Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Pope of Physics
WORK NOTES: with husband, Gino Segre
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1939
WEBSITE: http://bettinahoerlin.com/
CITY: Philadelphia
STATE: PA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://bettinahoerlin.com/about-the-author/ * https://www.amazon.com/Bettina-Hoerlin/e/B005YVY02E/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 * http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20161025_Penn_husband-and-wife_team_profile_physicist_Enrico_Fermi_in_new_biography.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1939; married Gino Segre, c. 1985; children.
EDUCATION:Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
City of Philadelphia, former health commissioner; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, professor, seventeen years. Visiting professor, Haverford College.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Bettina Hoerlin earned her doctorate in policy sciences and then became health commissioner of Philadelphia. She went on to teach at the University of Pennsylvania for seventeen years, and then she retired to become a writer. Hoerlin is the daughter of immigrants who escaped Nazi Germany, and her first book, Steps of Courage: My Parents’ Journey from Nazi Germany to America, details their story. Hoerlin was inspired to write the book after discovering four years’ of letters between her parents, all sent between 1934 and 1938, detailing Germany’s descent into fascism.
Discussing the book in an online Electra Street interview with Brigitta Schuchert, Hoerlin remarked: “About eight years ago I said, ‘You know Bettina, you have to do something with these letters, and nobody else is going to do it. You’re going to have to do it.’ It took me about a year to get through translating the letters, and I wrote them up in English and circulated them to my family.” She added: “And then I said, ‘Wait a second. Here’s a story.’ I said, ‘I have to write this, because this is a universal tale. It’s a universal tale of courage, it’s a universal tale of how people deal with a rising political movement that would affect their lives, and other peoples’ lives even more so, horrendously.’ That’s when I knew I had to write a book, and that’s when I quit teaching. I had never written a book, but this was burning inside me.”
For her second book, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age, Hoerlin teamed with her husband, Gino Segre, to author a biography of a brilliant physicist. Both Hoerlin and Segre were personally connected to their subject; the former through her father (who was also a physicist), and the latter through his own work as a physicist. In the book, Hoerlin and Segre offer insights into Fermi’s personal life, and they also detail his professional successes. Both aspects of the physicist’s life are placed in context with the rise of fascism in Europe, Fermi’s subsequent immigration to the United States, and his participation in the Manhattan project.
As Hoerlin stated in a Philadelphia Inquirer Online interview, “I remember Fermi quite well. I was a teenager, and I remember how all the Europeans there did this whole European thing. They had hikes on Sunday mornings, and they’d go mushroom-picking. . . . Physicists are an interesting bunch, but some of them are quite eccentric, and he seemed quite normal through my teenage eyes, which was quite a welcome thing for me.” The author also explained: “People called him ‘The Pope of Physics’ because he was infallible, maybe not always, but usually, when it came to physics.”
In the words of a Publishers Weekly critic, “fans of pop science and history will thoroughly enjoy this entertaining and accessible biography of a scientist who deserves to be better understood.” Echoing this sentiment in her Library Journal assessment, Sara R. Thompson advised: “Readers of history and physics will enjoy learning about this theoretical and experimental physicist. Offering praise in Booklist, Bryce Christensen observed: “the authors . . . give readers glimpses into some of Fermi’s personal, nonscientific attributes. A balanced portrait, rich in revealing anecdotes.” Another positive review appeared in BookPage Online, and Deborah Mason found that, “happily, the authors’ clear explanations ensure that the reader is not only able to follow Fermi’s contributions to science, but also understand their impact on his life story.” Lauding the volume further in the Dallas Morning News Online, a critic announced: “Combining family lore with intensive research, Segre and Hoerlin offer unique insights into Fermi’s life and work, set against the background of politics and the early years of the Atomic Age.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Hoerlin, Bettina, Steps of Courage: My Parents’ Journey from Nazi Germany to America, AuthorHouse (Bloomington, IN), 2011.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 15, 2016, Christensen, Bryce, review of The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age.
