s a youngster, Fermi attended the public schools of Rome, learned Latin and Greek, and had no trouble in reciting poems [1]. Aer the baccalaureat he enrolled at the Scuola Normale Superiore, at Pisa, to study mathematics and the language of science, i.e. German. e charming lad soon taught his teachers: as a second year’s student he lectured on the quantum theory and the Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. Fermi’s first post-doc trip abroad was to Gottingen, the contemporary Mecca of theoretical physics. ere he worked with Max Born and the latter’s students Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan, and published on ergodicity and the adiabatic principle. ese papers got translated into German and were noticed by Paul Ehrenfest, the renowned specialist in the field. As a result of a first contact, through George Uhlenbeck, Fermi visited Leiden in September-December 1924 and made the acquaintance of Lorentz, Einstein, Kronig and Goudsmit. At the time the quantization of a ‘gas’ of equal particles had his particular attention. In 1926 this research gave way to his first major contribution to theoretical physics; it was on the ‘Quantization of the ideal monoatomic gas’. e leading idea was to treat the translation of molecules between the parallel walls of a container as a periodic, and therefore quantizable, phenomenon. Instead of the container Fermi, next, posited a radial potential field around a central point – say, the origin of a Cartesian system of axes –, much like the Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. e monoatomic molecules were said to behave like harmonic oscillators of frequency siν and to be subject to quantum numbers similar to those of the electrons, here s1, s2 and s3, for the three axes, with si = s1 + s2 + s3. e total energy w of one such atom will thus be sihν. Apparently, an energy equal to 0 may only be realized in one way, an energy of 1hν in three ways, etc. So the A
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Jan 1, 2022
Ryan Dahn + 1
Open Access
