Enrico Fermi, the Pope of Physics

An exceptional Lecture, open to a general audience, by the Keynote Speakers:

Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin

Authors of the recent and acclaimed book

“The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age”

Enrico Fermi, Italy’s greatest physicist since Galileo, was unique in a number of ways, including the staggering breadth of his research. Born in 1901, he was the only 20^th century physicist to have attained the very heights of the profession as a theorist and experimentalist as well as the only one to be essentially self-taught. During the early part of his career he and his school established modern physics in Italy, but in 1938 Fermi and his Jewish wife and children fled Fascist Italy for the United States, traveling via Stockholm where he received the Nobel Prize.

He became in 1942 the lead scientist in producing a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, a critical precursor to the building of the atomic bomb. His role in the success of the Manhattan Project was key. This lecture will combine Fermi’s personal life with his scientific contributions and illustrates how he was shaped by history and how he in turn shaped history. Legendarily apolitical, Fermi was unavoidably impacted by Mussolini’s dictates and later drawn into American politics both during wartime and postwar time. The many dramas physicists faced at those times and the particular ones immigrants encountered are still relevant today.

 REGISTRATION REQUIRED

EVENT SOLD OUT

INFO: scien.washington@esteri.it

Gino Segrè  is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a visiting professor at MIT and Oxford University, chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of theoretical physics at the National Science Foundation. He is the author of three books of scientific history: Ordinary Geniuses, Faust in Copenhagen, and A Matter of Degrees.

Bettina Hoerlin taught health care disparities at the University of Pennsylvania for sixteen years. She also has been a visiting lecturer at Haverford College and Oxford University. Her career in health policy and administration included serving as health commissioner of Philadelphia. The author of Steps of Courage: My Parents’ Journey from Nazi Germany to America, she grew up in the Atomic City of Los Alamos.