Library Journal, October 15, 2016, Sara R. Tompson, review of The Pope of Physics.
Publishers Weekly, August 22, 2016, review of The Pope of Physics.
ONLINE
Bettina Hoerlin Home Page, http://bettinahoerlin.com/ (May 31, 2017).
BookPage Online, https://bookpage.com/ (October 18, 2016), Deborah Mason, review of The Pope of Physics.
Dallas Morning News Online, https://www.dallasnews.com/ (May 10, 2017), review of The Pope of Physics.
Electra Street, http://electrastreet.net/(May 31, 2017), Brigitta Schuchert, author interview.
Philadelphia Inquirer Online, http://www.philly.com/ (May 31, 2017), Tirdad Derakhshani, author interview.*
Bettina Hoerlin was born in America after her parents fled Nazi Germany and is a graduate of Los Alamos High School. She holds a doctorate in Policy Sciences and taught at the University of Pennsylvania for seventeen years, having previously served as Health Commissioner of Philadelphia. She was also a visiting professor at Haverford College where she taught courses in health care disparities. An enthusiastic hiker and avid music lover, she lives with her husband, physicist Gino Segre, in Philadelphia.
Penn husband-and-wife team profile physicist Enrico Fermi in new biography
Updated: October 25, 2016 — 3:01 AM EDT
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"The Pope of Physics" by Gino Segre' (right) and Bettina Hoerlin (left).
by Tirdad Derakhshani, Staff Writer
Retired University of Pennsylvania physicist Gino Segré has carved out a second career as a historian of science, with lively, accessible books about physics, including Ordinary Geniuses and Faust in Copenhagen.
"The Pope of Physics" by Gino Segre´ (right) and Bettina Hoerlin (left).
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Penn husband-and-wife team profile physicist Enrico Fermi in new biography
He joins forces with his wife of 31 years, former Philadelphia health commissioner Bettina Hoerlin, for The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age, a biography of the Nobel-winning physicist and Manhattan Project team leader who has been dubbed the architect of the Nuclear Age.
The couple will talk about their book with Penn physics professor Larry Gladney at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Free Library.
Fermi assembled the world's first nuclear reactor in 1942 and was a major figure in the development of the atomic bomb. You call this merely a tiny part of his overall contribution to science. In fact, he had already earned his Nobel in 1938.
Segré: Physics has two major divisions, theoretical and experimental, and there's a very firm line between them. Fermi was the only physicist to have reached the peak in both. He was . . . the first physicist to appreciate computing, and he's the father of what's called computational physics. He was the last physicist to work in all areas of the field: He worked in astrophysics, molecular physics, nuclear physics, particle fission, relativity theory. That work is worth a whole basketful of Nobel Prizes. He shaped how we live today in a way that's never been surpassed since.
You don't come to Fermi merely as academics. Both of you have family connections to him.
Segré: My uncle [Nobel laureate Emilio Segré] was his first student in Rome, and they worked closely together for 20 years, including at Los Alamos [with the Manhattan Project].
Hoerlin: My father [German émigré Hermann Hoerlin] was a physicist, and we moved to Los Alamos in 1953. . . . It was the last summer Fermi was there, too. . . . Fermi died prematurely a year later [at the age of 53].
You write about him in your memoir "Steps of Courage: My Parents' Journey from Nazi Germany to America." You were 13 at the time?
Hoerlin: I remember Fermi quite well. I was a teenager, and I remember how all the Europeans there did this whole European thing. They had hikes on Sunday mornings, and they'd go mushroom-picking. . . . Physicists are an interesting bunch, but some of them are quite eccentric, and he seemed quite normal through my teenage eyes, which was quite a welcome thing for me.
Segré: She's a graduate of Los Alamos High. You should definitely mention that.
You did extensive research on his early life and his most formative childhood experiences.
Hoerlin: Like some people at the time, his parents farmed him out after birth. Literally. They gave him to a farming family to raise until he was 21/2. So he returned to his family at 21/2 into this strange place he's never known, and he burst into tears. His mother just said, "We don't do that here." That was one of the biggest influences in shaping his whole life - the fact that he must suppress all his emotions.
