Episode Details

In 1923, a young Enrico Fermi joked that whoever figured out how to release the energy in E=mc² would be blown to pieces. Less than two decades later, he built the first nuclear reactor. This deep dive explores the man called the last universal physicist, equally at home with theory and experiment.

We trace his grief after his brother Giulio's death, his self-taught mastery of physics, the Via Panisperna Boys in Rome, Fermi statistics, and his neutrino theory rejected by Nature. Then we cover the slow neutron discovery, a Nobel Prize partly based on a mistake, his escape from fascist Italy, Chicago Pile-1, the Trinity test, and his opposition to the hydrogen bomb.

• Why fermions refuse to share quantum states, and why that gives matter its volume
• How a wooden table versus a marble one revealed the power of slow neutrons
• Missing nuclear fission, and Ida Noddack's ignored warning
• The coded message after the first controlled chain reaction on December 2, 1942
• Estimating the Trinity blast yield with falling strips of paper