Science, art, and the discovery of nuclear fission.

Abstract

On December 2, 1942, the first self-sustained nuclear reaction was initiated at the University of Chicago by a group of physicists led by Enrico Fermi. The experiment took place in an old squash court and became one of the landmarks of the nuclear era. Today the site is commemorated by a sculpture called Nuclear Energy , commissioned by the University of Chicago from a British sculptor, Henry Moore. Fermi and Moore were widely influential in science and the arts of their times, respectively. Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) was born in Rome and was awarded a doctorate at the University of Pisa. He then worked in Gottingen in Germany, in Leyden in Holland, and for 2 years at the University of Florence. He eventually became Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome. In 1938 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics “for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons” (1, 2). Fermi also postulated the presence of the neutrino, a particle …