Segré: The second has to do with the extraordinarily close relationship he had to his brother Giulio, who was a year older. When [Enrico] was 13, Giulio . . . died as a result of freak medical accident. That's when Fermi developed this intense interest in mathematics and physics.
So what was he like as a person - say, as a husband to Laura and a father to his two kids, Nella and Giulio?
Hoerlin: People called him "The Pope of Physics" because he was infallible, maybe not always, but usually, when it came to physics. But he was fallible in other respects, including family life. . . . His two children had the same problem as the children of other famous parents: having to learn to live with people who are always put on a pedestal by others. . . . Later in life, his daughter said that the problem wasn't that her father didn't have emotions, but that he never knew how to express them.
Fermi famously used his 1938 trip to the Nobel ceremony in Sweden as a gesture of protest that insulted Benito Mussolini.
Hoerlin: He went without the uniform members of the Royal Academy wore. . . . And he didn't give the fascist salute.
Yet, wasn't he a member of Italy's National Fascist Party?
Hoerlin: He was a very apolitical guy. He wanted physics, just physics, pure and simple. But he joined the fascist party in Italy, which coincided with Mussolini inviting him to join the Italian Royal Academy. So on paper he was a fascist. But he was very wary of them, and he was married to a Jewish woman. He had been to the United States a number of times in the 1930s, and he really regarded it as a land of the free. . . . So even though Laura was very hooked into life in Rome and her family, he finally convinced her they needed to leave Italy.
tirdad@phillynews.com
215-854-2736
Author, Speaker, Educator.
It’s somewhat of a risk, coauthoring a book with one’s spouse, but it turned out to be exhilarating. Not that we didn’t have tensions, but they were of the good sort: focusing on creating an accessible and compelling narrative. We wanted to tell a story that encompassed the whole man, not only Enrico Fermi’s primacy as a scientist but also his personal life, his struggles with politics and the ensuing moral dilemmas. The results seem to be very positive, at least according to reviews, but you can judge for yourself.
The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age is about an extraordinary immigrant to this country. A true genius. My prior book was about immigrants too, namely my parents, who also fled a totalitarian regime and embraced freedom in America. Both books planted me firmly in the world of physics, a world known to me since I grew up in the Atomic City of Los Alamos. My father was a physicist and my husband Gino Segrè is one.
But my career path was not physics. I have a doctorate in Policy Sciences and have been in a number of health policy positions, including Philadelphia’s Commissioner of Public Health. Later on I turned to teaching courses on health care disparities for sixteen years at the University of Pennsylvania and have been a visiting professor at Haverford College and lecturer at Oxford University.
My passions (other than my husband and children) are writing, enjoying chamber music and indulging in the great out-of-doors. Luckily we live in Philadelphia next to one of this country’s largest urban parks. And there are nine grandchildren to enjoy it with.
Interview with Bettina Hoerlin
Brigitta Schuchert | Mar 2015 | Archive, Conversations with Authors, History, Interviews, Literature and Creative Writing |
hoerlin-parents-lettersCONVERSATIONS WITH AUTHORS
Bettina Hoerlin is the author of Steps of Courage: My Parents’ Journey from Nazi Germany to America (2011) and is currently a guest lecturer at NYUAD. While meeting in her apartment, we talk over cups of strong espresso, something I’ve come to miss while living in Abu Dhabi. She shows me copies of her book, published in both English and German, and points out black-and-white pictures of her parents taken in Germany and later in the United States. Hoerlin, who has taught courses in Public Health and health care disparities at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania, started the project after uncovering a collection of over 500 letters written by her parents to one another from 1934 to 1938 while they lived in two different towns in Germany. (Click here for a link to the archive.) “Here was this unfolding of a great love story,” Hoerlin tells me about the letters, “but it was in the context of the rise of fascism. I had a personal history. And through this personal lens of my parents, they were being shaped by the history that was unfolding, this horrible history in Germany.”
