The Age of Radiance (11 page)

Marie’s fingers were now crusted in radiation-triggered, wartlike ulcers, and she tried surgery to repair the radiation-caused cataracts in both eyes. But her health continued to leak away. As with Pierre before her, doctors still had no idea what was wrong and suggested tuberculosis—the disease that had killed her mother and given sister Bronya a life’s work. At three thirty on a perfect afternoon in the Paris spring of May 1934, she came down with a fever at the Institut and went home. She never came back. Doctors found tubercular-like lesions on her lungs and again suggested she rest at the Sancellemoz sanitarium in Passy, Savoy. Waiting for the train at the Gare du Nord, she collapsed, and Ève had to help her into the cabin. But doctors at Sancellemoz found no tuberculosis. Ève:
“Then began the harrowing struggle which goes by the name of ‘an easy death’—in which the body which refuses to perish asserts itself in wild determination.” On July 4, 1934, at dawn, “when the full light of a glorious morning had filled the room,” Marie Curie died of what the Sancellemoz director said “was a plastic pernicious anemia of rapid, feverish development. The bone marrow did not react, probably because it had been injured by a long accumulation of radiations.”

Originally, Marie was buried next to Pierre and her father-in-law, as she had always planned, in the little cemetery of Sceaux. Six decades later, in 1995, the French government exhumed their bodies, and that is how a little girl from Poland named Manya became the first (and only) woman interred in the French Panthéon. Langevin rests there as well. Today her notebooks
and cookbook are still so radioactive they are kept in a lead-lined safe at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and scholars need protective clothing to work with them.

Radium and its effluvium, radon gas, would be used in medical therapies for years to come—replaced only because of Fred and Irène’s discovery—while polonium would be used as a trigger for nuclear weapons (including Hiroshima’s), and to alleviate static cling. In 2006, ex–KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko was dosed with Marie’s beloved polonium, and before dying, he accused Vladimir Putin of orchestrating the assassination.

Irène and Fred won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of artificial radiation. Marie had been the first woman laureate, and now her own daughter was the second. After Hungarian George de Hevesy won the chemistry Nobel in 1943 for inventing the tracer technique (in which radioactive isotopes can follow chemical changes and physiological processes), that process, combined with Joliot-Curie’s artificial radioactivity, became as important for modern science as the microscope.

Her daughter and son-in-law’s breakthrough meant that the backbreaking and wildly expensive labors of isolating radium from its ore—Marie Curie’s great triumph—was no longer required. Nuclear medicine could create its own irradiated materials at any time . . . and so could nuclear physics. This discovery dramatically changed the course of modern medicine, as well as forged a path for Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and “Germany’s Madame Curie,” Lise Meitner, to ignite the Atomic Age.

T
HERE
is a still in the night—but not this night. The palatial apartment on via L. Magalotti, in the neighborhood of Il Duce’s own Villa Borghese, was enrobed in marble, from the entryway’s Carrara to the bathrooms’ obscure sea-green—a cool, aquatic trance—and echoed with dozens of clinking, chiming, tocking mechanical clocks, nearly drowned out by the ruckus of the family’s cook making supper, which in turn was a murmur of distant thuds compared to the excited voices of the two children, Nella, eight, and her three-year-old brother, Giulio, who played and squabbled as voraciously as the wolf-bred children of Rome’s nascence. Nella’s father had at one point given her the nickname
bestiolina
—“little animal”—and she would prove for many years deserving of this honor.

The only quiet came from the parents in the living room, reading the paper while listening to an immense mahogany-and-bakelite radio. The two were suffering silently, both tense and in conflict. Laura, thirty-one, dark and elfin, was reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn; her husband, Enrico, thirty-seven, was black-haired, muscular, and easy to like, with slate-blue eyes as soulful as any basset hound’s, and a reputation as a genial workaholic. One of his colleagues called him
“completely self-confident, but wholly without conceit,” and onetime pupil and lifetime friend Emilio Segrè said Enrico was
“a steamroller that moved slowly but knew no obstacles.”

