Fermi Remembered by James W Cronin (ed.), University of Chicago Press. Hardback ISBN 0226121119, $45.00.

Enrico Fermi is one of the great physicists of the 20th century. He died relatively young at the age of 53, so many of us (where "us" means even retired physicists) never had the opportunity to have direct contact with him, and the younger generation had no chance to meet him anyway. This is one reason why it is so important to collect testimonies about Fermi to try to get a picture of his work and of his personality. So the enterprise undertaken by Jim Cronin is certainly extremely useful. It also comes at the right time, before all those who were in contact with Fermi disappear (some, such as Herb Anderson, are no longer with us).

I never had the occasion to meet Fermi despite the fact that I am old enough to have known many of the participants in the Manhattan Project. I did not have the luck to attend, as Georges Charpak and Michel Gourdin did, the lectures given at Les Houches during his last summer in 1954. (Curiously, nobody, not even Segrè, in the biography that is included in the book, mentions these lectures.) At that time, my only contact with Fermi was through his magnificent lecture course, the notes of which were written by Orear, Rosenfeld and Schluter.


Before reading this book, I had heard many testimonies from Fermi's Italian and US colleagues or students. All admired his genius and all liked him very much as a man. All except one - my late friend Boris Jacobsohn, who had a better relationship with Teller (which was strange because Boris was a liberal). One gets a somewhat better idea of who Fermi was after reading the 26 testimonies in this book.

It is no accident that among these accounts we find seven Nobel laureates and one winner of the Wolf prize, plus a few exceptional individuals such as Dick Garwin. It proves the quality of Fermi teaching, and the fact that he attracted very gifted people. He was of course extremely intelligent. He was able to simplify any problem, solve it and make it appear simple, to a point that sometimes people could not reconstruct his arguments afterwards. And he never made mistakes. On these two points Murray Gell-Mann commented that sometimes he preferred the not well prepared lectures of Vicky Weisskopf as well as his mistakes, which were more educative.

Fermi disliked generalities and preferred concrete things, in theory preferring to work examples until the end (a point of view with which I have a great sympathy), in experiments going as far as inventing and constructing his own instruments, such as the cart for moving a target inside the Chicago cyclotron. He was very careful, very precise, and this may be the key to his success in producing the first fission chain reaction in natural uranium, where criticality was, after all, rather marginal.

Fermi's contacts with politics and politicians were rather minimal. Yet he wrote to Benito Mussolini asking him to search for the missing Ettore Majorana and to Dean Acheson asking him to let Linus Pauling travel outside the US. However, he never tried to influence the decision to drop the bomb.

Fermi was very nice with young people, inviting them to parties and organising games, which he liked to win. He liked to win at sports too, whether swimming in Lake Michigan, rock climbing or playing tennis (although he lost against Leprince Ringuet, who, it must be said, was trained by the French champion Jean Borotra). He also liked to compete in physics. He once said to Jack Steinberger with some regret but great honesty: "I missed fission." Yet he was also extremely fair, referring to "Fermi statistics" as "Pauli statistics". Curiously he was not interested in art, while most scientists are at least attracted by music.

Among the testimonies, I would say that the most objective, the most balanced, is that of "Murph" Goldberger. In others one feels sometimes a kind of "cult of the personality". A very amusing chapter is that of Nina Byers, in which she compares two very different individuals, Fermi and Leo Szilard, who both did pioneering work on nuclear reactors, but whose paths separated completely. In this way, Byers, a well known opponent of the use of nuclear weapons, manages not to criticize Fermi explicitly for not opposing the use of the bomb. Also of great interest are the review of Fermi's theoretical achievements by Frank Wilczek, who received the Nobel prize probably after writing his article; Fermi's talk on the genesis of the nuclear-energy project, which is more complete than in his 1947 review in Science; and the reconstruction by Jim Cronin of Fermi's far sighted talk on the future of accelerator research.

I can only very strongly recommend reading this book. Just a detail: if you have my eyesight use a "Fresnel lens" to read the reproductions of the letters, which have been unnecessarily reduced. Regarding Fermi's Italian time, there is other material besides the biography by Segrè, mentioned above, in particular the article by Edoardo Amaldi in History of Twentieth Century Physics, Academic Press, New York, 1977, pp295-351. There are also the videotapes of the lectures of Gian-Carlo Wick in the Academic Training programme at CERN.
André Martin, CERN.

Enrico Fermi: His Work and Legacy by Carlo Bernardini and Luisa Bonolis (eds), Springer. Hardback ISBN 3540221417, €35.95 ($49.95).

In 2001, the centenary of Enrico Fermi's birth, the Italian Physical Society commissioned a series of articles to pay tribute to the man who was probably the most famous Italian scientist of the 20th century. Written by close colleagues as well as scientists whose fields Fermi influenced profoundly, the papers were published originally in Italian in Conoscere Fermi nel centenario della nascita 29 settembre 1901-2001 (SIF 2001). Now they have been translated into English and are available in this volume, which bears witness to the originality and breadth of Fermi's scientific work. They confirm that Fermi was a rare combination of theorist, experimentalist, teacher and inspiring colleague.

The book begins with three biographical overviews written by close colleagues after Fermi's death and ends with a year-by-year chronology of his scientific endeavours. In between are 14 chapters by a variety of distinguished scientists, which span the breadth of Fermi's achievements in physics. With an extensive bibliography and many illustrations, the book is written for a general scientific audience.

Books received

Superconductivity by V L Ginzburg and E A Andryushin, World Scientific. Hardback ISBN 981238913X, £10 ($16).

First written in 1989, this non-technical introduction to superconductivity has now been published as a revised edition. Written in a lively style, the book provides an excellent background for students at school or college, without recourse to mathematics. One of the authors, Ginzburg, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2003.

Gravitation: from the Hubble Length to the Planck Length by I Ciufolini et al. (eds), Institute of Physics Publishing. Hardback ISBN 0750309482, £80 ($125).

This volume in the series High Energy Physics, Cosmology and Gravitation provides a summary of modern research in experimental gravity, cosmology and the quantum theory of gravitation. Based on lectures at the Villa Mondragone International School on Gravitation and Cosmology, it brings together leading experts who present an up-to-date review of their field.

A Modern Introduction to Quantum Field Theory by Michele Maggiore, Oxford University Press. Hardback ISBN 0198520735, £47.95 ($99.50). Paperback 0198520743, £23.95 ($44.50).

This book is a welcome addition to the Oxford Master Series in Statistical, Computational, and Theoretical Physics, aimed at final-year-undergraduate and beginning-graduate level. Assuming no previous knowledge of quantum-field theory, it introduces modern developments in the field. The inclusion of more advanced topics will also make this a useful book for graduate students and researchers.