Enrico Fermi, Scientist
USCIS Albuquerque Field Office
Enrico Fermi was born on Sept. 29, 1901, in Rome, Italy. From an early age, he demonstrated an extraordinary aptitude for physics and mathematics. Fermi applied to attend the Scoula Normale Superiore in Pisa when he was 17 years old. By the age of 19, he had published his first scientific works in the Italian journal Nuovo Cimento, and by 20, he’d earned his post-secondary degree.
Fermi was well-versed in relativity and was the first person to discover an enormous amount of nuclear potential energy hidden inside Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation. In an appendix for the 1923 Italian edition of the book “Fundamentals of Einstein Relativity” by August Kopff, Fermi wrote:
“It does not seem possible, at least in the near future, to find a way to release these dreadful amounts of energy—which is all to the good because the first effect of an explosion of such a dreadful amount of energy would be to smash into smithereens the physicist who had the misfortune to find a way to do it.”
In 1938, Fermi received Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of 37 for “demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.”
That same year, he moved to New York City because Italy had enacted the anti-Semitic Racial Laws that threatened his wife, Laura, who was Jewish. Fermi accepted a position at Columbia University and in January 1939, began working with a team on the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States. In 1942, he moved to Chicago and collaborated with a fellow scientist to create the Chicago Pile-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor, at the University of Chicago. It went “critical,” meaning the fission chain was self-sustaining, on December 1942.
Based on that success, J. Robert Oppenheimer recruited him into the top-secret Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. In 1944, two important events occurred in Fermi’s life: He became a U.S. citizen on July 11, and soon after, moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico. One year and five days later, Fermi stood ten miles from ground zero during the Trinity Test—the code name for the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.
After the test, he said:
“My first impression of the explosion was the very intense flash of light, and a sensation of heat on the parts of the body that were exposed. Although I did not directly look towards the object, I had the full impression that suddenly the countryside became brighter than in full daylight.”
Fermi received the Medal of Merit for his contribution to the success of the Manhattan Project. He, his wife, and his two children returned to Chicago on December 31, 1946. He taught at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago. He died on November 29, 1954, of stomach cancer, and is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago.