AMONG THE ATOM SCIENTISTS

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27670, 28 May 1955, Page 3

AMONG THE ATOM SCIENTISTS

Atoms in the Family. My Life with Enrico Fermi, Designer of the First Atomic Pile. By »Laura Fermi. Allen and Unwin'. 283 pp. This charming biography of Enrico Fermi by his wife has acquired extra interest since its first publication in America owing to the sudden ahd untimely death of the eminent atomic physicist. Mrs Fermi has put on record an excellent account of her husband’s career and personality, keeping herself modestly in the background, but nevertheless providing a most entertaining impression of what it is like to be the wife of a physicist who is often working under conditions of the most stringent secrecy. Her book begins in Italy, where she describes the brilliance of Fermi and his group of friends in the University of Rome, and the gaiety of their first encounters and early married life against the background of Mussolini’s rise to power. In spite of their dislike of the dictator, the Fermis were reluctant to leave Italy, until the first Italian anti-racial laws (Mks Fermi is a Jewess) provided the spur, and Fermi’s trip to Sweden in 1938 to receive the Nobel Prize, the opportunity to leave their native land and emigrate to the United States. The process of their Americanisation as Mrs Fermi tells of it, was laborious but full of amusement. She describes the historic work done under the West Stands of Stagg Field, the University of Chicago stadium, which resulted in the building of the first atomic pile, and life in Los Alamos, where the labours of her husband and his colleagues resulted in the explosion of the first atomic bomb. The wives, of course, knew nothing of it until it was public news. Impressions are given of other famous personalities in the field of atomic fission—Bohr, Oppenheimer, Einstein, Urey, also Klaus Fuchs and Pontecorvo, a Roman compatriot and younger contemporary. And the scientific background is adequately filled in, for Mrs Fermi herself had a scientific training, and her understanding of her husband’s work is well be--yond that of the average layman. Mrs Fermi is a lively and accomplished writer, especially accomplished since she learned English comparatively late in life, and her book will be widely enjoyed.