Enrico was a titan of Roman society whose membership in the Royal Academy of Italy came with both a princely salary and the title Your Excellency. Many decades later, astronomer Carl Sagan summed up his legacy:
“There is a Fermi Sea, a Fermi Energy, a Fermi Paradox, Fermi Statistics . . . a Fermi class of elementary particles, a Fermi Constant, a Fermi
Surface, a Fermi Mechanism (for the acceleration of cosmic rays), a Fermi Age (neutron diffusion), a Fermi unit of distance (which is roughly the size of a nucleon), two Fermi Golden Rules, a Fermi Prize, a Fermi Institute, a Fermi High School, a Fermi National Laboratory, and a chemical element named after Fermi. . . . It’s hard to think of another physicist of the twentieth century who’s had so many things named after him—and this surely is an indication of the respect and affection with which he is thought of in the community of physicists, and in a larger community as well.” Meanwhile, another lifelong friend, Franco Rasetti, called him
“a very very common man, in fact, he was common as an old shoe.”

Like his older siblings, Maria and Giulio, Enrico Fermi had spent over two years of his infancy with a rural wet nurse, the European practice even for the middle class of that era. Brother Giulio then became Enrico’s idol and partner in crime, the two kids together investigating mysteries of science and engineering, building motors and drafting detailed technical drawings, especially of the era’s cutting-edge technology: aeroplanes. Ardent as both colleagues and competitors, the two brothers had no other friends.

Then, at the age of fifteen, while being operated on for a throat sore, Giulio suffocated from the anesthesia. Mother Ida became inconsolable, abandoning her other two children to withdraw into a sobbing mantle of grief. Each day, the boy Enrico forced himself to pass by the hospital where his older brother and only friend had died, until the crippling pain somewhat abated. He then withdrew himself, into a life of books. The family’s apartment near the train station was in a district hurriedly built to accommodate Rome’s turn-of-the-century doubling in population and would, in time, become famous for its vile urbanity. The quarters were unheated, so in the winters the young Enrico Fermi would sit on his hands to keep them warm and turn the pages with the tip of his tongue.

The years went by with both mother and son hidden from the world, until Enrico finally found another friend, who turned out to be one of his brother’s classmates, Enrico Persico. The boys often took long walks through the city and browsed for math and science books in the flea market of the Campo de’ Fiori, the Renaissance square where scientist Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600. One of their scavenges was a two-volume survey of mathematical physics, written in 1840, which taught the two Henrys the Newtonian equations of planets, waves, and tides, the language of numbers with which physics describes everything from the flow of water across a bed of stones, and the gravity that binds planets to their homely stars, to the evidence of things unseen. Enrico Fermi was so
enthralled he hadn’t noticed until he finished both volumes that they were written in Latin.

Three years later, when Fermi was ready for university, a family friend insisted he learn German to read scientific publications without waiting for them to be translated into Italian or French, as well as attend the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa instead of the University of Rome, to get him away from his mother’s unabated and suffocating melancholia. For all her faults, though, Enrico inherited from Ida a remarkable trait: the idea that, if you needed something, you could just learn how to make it yourself. The schoolteacher mother made her own pressure cooker, and her physicist son made his own lab apparatus.

To win a spot at Pisa, which included free room and board, he needed to prepare an essay; Fermi’s was on the vibration of strings. After reading it, the examiner, a University of Rome geometry professor, asked Enrico to come in and see him, for he had never seen anything in his professional life quite like Enrico’s essay. At the meeting, the professor told the student that he was extraordinary, sure to become famous, which, along with the full scholarship to Pisa, changed Fermi’s life. For the first time since the loss of his brother, he felt that what he was doing was right, and that he was good at it.

