. By which point civil war was inevitable.

Freed from jail by SS commandos, Mussolini was put in charge of part of northern Italy, occupied by Germany, in what became known as the Republic of Salò. In this German protectorate his delusions of grandeur returned with a vengeance. Giovanni Gentile Sr. remained loyal to Mussolini and was a leader in Salò. However, in this period he became conciliatory, attempting a reunification of Italy and its academic institutions, speaking passionately of Italian ideals to a nation torn by civil strife. In April 1944, Senator Gentile was assassinated outside his house by a group of partisans posing as philosophy students.

With the advance of the Allies and the growing presence of saboteurs behind the lines, the state of Salò finally collapsed in April 1945. Mussolini and his close assistants were captured and executed by partisans, their corpses displayed in a Milan square, where just a few months earlier a similarly gruesome spectacle had been performed by fascists. Civil war is not pretty. And thus was fascism brought to an end.

A less dramatic casualty of the fall of fascism was Professor Antonino Lo Surdo. Having won what looked like his last battle against Senator Corbino, succeeding him as head of the Physics Department in Rome, he was badly punished for his politics after the war. In the self-satisfied words of Segrè, “He lived to see the collapse of fascism and the waning of the influence he had acquired in the last years of the dictatorship.” Destitute of all power or scientific relevance, he died in 1949, forgotten by all. Were it not for the Mr. North evil-eye jokes, no one would have heard of him today.

Figure E.6: A very graphic portrayal of the end of Fascism: the corpses of the Duce and some of his followers hanging from meat hooks in Piazza Loreto, in Milan.

Another early member of the party who found himself in trouble after the war was Ettore’s Zio Quirino. He was head of the Italian Physics Society until 1946, when his early fascist associations forced him to resign (he’d joined the party in 1926). He continued to be critical of Einstein’s theory of relativity but never succeeded in disproving the principle of the constancy of the speed of light, despite several attempts. However he did manage to produce a “gravity shielding device” in a series of experiments that have never been reproduced (much to the chagrin of UFO fans). He died in Bologna in 1957 after keeping a low political profile.

But perhaps the only Boy to have a life almost as colorful as Ettore’s was Bruno Pontecorvo, the man who proposed neutrino oscillations and, in the end, opened the gateway to the detection of Ettore’s neutrino. In 1936, Pontecorvo moved to France to work with the Joliot-Curies. Being Jewish, after the establishment of racial laws in Italy he found himself unable to return. He remained in Paris until the Nazis invaded, after which he moved to the United States, where he developed the first industrial application of slow neutrons.⁷⁹ He was never invited to work on the Manhattan Project, due to his outspoken Marxist beliefs.

Bruno Pontecorvo (second from right) at the Ettore Majorana Center in Sicily, a few months before he died. (A much younger version of the author appears to be in meditative trance in the foreground.)

After the war, however, Pontecorvo worked on the British nuclear project, having become a subject of Her Majesty in 1948. Then in 1950 he went on holiday to Italy, and while there boarded a plane for Stockholm without warning. In Sweden he disappeared, but western intelligence sighted him a few days later near the Soviet border in Finland, surrounded by KGB agents. Was this Ettore all over again? The BBC reported, “The British intelligence service MI5 has been brought into the hunt for missing atomic scientist Bruno Pontecorvo who has not been seen for about seven weeks.”

Confirmation that he had fled, not been kidnapped, came only in 1955 when he appeared at a news conference in Russia. At a time when the exodus across the iron curtain happened overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, his declarations were deeply inflammatory. He explained that he’d moved away from the West because “[the West] was intent on a new war using atomic and nuclear weapons as a means for achieving world domination.”

In the Soviet Union, Pontecorvo became a leading scientist, winning a Stalin Prize and two Orders of Lenin. He worked almost exclusively on neutrinos, proposing the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations that would lead to the solution of the solar neutrino puzzle. He also pioneered experimental research on the Majorana neutrino, resurrecting Ettore’s idea and labeling it the central problem in neutrino physics. Universally known as Bruno Maksimovich, he was famed for attracting hordes of pretty women and leading a happy life in the “socialist” paradise. It was in a Marxist vein that he suggested in his 1972 book that if Ettore had had to earn his bread like the rest of the people, maybe his tragedy would never have happened.

Pontecorvo is the only Panisperna Boy I ever personally met. We encountered one another at the Ettore Majorana Center in 1992, the year before he died and three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He had Parkinson’s disease and was in dreadful shape. Over dinner he expressed disillusionment and kept insisting he’d made a terrible blunder when he moved to the Soviet Union. We tried to calm him down, to no avail. He died in Dubna in 1993 at the age of eighty, thoroughly embittered.

This book could not be more open-ended, which is why I had the drive to write it; I hate eternal truths. We don’t know what happened to Ettore, and we don’t know if the neutrino is Majorana. But who cares? As Einstein and Infeld once put it, science is a bad thriller, one in which we never get to know whodunit.

