Science: Life with Fermi

Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prizewinner, is one of the principal founders of modern physics. On Dec. 2, 1942, he set in operation the first nuclear reactor, thus became the Prometheus of the Atomic Age. These distinctions should be enough, but this week Fermi could claim still another: his wife is one of the most engaging biographers who ever described the private life of a great scientist.

Laura Fermi’s book. Atoms in the Family (University of Chicago Press; $4) starts with a hike outside Rome in 1924, when she met “a short-legged young man . . . with rounded shoulders and neck craned forward.” Fermi was only 22, but already a brilliant physicist. Laura, 16, considered him “pretty old.”

She forgave his age and married him in 1928. On their honeymoon he tried to teach her physics, starting with Maxwell’s Equations on the propagation of electromagnetic waves. He had no success, which was probably just as well. Fermi lived his professional life in the strange new world of mathematical physics; Laura did not try to follow him into his abstract jungle. She learned how to appreciate her husband in spite of quanta and nucleons.

Neutrons with Goldfish. There was much to appreciate. Fermi emerges from the book as alte’rnately serious and gay, abstracted but practical. He is modest about major accomplishments (his dis coveries in physics), vain about minor ones (his physical endurance in mountain climbing). His wife plainly worships him, but laughs at him just enough to keep him human. She tells how one of his crucial experiments on slow neutrons was carried on in a fountain among unsuspecting gold fish. She giggles gently at his troubles with unruly shirtfronts. She pokes friendly fun at his brilliant friends (who called Fermi “The Pope”) and tells how they once got so excited with their scientific talk that her maid thought they were all drunk.

The Italy of Fermi’s youth was Mus solini’s Italy. At first Fascism was merely silly, but as it grew, Fermi began to con sider leaving Italy forever. He made up his mind when Hitler’s anti-Semitism flooded over the Alps. The Nobel Prize made escape easy. In 1938 Fermi took his Jewish wife and his two children to Stockholm to receive the prize. After the ceremony, they continued to the U.S.

Retreat into Mystery. Two weeks after Fermi reached New York, he heard about the famous telegram telling Niels Bohr that uranium fission had been discovered in Germany. Fermi knew what it meant: that enormous energy might be extracted from the uranium atom. Soon he was part of the vast U.S. attempt to release that energy in an atomic bomb.

Laura Fermi knew nothing of his work —only that her famous husband was receding day by day into deeper mystery. He made long trips to Chicago for no announced reason. The friends whom he brought to her house were as silent about their work as he. When the Fermis moved to Chicago, all that she knew was that he worked at a “metallurgical laboratory” (where no metallurgists worked). She asked no questions. She brought up her children, kept her overworked husband comfortable, laughed at him affectionately when laughter was in order (once he buried a “treasure” of currency in a coal bin). But she felt the excitement around her grow and the mystery deepen.

An Admiral Sunk. One night she gave a party for a crowd of “metallurgists.” As each guest arrived, he congratulated her husband, but no one told her why. At last one whispered: “He has sunk a Japanese admiral.” What Fermi had done was to start the first chain reaction.

In 1944 the Fermis moved to Los Alamos, that strange, comfortless Shangri-La where famous men of many nationalities conjured up the atomic bomb. Laura Fermi describes their life on the pine-covered mesa, cut off from the world, where the men disappeared every morning behind the high wire fence of the “technical area.” She knew them all, from Oppenheimer (“Oppie [was] a marvelous director, the real soul of the project”) to silent Klaus Fuchs, who drove a car badly, played charades shyly, and was spying for the Russians.

Still she asked no questions. Deliberately, one suspects, she did not try to guess what her husband was doing. Putting up with the rigorous living conditions (sometimes Los Alamos had no water) and the ironclad isolation, she made a life for her husband outside the wire fence. Touched by the wand of her smiling description, the men of the golden age of physics come to life. She tells how Hans Bethe, father of nuclear fission, eats a big dish of spaghetti (“slowly but steadily … between mouthfuls of red wine”). She describes the strange whispering voice of Niels Bohr, whom they had been ordered to call “Mr. Baker,” and tells how he was charmed by a skunk (unknown in Europe) and rescued just in time. She tells how Edward Teller kept the neighbors awake with his piano playing.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the Los Alamos secret broke at last: President Truman announced to the world that an atomic bomb had exploded over Hiroshima. Not until then did Laura Fermi know what her husband had been doing behind the wire fence.