The Scuola Normale Superiore’s director of physics was so overwhelmed by Fermi that the boy taught him Einstein’s theories of relativity, and since Pisa did not yet teach quantum mechanics, Fermi had to learn it on his own. Pisa’s days of greatness were in the Middle Ages, centered on its son Galileo, who’d been inspired by the physics of the pendulum from watching the great cathedral’s swinging lamps. Like his Roman childhood home, Enrico’s room was unheated, but instead of sitting on their hands, the students tried to keep warm with charcoal-burning ceramic braziers,
scaldini.

A fast friend at Pisa was Franco Rasetti, a self-taught polymath deliberately studying physics because it was difficult—the boy wanted to prove to himself that he could accomplish anything. Besides hiking in the Alps near the Carrara marble quarries, the two loved pranks, with a twist. At that time in Italy, public urinals were built with pools of water. The nineteen-year-olds Fermi and Rasetti would sneak up behind a man using the facilities, loft a bit of metallic sodium into the water, then listen to the victim’s cries of horror as the pool exploded into flames. Though the university may have lagged academically, it was a little Eden for young men falling in love with science. Fermi wrote of Pisa’s three lucky physics students,
“They were allowed to use the research laboratories at all times, received keys to the library and instrument cabinets, and were given permission to try any experiment they
wished with the apparatus contained therein. [Enzo] Cararra and Rasetti, who in the previous year had come to recognize Fermi’s immense superiority in the knowledge of mathematics and physics, henceforth regarded him as their natural leader, looking to him rather than to the professors for instruction and guidance.”

In another echo of his mother’s can-do attitude, he said, “Fermi, after much reading of the pertinent literature, decided that X-rays were the field that offered the best chance for original research [but] it soon appeared that the sealed tubes were not fit for research, and the experimenters decided to build their own tubes. The glass part was made to specifications by glassblower, while the physicist had to seal windows and electrodes. No diffusion pumps were available; hence the tubes were evacuated by means of rotary mercury pumps.” As hard as it is to imagine, X-rays, vacuum tubes, and electrodes would be the foundations of the Atomic Age.

Emilio Segrè explained his friend’s academic stance during this period: “Fermi was almost entirely self-taught; all that he knew he had learned from books or rediscovered by himself. He had found no mature scientist who could guide him, as he would have found at that time in Germany, Holland, or England, and did not personally know any older scientists with whom he could compare himself. He knew that he was better than those around him, but this he also knew meant little because these men were not in the forefront of active science. And he was in a hurry to get to the top.”

The Italian Ministry of Education had one fellowship for postdoctoral study in the natural sciences, and Fermi won it in 1923, going to work under Max Born at a paradise of academic physics, Göttingen. Though his colleagues included the stellar Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli, it seems that Fermi did not become a signature member of that extraordinary clique, even though his German was good enough. It may have been too big a pond for someone used to being a great star of the provinces; or maybe his tendency to be shy, proud, solitary, and aloof kept him from being welcomed and engaged. It was a profound opportunity wasted . . . yet, Enrico’s life was soon to change dramatically . . . through the efforts of a modern-day Medici.

Orso Mario Corbino grew up in a small town on the east coast of Sicily where his family owned a handmade-macaroni factory with the product sold on the premises. Instead of pasta, though, Corbino worked in magneto-optics at the University of Rome; joined government committees to manage the nation’s water resources; was made a senator of the kingdom in 1920; and the minister of national economics in 1923, even though he was not then and never became a Fascist. As the University of Rome’s dean
of physics, Corbino was determined to begin a world-class program, and he brought the twenty-six-year-old Fermi aboard with lifetime tenure—an achievement that most academics needed thirty-five years to acquire. Franco Rasetti transferred from Florence in 1927, Emilio Segrè and Edoardo Amaldi enrolled as students, and the group immediately made such an international splash in journal publishing that in the fall of that year, a physics conference in the lakeside resort of Como drew such international superstars as Rutherford, Planck, Bohr, and Heisenberg.