Even if an experiment proved the neutrino to be Majorana, we can be sure that before another hundred years have passed a different experiment will demonstrate that Ettore’s construction is still only a crude approximation. Reality is always far deeper and more complex, and our little steps will inevitably seem naïve and raw with the benefit of hindsight. In this sense the neutrino can never be Majorana. Or Dirac. Or whatever. The lack of a definite answer is not just the end of this book, it’s the name of the game.

And as with the neutrino, Ettore’s story is also elusive. Even if we found out for sure what actually happened to him, we’d never know why he did it—which is far more important. This absence of a final truth shouldn’t sadden us: At least we don’t harbor delusions of omniscience. When I got on that plane to Sicily, I promised myself only this: I won’t raise my leg and urinate over my little territory in Ettoreland; I won’t invent a solution that is not needed.

I would love to know if neutrinoless double beta decay happens; it would be fascinating to board a time machine to that day in March 1938. But access to omniscience wouldn’t solve our problems, it would only create new ones—stressing that it’s only a mirage. I’m happy to live in ignorance as long as an effort has been made; it’s glimpses of temporary answers that spur us onward, creating tension and life. This is no fabricated disbelief. So I might as well tell you what inspired me to write this book: what particular newspaper clipping made me jump on that plane to Sicily. It was a matter of an image.

Bruno Pontecorvo proposed neutrino oscillations from behind the iron curtain, and we have now proved their existence. The sun isn’t sick. A healthy flux of neutrinos emanates from its core, but some oscillate into another reality. Gargantuan experiments have proved this temporary truth all around the world: in Japan, Switzerland, France, Italy, and the United States. One of these projects, the NEMO experiment, uses large masses of seawater, two kilometers beneath the surface off the eastern Sicilian coast, in effect employing a cubic kilometer of deep seawater as a neutrino target. The purity of this water, like the purity of Antarctica ice, makes it an ideal film for a neutrino camera. It’s peaceful down there, at least if you ignore the bioluminescence coming from the occasional abyssal fish.

While the detectors were being lowered into these Faustian depths, scientists were surprised by a cacophony of sonar clicks that couldn’t possibly be caused by neutrinos. Could this be the intangible dark matter? Or something even creepier than Ettore’s neutrino? Many a wild physics theory was proposed, until finally someone had the good sense to call in the marine biologists.

It turned out that the clicking ultrasounds were the characteristic mating signals of sperm whales, an endangered species long thought to be extinct in the Mediterranean. But in fact the hulking mammals had been there all these years, withdrawn into the depths of the ocean, disgusted by life on its surface. The world’s largest toothed animal, carrying the heaviest brain, had sought refuge in the same deep waters that may have welcomed Ettore, if he did commit suicide. Even if he didn’t physically end up there, Ettore certainly moved to a “whales’ world”—to a different planet, emigrated to Mars.

The whales screech in an alien language of peace known only to them, making way for the scientists, who install detectors that might one day prove Ettore’s theory. For decades the whales have been beyond detection. And so has he.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, my thanks go to Ettore’s closest relatives: Signora Nunni Cirino Majorana (who sadly passed away in October 2008) and her three sons (Fabio, Ettore Jr., and Pietro), as well as Wolfgang-Fabio Schultze (son of the late Rosina Majorana). I used to think that my family is a mess. I now realize the error of my ways. More seriously, were it not for the Majorana family’s kindness and their openness in talking to me, this book would have been very different: It would have lacked love. Luciano’s sons happen to be irreconcilably different people, but if I may say so, I’m very fond of them all.

I’m also eager to thank Dr. Gilda Senatore for so effusively conversing with me. I’d like to register my gratefulness for the hospitality afforded by her children and their spouses.

I benefited enormously from the help of three Majorana scholars, who have devoted lifetimes to his study. In alphabetical order, I warmly thank Francesco Guerra, Erasmo Recami, and Bruno Russo. Their assistance on many different levels was invaluable to me.

If the Italian language eventually stopped cringing while I researched this book, it’s due to Silvia Capurro, who, after many a pub outing, converted my unashamed Portaliano into a passable (if rather spicy) rendition of her language. I’m also thankful to my colleague Carlo Contaldi (as it happens, grandnephew of Senator Corbino), who helped with the translations of Italian documents presented in this book.

In scientific matters I profited from the comments of David Sington, Julia Sedgbeer, and Kelly Stelle. In editorial and publishing matters I’m very grateful to Bill Frucht, Susan Rabiner, and Alix Sleigh. Susan Baller-Sheppard and Bernice Landry were very helpful when I was having doubts about tone. My tenor owes much to Italian writers Leonardo Sciascia and Antonio Tabucchi, masters of the subverted thriller and the open-ended narrative.

