By Edoardo Amaldi (Saverio Braccini, Antonio Ereditato and Paola Scampoli eds.)
Springer
Paperback: £44.99 €52.70 $49.95
E-book: £35.99 €41.64 $39.95
Before visiting a university or physics laboratory, most people imagine today’s physicists as peaceful men or women wearing white lab coats and dealing with test tubes, clouds of coloured smoke and mathematical equations. Although the description would be more appropriate for ancient alchemists rather than modern physicists, one word should still stand out – peaceful. However, there was a time when physicists were investigating dangerous radiation, fissile nuclei and particles to trigger a nuclear-reaction chain. These were also the times when Europe was a battlefield and scientific results were regarded as potential material for spies and the tellers of spy stories. In those days, almost every scientist could have made a good subject for writers and Hollywood.
Friedrich “Fritz” Houtermans is no exception. Indeed, his private and professional lives make a good subject for a book. However, in my opinion, the most intriguing aspect of this book is the author – Edoardo Amaldi – and the reason why he decided to write about Fritz, a man who was married four times, spent a few years in Lubianka and other prisons and published several important physics results along the way. Amaldi had seen L’Aveu – the film by Costa Gravas about Artur London, the Czechoslovakian communist minister falsely arrested and tried for treason and espionage – and was struck by similarities with the story of Houtermans. Amaldi began to write about Houtermans but died in 1989. Twenty years later, Edoardo Amaldi’s son Ugo gave his father’s unpublished manuscript to the Laboratory for High Energy Physics at the University of Bern, where Fritz had done much to initiate research on particle physics. I share the fascination of the editors when they describe how grateful they were to have the opportunity to “meet two outstanding physicists” – Fritz and Edoardo.
The result is a detailed description of both the life of Houtermans and the lives of other friends of Amaldi. It is a beautiful description of Europe and science during the years before, during and after the Second World War. The words Amaldi uses – which are well edited – are not those of a storyteller. Instead, he provides a detailed – almost scientific – report of this almost unknown physicist.
Although Houtermans is an interesting subject, more interesting to me are the chapters where Amaldi explains the “making of” the book and his research into accurate information sources about its subject. I think that soon I will be looking for an equivalent book about Amaldi’s life.