Brigitta Schuchert: How much had you known about your parents before reading the letters? How much of this was new information?
Bettina Hoerlin: I knew outlines. Of course I knew my parents had met. I knew they had fallen in love. I knew they had immigrated to the United States in 1938. But there was so much I didn’t know. They didn’t want to talk about their past, even though my father was sort of this Aryan poster boy. He had climbed the highest mountains, and had been celebrated in Germany. This was a golden age of mountaineering. Nobody had ever conquered an 8,000-meter peak, you know. Everest hadn’t been conquered. None of these peaks had been conquered.
He went on one of the very early expeditions, and tried to climb what they thought at the time was the second highest mountain in the world. I turned out to be only the third highest mountain. They didn’t conquer it because of extensive avalanches, but successfully climbed another nearby mountain, the highest summited to date. He had held a world record, and he was very modest about that. I didn’t realize how revered he was. And there was a movie made out of this 1930 International Expedition to the Himalaya, which was widely shown.
I certainly did not know about his protests when he was part of the executive committee of the Alpine Club. Protests about the Nazification of German mountaineering. He never told me that, so this all came out in the research.
I discovered when I was thirteen that my mother was Jewish by background. [She] had been born to a Jewish family, but fallen in love when she was nineteen with someone who was Catholic. She converted to Catholicism in 1922 and thought of herself as Catholic, as a result of that. They had three children, who were brought up Catholic. And then [her husband] was killed by the Nazis in 1934, during what was called the Night of Long Knives, which was basically the end of the rule of law in Germany, when Hitler rounded up 90-plus people who he saw as hindering him from absolute power. As it turns out, [my mother’s first husband] was killed by mistake. His name was Willi Schimd, and there were many Wili Schmids in Germany — and they confused it. So he was killed and my mother was visited by Rudolph Hess, who was a deputy to Hitler. And he apologized to her profusely for the mistake and he said, “Consider that his death was that of a martyr for a great cause.”
I was visiting my namesake in New York, a woman named Bettina Warburg. And she was talking about her own family, famous Jewish bankers, having problems getting out of Germany. I was very interested and she said, “Well your mother had problems, too.”
And I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “Well, because she was Jewish.” I came home, which at that point was Los Alamos, New Mexico, and I said, “Mutti, what’s this about your being Jewish?” And she totally dismissed it. She said, “Oh, that was in the past.”
I knew there were some Jewish roots there. I had no idea how difficult this made their relationship. And how difficult, if not impossible, it made it for them to get married. Racial laws forbid marriages between Jews and Aryans. They were the exception to the Nuremberg Laws, a rare exception. I’ve talked to historians and they say it couldn’t have happened. I show them the marriage certificate, which crosses out the part that says, “These are Aryans being married to one another,” and has written, “By special permission of the Fuehrer, she can marry.” I had no idea how much of a motivating factor this was in their leaving Germany.
The other thing I didn’t know was my parents as lovers. We all see our parents as the adults. They are the people approving or disapproving of us, or supporting us. My parents were a loving couple, but in these letters there was the passion. It was just wonderful to think of your parents that way, you know? Just clearly so in love, and breaking the rules, as it were. That was a revelation.
BS: How did your parents meet?
BH: It was total serendipity. It was the early ’30s, and Germany was very depressed. [My mother’s] first husband, was a music critic, and he was offered a job as press secretary to a major German expedition to the Himalayas. This was a big deal expedition, to a mountain called Nanga Parbat. This had huge publicity, because it became politicized by Hitler, in terms of him saying, “We are going to be the first country in the world to conquer an 8,000 meter peak.” So they were press secretaries for this expedition, and my father had been invited on the expedition.
My father didn’t go. He didn’t like the national tone of it, and his father had died and he felt that he needed to look after his mother, and sister, while he completed his doctoral studies in physics. This expedition, which was supposed to showcase Germany and Germans turned out to be greatest mountain climbing disaster to date. Ten people died over a week period. There were huge storms; people could hear their cries. It was grisly.