Above all I’d like to thank my girlfriend, Kim Baskerville, who traveled with me while I did the field work, and read through the whole manuscript at all stages. Admittedly she was paid handsomely in fine Italian wines, but without her endless patience, this book simply wouldn’t exist. I dedicate this book to her.

REFERENCES

The literature on Ettore’s life and work is long and repetitive. Below is what I like best:

Amaldi, Edoardo. “Ricordo di Ettore Majorana,” Giornale di Fisica, Bologna, 1968.

Amaldi, Edoardo. La Vita e l’Opera di Ettore Majorana. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1966.

Castellani, Leandro. Mistero Majorana: l’Ultima Verità. Florence: Editrice Clinamen, 2006.

Guerra, Francesco and Nadia Robotti. Ettore Majorana: Aspects of His Scientific and Academic Activity. Pisa: Edizione della Normale, 2008.

Recami, Erasmo. Il Caso Majorana: Epistolario, Documenti, Testimonianze. Rome: Di Renzo Editore, 2002.

Russo, Bruno. Ettore Majorana: Un Giorno di Marzo. Palermo: Flaccovio Editore, 1997.

Sciascia, Leonardo. La Scomparsa di Majorana. Milano: Adelphi Edizione, 1997. (English edition: The Moro Affair and The Mystery of Majorana. New York: New York Review Books, 1987.)

I used extensively the following biographies of other characters in this story:

Farmelo, Graham. The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.

Fermi, Laura. Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi, Designer of the First Atomic Pile. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955.

Moore, Walter. Schrödinger: Life and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Pontecorvo, Bruno. Fermi e la Fisica Moderna. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1972.

Segrè, Emilio. Enrico Fermi, Physicist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Other books used for biographic content but also for their scientific component are:

Judson, Horace Freeland. The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology. London: Penguin Books, 1979.

Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

Sutton, Christine. Spaceship Neutrino. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

The following TV documentaries are highly recommended:

Ettore Majorana: Un Giorno di Marzo, Rai III Sicilia, 1990, by Bruno Russo.

Hitler’s Bomb, BBC II Horizon, 1992, by David Sington.

Project Poltergeist, BBC II Horizon, Dox Productions, 2004, by David Sington.

Sulle Tracce di Majorana, Canale Cinque, 1987, by Salvo Ponz de Leon.

Works of fiction that became entangled with this book include:

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. London: Penguin Books, 1991.

Camilleri, Andrea. La Paura di Montalbano. Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 2002. Camilleri, Andrea. La Scomparsa di Patò. Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 2000.

London, Jack. Martin Eden. London: Penguin Classics, 1987.

Pirandello, Luigi. Il Fu Mattia Pascal. Milano: Garzanti, 1993. (English edition: The Late Mattia Pascal. New York: New York Review Books, 1964.)

Pirandello, Luigi. Uno, Nessuno e Centomila. Padova: Rusconi Libri, 2007. (English edition: One, No one, and One Hundred Thousand. New York: Marsilo Publishers, 1992.)

Sciascia, Leonardo. A Ciascuno il Suo. Milano: Adelphi, 1987.

I paraphrased from memory (no doubt with some reworking by my imagination) several

scenes from the film I Ragazzi di Via Panisperna, Urania Film/Beta Film/RaiUno Italia,

1989, directed by Gianni Amelio. I strongly recommend the original. Finally, of the many interventions Ettore has had in the Italian “subculture,” I can only

recommend the following:

Lazarus Ledd: Tra le Ombre (number 97), Perugia: Edizioni StarComics (Italia), 2001.

Martin Mystère: Il Caso Majorana (number 191), and La pietra di Jivaka (number 192), Milano: Sergio Bonelli Editore, 1998.

But then, I warn you, I’m addicted to Italian comics.

CREDITS

All the line drawings in this book were prepared by Silvia Capurro, to whom very special thanks are due. The Martin Mystère comics in the prologue and on p. 134 were reproduced with the permission of SAF and Sergio Bonelli (Copyright © 2009 Sergio Bonelli Editore, drawings by Lucio Filippucci), who stress that their “hypothesis is fictional and not factual.” The photo on p. 32 was reproduced courtesy of Barbara Piqué and Erasmo Recami. Ettore’s photo on p. 40 was reproduced by permission of Fabio Majorana and Erasmo Recami. The Boys photo on p. 56 originates from the Archivio Amaldi, Dipartimento di Fisica, Università La Sapienza, Roma. The documents on pp. 59 and 128 were reproduced by permission of Domus Galilaeana, and belong to the Ettore Majorana archives “Documenti Vari” and “Quaderni.” Figure 9.3 is due to NASA/JPL. The positron photo on p. 130 is by Carl D. Anderson, and was first published in Physical Review 43, p. 491. Figure 13.1 is the work of “MissMJ.” The photo on p. 166 was taken for the Muzej Revolucije Naradnosti Jugoslavije. The documents on pp. 183 and 198 were reproduced with permission (ref. 810/09) from the Italian Archivio Centrale dello Stato, and are safely filed under “Ministero della pubblica istruzione, dir. gen. Istruzione superiore, fascicoli del personale, sec. vers. sec. serie, b. 93,” and “Ministero dell’interno, dir. gen. Pubblica sicurezza, div. Affari generali e riservati 1939 A1, b. 51.” Ettore’s photo on p. 184 was reproduced with the kind permission of Ettore Majorana Jr. Signore Lípari’s photo on p. 243 was reproduced with the permission of the photographer Nino Giamidaro and Libridine Editors, and forms the cover of the book “Tommaso L’omu Cani” by Ignazio Bascone, Libridine 2009. The comics on p. 247 were reproduced with the permission of the author, Ade Capone (Copyright © 2009 Ade Capone & Edizioni Star Comics). The photo on p. 264 was reproduced with the congenial permission of Manuela Campanelli and Carlos Loustò. We are grateful to Ettore Majorana Jr. for his cooperation in the reproduction of Ettore’s letters.

