A Brilliant Darkness

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.

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.”