Edited by Salvatore Esposito, Ettore Majorana Jr, Alwyn van der Merve and Erasmo Recami, Kluwer. Hardback ISBN 1402016492, €175 (£111/$193).
Ettore Majorana was the Vincent van Gogh of theoretical physics, endowed with phenomenal talent but tortured by his own personality; both were geniuses whose unconventional epic work was first recognized by only a few contemporaries, but whose fame ultimately came only after a premature death, by suicide for van Gogh, and possibly so for Majorana too.
Enrico Fermi once said: “Few are the geniuses like Galileo and Newton. Well Ettore was one of them.” Appointed professor at the University of Naples in 1937, Majorana mysteriously disappeared in March 1938 after a brief trip to his native Sicily. After having cabled “I shall return tomorrow”, he was not aboard the ferry from Palermo when it docked at Naples. Despite extensive searches, no trace of him was ever found. The only clue was an enigmatic remark “The sea has refused me (il mare mi ha rifiuato)” in the same cabled message from Sicily, suggesting that his plan to jump overboard unseen on the outward trip had failed and so he had opted for another attempt on the return journey. It was a major loss for Italian physics, compounded later that year when Fermi emigrated to the US.
After having first studied engineering, Majorana graduated in physics with Fermi in 1928 and went on to become a key member of Fermi’s newly established and subsequently famous Rome group of the early 1930s (which included, among others, Edoardo Amaldi, Ugo Fano, Bruno Ferretti, Bruno Pontecorvo, Giulio Racah, Emilio Segrè and Gian Carlo Wick).
Majorana was chronically diffident, and this shyness extended to his own publications. He formally published just nine papers in his lifetime, including his 1932 relativistic theory of particles with arbitrary spin. His final paper in 1937 was called “A Symmetrical Theory of the Electron and the Positron” and introduced the revolutionary concept of what became known as a “Majorana particle” – a neutral spin 1/2 particle that is its own antiparticle – now of vital importance for neutrino physics. However, Majorana’s archived papers in the Domus Galileana in Pisa show that he had already formulated these ideas in 1933, soon after the positron had been discovered.
This book looks instead at Majorana’s first steps in physics research, carefully documented by him in five notebooks (Volumetti) from 1927-1932, about one notebook per year, and extending from his formal coursework to original research covering topics ranging from the effect of a magnetic field on melting point to solutions of the Fermi-Thomas equation. These papers are translated into English but retain Majorana’s original format and conventions.
As Majorana’s contributions to physics have increased in value, several other collections of his work have appeared. There is also Recami’s excellent biography Il Caso Majorana (Mondadori), but the volume now published by Kluwer is the first rendition of any of Majorana’s work into English. This book is the outcome of some dedicated and painstaking work by the editors in translating a wealth of difficult material and reproducing Majorana’s original presentation. It was commendably supported by the Italian Embassy in the US and by the Italian government. After this effort, the highly motivated editors are looking towards a new volume of Majorana’s subsequent research notes.