INDEX

Abbazia, Croatia

Alentejo, Portugal

Alice (in Wonderland)

Amaldi, Edoardo

and the discovery of fission

relations with Ettore

Amato, Antonio

Amato, Ciciuzzo (the “burnt baby”)

Amelio, Gianni

Amis, Martin

Annihilation

Anschluss (Austria’s annexation)

Antimatter

according to Feynman

discovery

prediction by Dirac

Anti-Semitism

Appointment by exceptional merit

Argentina

Buenos Aires

military dictatorship

Palermo

Perón

Arrow of time

Atomic Bomb

Fat Man

Little Boy

Thin Man

Atomic physics

Ausonium

Author

and the Ettore Majorana Center

appreciation of Prof. Guerra’s assistance

poor opinion of Sanremo

prompt to write this book

travels from Naples to Palermo

visit of Via Etnea house

visits Ettore Majorana Jr.

visits Pietro Majorana

Bachall, John

Bethe, Hans

Blackett, Patrick

Bocchini, Arturo

Bohr, Niels

personality

role in the development of atomic weapons

Boltzmann, Ludwig

Born, Max

Borsellino, Paolo

Buñuel, Luis

Burnt baby incident

Café Faraglino

Caltagirone, Sicily

Camilleri, Andrea

Cartuxa (wine)

Carlsberg

Carrelli, Professor Antonio

Casina delle Rose

Castellani, Leandro

Catania, Sicily

Cornuti (as a Sicilian concept)

Chadwick, James

Chirality

and time’s arrow reversal

in biology and chemistry

Copenhagen Institute, (Niels Bohr Institute)

Corbino, Orso Mario

and the accidental fission of uranium

death

feud with Lo Surdo

politics

setting up of the Via Panisperna Institute

Corvo Rosso

Cosmic rays

Cowan, Clyde

Creation process

Crick, Francis

Critical mass

Curse of the Majoranas

D’Agostino, Oscar

Davis, Ray

de Broglie, Prince Louis

Deuterium

Deutsche Physik movement

Dirac, Paul

biography

initial lack of success

sea

theory of the electron

theory of the neutrino

vindication

Double beta decay

Eddington, Arthur

Ehrenfest, Paul

Einstein, Albert

Einstein, Hans

Enriques, Giovanni

Ethiopian War (Abyssinian War)

Falcone, Giovanni

Farmelo, Graham

Fascism

Fátima, Our lady of

Feenberg, Eugene

Fermi, Enrico

attitude to publishing

early days

involvement in nuclear weapons

personality

politics

relations with Ettore

scientific work

Fermi, Laura (wife)

Fermi, Giulio (brother)

Fermions

Ferro-Luzzi, Giovanni

Feynman, Richard

Feynman diagrams

Format of academic career in Italy

Franco, Generalissimo Francisco

Frisch, Otto

Furry, Wendel

Gagliardi, Carmela

Galilei, Galileo

Genius, (origins of)

Gentile Jr., Giovanni

demise

politics

relations with Ettore

Gentile Sr., Giovanni

Gluons

Goeppert-Mayer, Maria

Goldhaber, Alfred

Goudsmit, Samuel

Graphite

Gravity shielding device

Grodzins, Lee

Guerra, Francesco

Hahn, Otto

Heavy water

Heisenberg, Werner

personality

politics

role in atomic weapons program

Heitler, Walter

Helfgott, David

Hesperium

Higgs particle

Hitler, Adolf

Hole theory

Holocaust

Hotel Continental

Idealism

Infeld, Leopold

Isotopes

Istituto Massimo alle Terme

Italian Physical Society

Italian public competition procedures

Ivanenko, Dmitri

Jesuits

Joliot-Curie, Frédéric and Irène

Jordan, Pascual

Jung, Carl

KGB

Koshiba, Masatoshi

La Legitima

Lavoisier, Antoine

League of Nations

Lee, Tsung Dao

Lenard, Philipp

Leptons

Lepton number conservation

Le Verrier, Urban

Liceo Torquato Tasso

Lípari, Tommaso

Lo Surdo, Professor Antonino

London, Jack

Mafia

Maioranus, Iulius Valerius (Emperor)