In the meantime back in Munich there’s my mother, and her husband has just been killed. She’s getting all these telegrams of Germans wandering the mountain, so-and-so’s killed, and we heard his voice yesterday, and she said, “I can’t do this,” and she said to The Alpine Club, “Please send me somebody who can help me sort out what is truth, and what is not, so we can do a press release on this.” And they sent my father, from Stuttgart to Munich. So that is how they met. And I think he fell in love with her immediately.
BS: And your mother was very involved after her first husband’s wrongful death with getting reparations.
BH: Exactly. She was insistent on reparations, and she was fierce. She went to Berlin, she met with top Nazi officials. The other part of this story is that she had a protector, who was the top aide to Hitler, Hitler’s adjutant. His name was Fritz Wiedemann.
BS: And Wiedemann ended up playing a pretty large role in the story, and helping your parents get to America. What was the process of researching him along your parents? Was there information in the letters?
BH: There are numerous references to Wiedemann in the letters. I extrapolated that at one point. I think almost 100 references to him. He first of all helped my mother get reparations. Then there was the question of how she was going to classified. When the Nuremberg Laws were passed, people were classified as full Jews, half Jews, quarter Jews, et cetera. And how was she going to be classified in terms of her life in Germany, and whether she was going to be able to vote, whether she was going to be able to own property, because the laws said if you’re Jewish you can’t do all of this. He was very helpful in that regard too.
Here’s another loop in the story, [my mother’s] birth certificate said that both her parents were Mosaish, which is of the tribe of Moses. But, it happened that her mother had a long-term affair with a Prussian count — who was not Jewish of course. There was this letter where this count said, “Yes, this my child,” and there was enough evidence that the Nazis did classify her as a mischlinge, which means of mixed race, which meant that she had a few more rights.
Wiedemann was also helpful to my father in getting him transferred to the United States. So Wiedemann became really kind of a savoir to them in that regard. The irony of this happening all under Hitler’s nose is enormous.
Wiedemann, then ends up as German Consul in San Francisco, for a couple of reasons. One, it became clear after Kristallnacht that he didn’t have a stomach for anti-Semitic terrorism. Furthermore, he was having an affair with a Jewish princess, a woman who was Jewish and had married into nobility. He had helped other Jews as well. It wasn’t just my mother. He was this fascinating character, neither black nor white, but sort of in this gray area.
BS: What was the process like of reading the letters between 1934 and 1938? There’s a point in the book where you mention the letters becoming more coded, and this increased awareness of how dangerous it was.
BH: Letters were being looked at all the time. My father was considered politically unreliable, because of his outspokenness, and then he hadn’t planted the German flag on the summits of his many first mountaineering ascents. So anyone politically unreliable at that point was under the purview of the Nazis. So, he was, and [my mother] was too. So both of them, I think, were under scrutiny. There are a few letters, “The clouds are forming in the sky here. How is the weather there?” Wiedemann in a lot of the letters is “W.”
BS: In the book you mention your first visit to Germany. I was wondering if you could talk about that experience.
BH: I’d grown up during the war, and it was not cool to be German. I didn’t really want anything to do with that. But I had never met my grandmother, so [in 1952] at the age of thirteen I went with my father to Germany. And it was like, opening up the world. You have your prejudice, you have your mindsets — and it was just a totally different kind of experience for me.
I could still see at that point the scars of war, in Germany. You had bombed-out sections, so there was always a little bit of that ghost there. I felt much more open to Germany after that.
BS: What are you working on now?
Well, when I wrote the book, it was such a huge emotional experience for me. It was totally absorbing. I was living these two lives. I had this life in Philadelphia, and then I had this life that I had just been writing about. So, when I started presenting about the book, people would say, “Oh, what’s your next book?” And I’m sort of looking at them cross-eyed.
