The Disappearing Physicist and His Elusive Particle
The members of the physics institute at Via Panisperna were in the habit of giving themselves jocular nicknames: Enrico Fermi was “The Pope,” Orso Corbino was “God the Almighty,” and Franco Rasetti was “The Cardinal Vicar.” It was 1930, and the Italian capital boasted a miraculous collection of scientists on their way to revolutionizing atomic and nuclear physics. Not since Galileo had Italy shown such scientific prominence. The team of mavericks became known as the “Via Panisperna Boys,” and was led by the now-celebrated Enrico Fermi, at the time in his 20s and already a full professor. But many of its other names will also sound familiar to present-day physics students: Wick, Racaha, Segrè, Pontecorvo…
As usually happens with such wondrous groups, it was born out of serendipity, the fortuitous confluence of talented people and visionary politicians. The latter came in the form of a Mafioso protector, Senator Corbino, who was powerful enough to keep science bureaucrats and Mussolini’s quirks at bay. Thus sheltered from the real world, the Boys did science in that atmosphere of pranks, jokes, and informality present in every high-intensity scientific establishment, an intellectual ambience popularized in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.” The Via Panisperna Institute was the sort of scientific kindergarten capable of nurturing truly creative thinking, where serious issues blended with bets on who could solve differential equations fastest. These, incidentally, were always won by “Il Grande Inquisitore”—Ettore Majorana.
Ettore Majorana was one of the oddballs of the group. A child prodigy, capable of doing cubic roots in his head as a kid, he carried into adulthood the concomitant problems in relating to others—and very pertinently to women—ensuring the prerequisite internal pool of frustrations essential for lateral thinking. Majorana was reared within a dysfunctional high-flying family, ruled over by an overbearing and domineering mother, who towered over his generation. He hailed