Majorana, Angelo

Majorana, Ettore

and burnt baby incident

as a teacher

birth

Center (Erice)

comes to the Via Panisperna Institute

conversation with Occhialini

cultural interests

driving skills

early days

early searches

health

joins competition for a Chair

lack of interest in publishing

last seen

lost work

letter to Segrè

mathematical stunts

mental collapse

opinion on Niels Bohr

physical appearance

politics

possible life in Argentina

possible reclusion in a monastery

possible suicide

possible transmutation into a tramp

post-vanishing sightings

relation with father

relation with Fermi

relation with Heisenberg

relation with mother

relation with the Boys

religious feelings

role in Italian subculture

sense of humor

sexuality

shyness

smoking habits

vanishing

views on Naples

visit to Copenhagen

visit to Leipzig,

work in atomics physics

work on neutrino

work on neutrons and the nuclear forces

work on infinite dimensional equation

Majorana, Ettore Jr. (nephew)

Majorana, Fabio (nephew)

Majorana, Fabio Massimo (father)

Majorana, Luciano (brother)

Majorana, Maria (sister)

Majorana, Nunni Cirino (sister-in-law)

Majorana, Pietro (nephew)

Majorana, Quirino (uncle)

Majorana, Rosina (sister)

Majorana, Salvatore (grandfather) ,

Majorana, Salvatore Jr. (brother)

Majorana, Salvatrice (Dorina) Corso (mother)

Majorana sphere

Malbec (wine)

Marconi, Guglielmo

Martin Eden

Mazara del Vallo

Mediterranean whales

Meitner, Lise

Metaphysical conversations in hot weather

MI5

Millikan, Robert

Montalbano, Salvo

Montecatini, Tuscany

Mount Etna

MR scans

Muon

Muonic neutrino

Mussolini, Benito

Mussolinium

Nahmias, Maurice

Naples

Nazi movement

Nazi nuclear project

Negative energy

Nerello Mascalese

Neutrino

and the puzzle of beta decay

and the Solar neutrino problem

chirality (or handedness)

detection

Neutrino (continued)

etymology

mass of

of Majorana

oscillations

Pauli’s proposal of the

poor reactivity

Neutrinoless double beta decay

Newton, Isaac

Nobile, Umberto

Noddack, Ida

Nuclear physics

and the neutron

chain reaction

early nuclear models

fission

liquid drop model

production of Plutonium

slow neutrons

Nuclear reactor

moderator for

Occhialini, Giuseppe

meeting with Ettore

Oppenheimer, J. Robert

OVRO (Italian secret services)

Palermo, Sicily

Pascal (French philosopher)

Passopisciaro, Sicily

Patents

of oral sex

of slow neutrons

Pauli, Wolfgang

personality

proposal of the neutrino

Peierls, Rudolph

Penrose, Roger

Pessoa, Fernando

Photons

Piqué, Gastone

Pirandello, Luigi

Plutonium

Political correctness in Italy

Pontecorvo, Bruno

promotes the Majorana neutrino

proposes neutrino oscillations

role in elucidating slow neutrons

sudden disappearance

Quantum chromodynamics (QCD)

Quantum mechanics

and drinking habits of its proponents

general setup

history

Quarks

Racah, Giulio

Racism

Radiations

Alpha

Beta

Gamma

Rasetti, Franco

attitude to nuclear weapons

and the discovery of fission

personality

Recami, Erasmo

Reines, Fred

Respighi, Ottorino

Rivera, Carlos

Royal Academy of Italy

Russo, Bruno

Rutherford, Ernest

Salam, Abdus

Salò

Saramago, José

Salazar, Oliveira

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Schrödinger, Erwin

Schrödinger’s cat

Schultze, Werner (brother-in-law of EM)

Schultze, Wolfgang-Fabio (nephew of EM)

Sciascia, Leonardo

Sciuti

Scooping in science

Segrè, Emilio

and fission debacle

famous EM letter to

participation in nuclear weapons projects

personality

physical appearance

Senatore, Gilda

husband of (Dr. Cennamo)

daughter of

Solvay Conference

Sommerfeld, Arnold

Spin

Standard model of particle physics

Stark, Johannes

Stendhal

Strange particles

Strassmann, Fritz

Strazzeri, Prof.

Strong force

Stueckelberg, Ernst

Sunyar, Andrew

Szilárd, Leó

Talbert, Signora

Tauon

Tauon neutrino

Tebalducci, Signorina

The Late Mattia Pascale

Theory of relativity

labelled Jewish science

Zio Quirino attempts to disprove

Thomas-Fermi model

Tirrenia

Trabacchi, Giulio Cesare

Troccoli, Mr.