I’ve really gotten very interested in Wiedemann, as a very checkered character. We are very quick to put people into corners, good, bad, and et cetera. But here was this man who was obviously swayed by the Nazi doctrine at some point, and yet ends up helping Jews and is ready to be part of a resistance against Hitler — then is regarded as a war criminal by the United States, although he had not been in Germany at all during the war.
The complexity of him as a character interests me. And to extrapolate that in terms of how we ourselves deal with the goods, the bads, the blacks, the whites — and boxes. That’s what I’ve been looking at.
BS: When was the point that you decided that you wanted to turn the story of your parents into a book, when did you decide that was the future for it?
BH: About eight years ago I said, “You know Bettina, you have to do something with these letters, and nobody else is going to do it. You’re going to have to do it.” It took me about a year to get through translating the letters, and I wrote them up in English and circulated them to my family. And then I said, “Wait a second. Here’s a story.” I said, “I have to write this, because this is a universal tale. It’s a universal tale of courage, it’s a universal tale of how people deal with a rising political movement that would affect their lives, and other peoples’ lives even more so, horrendously.” That’s when I knew I had to write a book, and that’s when I quit teaching. I had never written a book, but this was burning inside me.
Brigitta Schuchert graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 2014, with a B.A in Religious Studies. She is currently a Writing Fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi.
[Photo courtesy of Bettina Hoerlin]
Segre, Gino & Bettina Hoerlin. The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age
Sara R. Tompson
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p107.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Segre, Gino & Bettina Hoerlin. The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age. Holt. Oct. 2016. 368p. bibliog. ISBN 9781627790055. $30; ebk. ISBN 9781627790062. SCI
In this narrative biography of physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-54), creator of the first sustained nuclear reaction, husband-and-wife team Segre (physics, emeritus, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Faust in Copenhagen) and Hoerlin (former health commissioner; Steps in Courage: My Parents' Journey from Nazi Germany to America) discuss Fermi's milieu--the rise of fascism in Europe and the rapid advances in understanding particle physics and universal forces--with clarity. The historical passages at times resort to well-worn phrases such as sheer happenstance, but the authors succeed in "approaching Fermi in terms of person and place." They rely upon Laura Fermi's book Atoms in the Family as well as Emilio Segre's short biography Fermi, and include their own research, which further illuminates their subject as a brilliant scientist at a time of great upheaval, a humble family man who worked with, learned from and taught a who's who of 20th-century physicists. VERDICT Readers of history and physics will enjoy learning about this theoretical and experimental physicist, whose name lives on in the fermion particles, the element fermium, and the national accelerator laboratory near Chicago--Sara R. Tompson, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Lib., Archives & Records Section, Pasadena, CA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tompson, Sara R. "Segre, Gino & Bettina Hoerlin. The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 107. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466413057&it=r&asid=73b4ad7c183912018c90968f4c029b44. Accessed 10 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466413057
The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age
Bryce Christensen
113.2 (Sept. 15, 2016): p7.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age. By Gino Segre and Hoerlin Bettina. Oct. 2016. 368p. illus. Holt, $30 (9781627790055). 530.092.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Suspected of Fascist sympathies, the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi looked like a bad security risk to the FBI in 1940. That judgment lends piquant irony to Segre and Hoerlin's illuminating biography of the immigrant genius who earned a prime place among the elite scientists who watched the planet's first mushroom cloud rise above New Mexico sands. Sparing readers the technical details, the authors recount how this genius brought cutting-edge science to his native land, uniting a team of talented countrymen--the Boys of Via Panisperna--intent on assaulting the mysteries of the atom. After many of LI these mysteries yielded to Fermi's revolutionary slow-neutron probing, Fermi parlayed his Nobel Prize into a ticket out of Mussolini's dictatorship and into America, where he constructed the world's first atomic-fission pile on a University of Chicago squash court. As a man of pure scientific devotion, reputedly sharing with the Pontiff a magisterial infallibility, Fermi established himself (despite the FBI's misgivings) as a leading spirit of his new country's Manhattan Project. By exploring Fermi's friendships, his marriage and family life, and his postwar concerns about morality in an atomic age, the authors also give readers glimpses into some of Fermi's personal, nonscientific attributes. A balanced portrait, rich in revealing anecdotes.--Bryce Christensen
