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The Enrico Fermi Award is a scientific award conferred by the President of the United States. It is awarded to honor scientists of international stature for their lifetime achievement in the development, use or production of energy.
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- Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi (Italian: [enˈriːko ˈfermi]; 29 September 1901...
- Enrico Fermi Prize
Enrico Fermi (Italian: [enˈriːko ˈfermi]; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian and later naturalized American physicist, renowned for being the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and a member of the Manhattan Project.
On November 16, 1954, President Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission honored Enrico Fermi with a special award for his lifetime of accomplishments in physics and, in particular, for his vital role in the development of atomic energy.
- Overview
- Early life and education
- European career
Enrico Fermi (born Sept. 29, 1901, Rome, Italy—died Nov. 28, 1954, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) Italian-born American scientist who was one of the chief architects of the nuclear age. He developed the mathematical statistics required to clarify a large class of subatomic phenomena, explored nuclear transformations caused by neutrons, and directed the f...
Fermi’s father, Alberto Fermi, was a chief inspector of the government railways; his mother was Ida de Gattis, a schoolteacher. In 1918 Enrico Fermi won a scholarship to the University of Pisa’s distinguished Scuola Normale Superiore, where his knowledge of recent physics benefited even the professors. After receiving a doctorate in 1922, Fermi use...
Fermi returned home to Italy in 1924 to a position as a lecturer in mathematical physics at the University of Florence. His early research was in general relativity, statistical mechanics, and quantum mechanics. Examples of gas degeneracy (appearance of unexpected phenomena) had been known, and some cases were explained by Bose-Einstein statistics, which describes the behaviour of subatomic particles known as bosons. Between 1926 and 1927, Fermi and the English physicist P.A.M. Dirac independently developed new statistics, now known as Fermi-Dirac statistics, to handle the subatomic particles that obey the Pauli exclusion principle; these particles, which include electrons, protons, neutrons (not yet discovered), and other particles with half-integer spin, are now known as fermions. This was a contribution of exceptional importance to atomic and nuclear physics, particularly in this period when quantum mechanics was first being applied.
This seminal work brought Fermi an invitation in 1926 to become a full professor at the University of Rome. Shortly after Fermi took up his new position in 1927, Franco Rasetti, a friend from Pisa and another superb experimentalist, joined Fermi in Rome, and they began to gather a group of talented students about them. These included Emilio Segrè, Ettore Majorana, Edoardo Amaldi, and Bruno Pontecorvo, all of whom had distinguished careers. Fermi, a charismatic, energetic, and seemingly infallible figure, clearly was the leader—so much so that his colleagues called him “the Pope.”
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In 1929 Fermi, as Italy’s first professor of theoretical physics and a rising star in European science, was named by Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini to his new Accademia d’Italia, a position that included a substantial salary (much larger than that for any ordinary university position), a uniform, and a title (“Excellency”).
During the late 1920s, quantum mechanics solved problem after problem in atomic physics. Fermi, earlier than most others, recognized that the field was becoming exhausted, however, and he deliberately changed his focus to the more primitively developed field of nuclear physics. Radioactivity had been recognized as a nuclear phenomenon for almost two decades by this time, but puzzles still abounded. In beta decay, or the expulsion of a negative electron from the nucleus, energy and momentum seemed not to be conserved. Fermi made use of the neutrino, an almost undetectable particle that had been postulated a few years earlier by the Austrian-born physicist Wolfgang Pauli, to fashion a theory of beta decay in which balance was restored. This led to recognition that beta decay was a manifestation of the weak force, one of the four known universal forces (the others being gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong force).
- Lawrence Badash
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1938 was awarded to Enrico Fermi "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"
The Enrico Fermi Presidential Award is one of the oldest and most prestigious science and technology honors bestowed by the U.S. Government.
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The Fermi Award, which dates to 1956, honors the memory of Enrico Fermi, leader of the group of scientists who on December 2, 1942, achieved the first self-sustained, controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago. The award is administered by the U.S.