Uhlenbeck, George

Uranium

bombardment with neutrons

fission

isotopes

Uranium Club

Valera, Éamon de

Vatican’s response to Ettore’s disappearance

Vesuvius

Via Panisperna Boys

accidental fission of uranium

and work on slow neutrons

“evil eye” jokes

film (by Gianni Amelio)

nicknames

office and lab arrangements

schism

setting up of institute

strategy in publishing

the end of

Virtual particles

Virtual photons

W boson

Wataghin, Gleb

Watson, James D.

Weisskopf, Victor

Wheeler, John A.

Wick, Giancarlo

Wigner, Eugene

Yang, Chen Ning

Z boson

1

There was a rumor that the banknotes used by the center were stained with blood. This is simply not true. They were extremely clean.

2

Not as far-fetched as it might sound, I was assured.

3

Those who enjoy life will recognize this pattern in the robust red wine Amarone and the light, strawberry-flavored Fragolino.

4

Not unusual in those days. A recent study on European laundry habits shows that, until recently, changing clothes was something done only on special occasions, like a purification process. This belief persists to this day among English academics.

5

For a Portuguese native, Italian sounds like archaic speech. On my first trip to Sicily, I felt like a knight, talking to maids and other knights.

6

He married a rich widow.

7

For reference, Italian political life—left and right wing—has always been a soap opera, one that fails to amuse the Italian people.

8

The majority of the information on Ettore’s family in this chapter originates from Erasmo Recami’s book (see References at the end of the book).

9

His first marriage failed to produce any offspring.

10

Leonardo Sciascia goes as far as to say that Ettore and his uncle “like all ‘good’ Sicilians” were averse to being part of any type of group, to establish teams or partnerships. He adds, “It’s only the worst Sicilians who feel the need for ‘groups,’ for Mafia gangs.”

11

Note that since each atom must be electrically neutral, Z is also the number of electrons orbiting the nucleus. The proton and electron have the same electric charges, but with reverse signs.

12

This is still true, even considering that the electron has to spend energy getting out of the atom and the material it is part of, and considering the recoil of the nucleus that fired it. Yes, people were not stupid then, and they did check all the details: We’re talking about a million times more energy disappearing than could be accounted for by such details.

13

And overlooking a very sleazy park: nature and cost of available services very vocally provided—quite unasked—and this was in the middle of the afternoon.

14

She also knew, I found out later, that he’d told the same lie to the police.

15

The Ettore Who Ran Away to Argentina and the Ettore Who Was Kidnapped by Spies theories.

16

This started a trend in underground particle experiments that has persisted to this day, whereby deep mine shafts and caverns are often used.

17

It seems that Ettore’s uncle Quirino wasn’t being that original in his questioning of Einstein’s relativity. And yet Quirino was instrumental in electing Fermi to Rome, once again showing his intrinsic honesty.

18

How I wish I had someone like Corbino at Imperial College. . . .

19

I’ve gathered these various epithets from the TV documentaries in the References at the end of this book.

20

The Eighth Day of Creation, by Horace Judson.

21

The single voice of dissent came from Cambridge experimentalist Ernest Rutherford, who’d been hinting about the neutron since 1920. No one listened to him.

22

That is, electrons that lived inside the nucleus, not to be confused with those orbiting the nucleus on the outer edges of the atom.

23

Renowned for his literary work on the Mafia and the polemics it engendered. I strongly recommend To Each His Own and The Day of the Owl.

24

To put things in perspective, Senator Corbino’s mother was illiterate. Being a very intelligent woman, she taught herself to read and write at the age of fifty, so that she could find out more about the terrible earthquake in Messina, where her son nearly died.

25

Lazio versus Roma, for those who know what I mean.

26

All material and quotes in this chapter come from Laura Fermi and Emilio Segrè books (see References at the end).

27

This testimony comes from a 1984 letter from Gilberto Bernardini to Erasmo Recami. Bernardini was part of the Florence group, set up by Fermi’s friend Enrico Persico. The two groups kept a close collaboration.

28

Sample: The boiling point of oil (figure supplied) is higher than the melting point of the metal used to manufacture a normal pan (figure supplied, too). How do you explain that deep frying doesn’t melt the pan? Answer: When you deep fry, the oil never boils. It’s the water contained inside the food you’re cooking that does. Fascinating.

29

Fermi met the composer Ottorino Respighi during a transatlantic boat trip and was truly shocked by the old man’s working habits: “by fits, at the oddest hours, often in the middle of the night, or halfway through a meal, whenever the inspiration surged in him, impelling, urging, irrepressible.” Fermi, who kept a strict routine, was horrified.

30

This explanation of their origin is far from obvious. Robert Millikan, the main cosmic-ray expert in the 1920s, considered these rays to be what Graham Farmelo dubbed a divine benison: “signals [from the] heavens, the birth cries of infant atoms.”