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Christensen, Bryce. "The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 7. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464980744&it=r&asid=a723974423a685ead4e062a5b1c4fc0d. Accessed 10 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464980744
The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age
263.34 (Aug. 22, 2016): p100.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age
Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin. Holt, $30 (368p) ISBN 978-1-62779-005-5
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
By placing stunning scientific advances into historical context, this engaging biography of Nobel Prizewinning Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901--1954) captures the life and times of one of the 20th century's most creative and hard-working scientists. Husband-and-wife authors Segre (Ordinary Geniuses), emeritus professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Hoerlin (Steps of Courage), a former Philadelphia health commissioner, quickly construct a captivating image of Fermi, addressing such elements as his love of hands-on work and his long friendship with fellow student and practical joker Franco Rasetti. Drawn to theoretical physics, Fermi helped advance quantum mechanics from mathematical abstraction to experiment, yielding a clearer picture of the atom and explaining beta decay--the Nobel-winning work that laid the foundations for nuclear physics and the modern device-dependent world. The authors describe how Fermi and Laura, his Jewish wife, sought refuge from European fascism and anti-Semitism in the U.S., where Fermi's efforts produced the first nuclear chain reaction and fueled the Manhattan Project. Segre and Hoerlin draw an engaging portrait of a man with boundless curiosity who delighted in his work; fans of pop science and history will thoroughly enjoy this entertaining and accessible biography of a scientist who deserves to be better understood. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age." Publishers Weekly, 22 Aug. 2016, p. 100. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461609338&it=r&asid=89fcc8a634d18b91d4c84fcae8d23d07. Accessed 10 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461609338
Web Exclusive – October 18, 2016
The Pope of Physics
Harnessing the power of the atom
BookPage review by Deborah Mason
While thousands worked on the Manhattan Project, it is doubtful that e = mc2 would have been translated into the atomic bomb without Enrico Fermi. Given his role in ushering in the Atomic Age, it is surprising that, until now, there has been no major biography of Fermi in English; The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age, by husband and wife authors Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin, does an excellent job of filling that gap.
Although Fermi didn’t discover nuclear fission, he arguably made the greatest contributions towards harnessing its power. The first nuclear chain reaction took place in December 1942, at the University of Chicago, under his direct supervision. Afterward, he was a leader in the development of the atomic bomb.
The main problem for any biographer of Fermi is the nature of his work, which depended upon complex mathematical models, an intuitive understanding of the workings of the atomic nucleus, and intricate experimentation. Happily, the authors’ clear explanations ensure that the reader is not only able to follow Fermi’s contributions to science, but also understand their impact on his life story.
Segrè and Hoerlin both had family connections with Fermi: His uncle was one of Fermi’s closest colleagues, and her father worked with him on the Manhattan project. Together, they paint an affectionate and honest portrait of a man who was defined by his contradictions. Fermi, nicknamed “The Pope” for his infallibility, was both a theoretical and an experimental physicist, nearly a contradiction in terms. He was deeply apolitical, but politics nevertheless molded his life, from his increasingly uneasy relationship with Mussolini, which culminated in his arrival as a refugee to the United States, to his defense of Robert Oppenheimer during the McCarthy era. Unemotional, he inspired great love from his wife, friends and colleagues, and yet his own children suffered from his aloofness.
In all, this comprehensive and enjoyable biography is a valuable introduction to the life of Fermi.
Discover Enrico Fermi in 'The Pope of Physics'
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Authors looking to mine science history can find no richer lode than physics in the early- to mid-20th century. New subatomic discoveries and the groundbreaking theories of relativity and quantum mechanics challenged and reshaped scientific understanding about the nature of matter and energy, space and time.
The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age, by Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin.
The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age, by Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin.
Then in 1938, while the world was being shaken by the rise of Fascism in Europe -- most notably Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy -- came the momentous discovery of nuclear fission and the rapid realization that the phenomenon could be used to build a bomb with previously unimaginable destructive power.
Stories of the science and technology of that period have produced a vast body of literature. But to a biographer's delight, behind those discoveries is a rich cast of characters. One of the most important yet not fully appreciated of those is Enrico Fermi (1901-54), whose near infallibility in both the theoretical and experimental realms led his Italian colleagues to give him the nickname The Pope of Physics -- the title of a new biography by University of Pennsylvania physics professor Gino Segrè and his wife, former Philadelphia health commissioner Bettina Hoerlin.
Few writers are better positioned than that duo to bring Fermi's story to light. Segrè is the nephew of Nobel Laureate Emilio Segrè, Fermi's first graduate student and long-term collaborator.
Hoerlin, the daughter of a physicist who fled Europe to escape the rising tide of European anti-Semitism, grew up in the Atomic City of Los Alamos, N.M., where Fermi was one of the key scientists developing the atomic bomb. The Segrè family was part of the same wave of refugees, as were Fermi and his Jewish wife, Laura. Combining family lore with intensive research, Segrè and Hoerlin offer unique insights into Fermi's life and work, set against the background of politics and the early years of the Atomic Age.
Readers first meet the young Fermi as an exceptional student whose intuitive grasp of physics quickly leaves his professors far behind. At that time, Italy was a backwater in physics, but Fermi's appointment to a professorship soon changes the dynamic. He assembles a group of students and colleagues who became known as The Boys of Villa Panisperna for their relative youth and adventurous spirits as well as their scientific prowess.
Physicist Enrico Fermi in a photograph probably taken between 1943 and 1946.(Department of Energy)
Physicist Enrico Fermi in a photograph probably taken between 1943 and 1946.
(Department of Energy)
Fermi's first major accomplishment was theoretical. In the type of radioactivity known as beta decay, a nucleus emits an an electron that does not carry off as much energy as physicists initially expected. Fermi postulated that a previously unknown subatomic particle that he named the neutrino ("little neutral one" in Italian) accounts for the rest. Because the neutrino was undetectable at the time, the theory met with considerable resistance. However, it fit so well with experimental results that physicists soon accepted it.
His next triumph was experimental: the generation of beams of "slow" neutrons that were able to penetrate into the nuclei of a target material and create new radioactive isotopes. This work proved to have great scientific and technological value and led to Fermi's 1938 Nobel Prize.
Largely apolitical, Fermi was acceptable to Mussolini as one of the first 30 distinguished appointees to the Royal Italian Academy in 1929. For nine years, he was able to ignore the rising tide of Fascist ideology. But in July 1938, as Mussolini launched an anti-Semitic campaign, Fermi began to lay the groundwork for his family's escape to the U.S. When he and Laura left for Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in December, they knew that they would not return to their beloved homeland for many years.
In the U.S. at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, Fermi quickly emerged as a leader in nuclear fission. After achieving a chain reaction, he was a central figure in developing an atomic bomb.
Biographies of physicists tend to focus on personal quirks. With the down-to-earth Fermi, that is not possible, though the prologue opens the book with a memorable anecdote from the Trinity test that ignited the Atomic Age.
Enrico Fermi, circa 1950. (
National Archives/Argonne National Laboratory
)
Enrico Fermi, circa 1950.
(
National Archives/Argonne National Laboratory
)
Immediately after the blast, Fermi "began tearing a sheet of paper into small pieces and then dropping them from his upraised hand.... [A]s the front of the shock wave hit, the midair pieces were blown a short distance away." He paced off the distance to their landing points and soon had an estimate of the blast's force. The number from his simple test was remarkably close to the magnitude determined by detailed measurements a week later.
"None of the physicists was surprised," the authors note. The Pope of Physics was right as usual.
Fred Bortz is the author of the twentieth-century history Physics: Decade by Decade.
The Pope of Physics
Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age
Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin
(Henry Holt, 368 pages, $30, October 18, 2016