31

Spin in such a setup is called helicity. For simplicity it may be advisable to assume here that the neutrino moves at the speed of light; this issue is addressed in a later chapter.

32

Fermions are all the particles with half-integer spin (½,,, etc). The term was coined by Dirac in 1926.

33

The German eugenic activities of the 1930s were widely praised in the United States, for example.

34

The quote comes from Laura Fermi’s book, Atoms in the Family.

35

John Moffat’s book of memoirs In the Company of Giants contains a number of such delicious stories. I can also heartily recommend the recently published Dirac biography The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo. Having spent twenty years berating my British colleagues for the absence of a biography for their twentieth-century scientific exponent, I am happy to say that the wait was worth it. The material in this chapter comes from this source.

36

Dirac’s heuristics are also a technically correct account of some of the physics that rules, for example, the electronics in your mobile phone.

37

The career of an Italian scientist began with a PhD degree (which Ettore obtained in July 1929, at age twenty-two). The aspiring scientist then became an assistant (aiuto) to a professor and eventually, via research and fame, a libero docente, or unpaid lecturer. After a few years of unpaid toil, the libero docente could finally apply for a tenured chair in a concorso, an open competition.

38

Einstein resigned from the Prussian Academy in 1933; but his resignation was not accepted—just so that the academy could then “expel” him. Nice.

39

While all other non-Jewish German scientists were washing their hands of the matter (when not opportunistically using the situation to promote their careers), Heisenberg offered to keep Max Born in office, after the ethnic cleansing of May 6 came into force. Born, a Jew and a close friend of Einstein, contemptuously declined the “favor.”

40

He was for a while the goalkeeper of AB, the Danish champions on numerous occasions. His brother, a mathematician, was a prominent player for AB and made the Danish national and Olympic teams.

41

It’s a curious coincidence that Ehrenfest’s nickname in the quantum mechanics community was also the Inquisitor.

42

Anderson coined the term positron, a contraction of positive and electron; but he also wanted the electron to be renamed negatron for consistency. There were other proposals: The eccentric Herbert Dingle, recalling that Electra’s brother is called Orestes in Greek mythology, suggested that the antielectron be named Oreston.

43

Specifically, you can only decide where half of your estate goes; the other half has to be equally divided between all surviving direct relatives.

44

Interview given in 1975 at the University of Campinas, São Paulo; Wataghin doesn’t date this incident, though.

45

Segrè himself stated in his book on Fermi that the German anti-Jewish crimes at this stage were “minor.”

46

The only Italian until then to have been invited was Corbino (in 1924), and he didn’t go.

47

Rasetti was considered “exotic” by the other Boys (particularly Segrè) because he “read books” and traveled places. His schedules were also more irregular that the others’, with the exception of Ettore. From this early crisis, one can guess that his Boyish attitudes were always a facade. He had a lot in common with Ettore, as we shall see.

48

Radon emits alpha particles, which, acting on beryllium, produce neutrons. Usually radon is a bad source for alpha particles because it also emits gamma rays, which might mask the effects under study or disturb the instruments; but here it didn’t matter, because Fermi was observing a delayed effect. He’d bombard the beryllium with alpha particles from radon, then remove the radon and use the beryllium as a neutron emitter.

49

All material and quotes in this chapter are taken from the books by Laura Fermi, Emilio Segrè, Bruno Pontecorvo, and Richard Rhodes referenced at the end.

50

In some cases, a second beta decay followed, leading to an overall transmutation going up the periodic scale by two protons. When you combine the effect of the two consecutive beta decays element (A, Z) finishes as (A + 1, Z + 2).

51

The issue hinging on whether one and/or two beta decays followed the capture of the neutron.

52

All material and quotes in this chapter are taken from the Laura Fermi and Emilo Segrè books (see References at the end).

53

Italy had previously lost a war with Ethiopia (in 1896), which thus became the only African nation to successfully resist European colonialism by force. An outrage!

54

One of the most amazing things about racism is how race itself is merely a self-serving and changeable definition. Southern Europeans never cease to be surprised when they learn that blond northern Europeans consider them “black, certainly not properly white,” (the compliment is returned by declaring the bleached deities “a bunch of Nazi pigs.”) The Chinese are variously considered white or non-white depending on the country. Many mixed Brazilians consider themselves white; whereas in the United States unnoticeable tinges of brown make one eligible for black power membership. The British National Party went the furthest, introducing the concept of nigressence, arguing that the Irish are really black people with white skin. Nazi racism itself grew from a colossal misunderstanding. If we take the expression Aryan literally, the last Aryan arrivals in Europe were the gypsies.

55

A women’s magazine of the period unlucky enough to be called Lei (which also means “she”) had to change its name to Anabella.

56

The testimonies of Ettore’s lecturing present in this section are Gilda Senatore’s.

57

Sample: “My mother was working on her sewing while seated on a stool with her legs slightly apart, when my father opened the door and shouted, ‘Freeze!’ He pointed his rifle at her and shot, the bullet hitting right in the middle of the eyes a huge snake standing upright under the stool in between my mother’s legs.”

58

O burro és tu is Portuguese for “You’re the one being the ass!” Burro—“ass” in Portuguese—happens to mean “butter” in Italian.

59

Who shall remain unnamed; but who isn’t the obvious culprit—for those in the know.

60

Recently a man was caught on the Milan-Lecco train staring twice at a woman, a transgression that was enough for the “victim” to complain that “he was undressing me with the eyes.” The man got ten days in jail and a sixty-euro fine. In a culture that has so long lived with complete strangers staring at each other, one wonders if we shall soon also see Sicilian cannoli made with aspartame.

61

This Mafia tale is reported, for example, in Leandro Castellani’s book—see References at the end.

62

Ettore has been featured in “Chi l’ha visto” programs repeatedly; most recently on RAI, December 2008, as I’m finishing this manuscript. The original 1938 entry contained an appeal: “Ettore, return. Don’t make us weep. Your family is waiting for you.”

63

An anonymous letter on file states that Ettore had been kidnapped by interests against the Italian state. It’s hinted that he’d been completing an invention Marconi (recently deceased) had left almost in working order: a “death ray” that could be fired directly from Italy to Ethiopia. Apparently a cow had already been killed in a test strike.

64

Fermi’s letter is not in his handwriting. Whether it is a forgery or was written with his permission (or even dictated by him) remains a matter for debate.

65

It’s been claimed that Dorina’s letter never made it to the Duce’s office. Her letter isn’t in the state archives, scrupulously kept during fascism. A Majorana entry can be found, but relates to a certain Maria Majorana—entirely unrelated to Ettore’s family—who complained to the Duce about an estranged husband, only to be told off for being a slut by the official who investigated the matter.

66

In Italy (as in France, Portugal, and Spain) a proper intellectual has to be impossible to understand by the masses. Anything “popular”—like a thriller—or which might reach a wide audience is scorned and put on the same level as football or bullfights. The real intellectual is several cuts above the populace, well entrenched in the hollow depths of verbal diarrhea.

67

The mortorio, in Sicilian parlance.

68

The material in this section (including all quotes) originates from Erasmo Recami’s book and Leon Ponz’s documentary (see References at the end.)

69

He drank it all in the end.

70

Energy is ability to change, and a moving car colliding with a stationary one results in evident changes for both.

71

Naturally if neutrinoless double beta decay is not observed, all we can say is that, given the sensitivity of the experiments, if the neutrino is Majorana, its mass must be smaller than a given figure.

72

I particularly like her use of the term schermo. It’s a beautiful word, with many senses. It means “a screen” or “a shield” but it’s also used by Dante in Beatrice to signify his feelings of modesty, hiding the sacred terror that Monna Bicce—the nine-year-old who had conquered his heart—inspired in him. Majorana’s “schermo” is also both the root of his attraction and a cover for our unmitigated shame.

73

An incident that petrified a nation under the belief that her soldiers were sent abroad for the purpose of parading medals and singing opera.

74

All material and quotes in this epilogue regarding the atom bomb are taken from Richard Rhodes’s excellent The Making of the Atom Bomb (see References at the end).

75

It’s chilling that he accidentally almost gave away the neutron-graphite cross section to the Germans; it was only because they didn’t know this important figure that they persevered with heavy water.

76

You need enriched uranium to achieve criticality with normal water, because it slows down but also absorbs neutrons. Heavy water, in contrast, only slows down neutrons.

77

About five tons of heavy water are required to get a nuclear reactor going and ten tons are needed to produce enough plutonium for a bomb. The Germans did purify a couple of tons before being hit by Norwegian saboteurs (their factory was in Norway). But given enough time, they’d eventually have got there.

78

Denmark, a labor-intensive agricultural country, supplied butter to the German army. In exchange the Germans agreed to leave her alone, as well as her Jews. But by 1943 relations had soured and immediate deportation of all Jews was demanded, with or without butter.

79

Senator Corbino’s suggestion that they patent slow neutrons may have attracted mirth but ultimately led to a rather protracted legal affair. In 1953 the Boys each received $24,000 from the United States government, as “just compensation” for their patent of slow neutrons. The inhabitants of the Via Panisperna fish pond never received any “just compensation.”

Copyright © 2009 by João Magueijo

Published by

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Magueijo, João.

A brilliant darkness : the extraordinary life and disappearance of Ettore Majorana, the troubled genius of the nuclear age / João Magueijo. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-465-02008-9

1. Majorana, Ettore. 2. Majorana, Ettore—Legends. 3. Nuclear physicists—Italy—Biography. 4. Physics—Italy—History—20th century. 5. Neutrinos. I. Title.

QC774.M34M35 2009

539.7092—dc22

[B]

2009037678