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Who was Enrico Fermi?2024 Dec 27
Linked is a blog post biographying the physicist Enrico Fermi and his contribution to the Manhattan Project and how that came to happen.
Every great scientist has an anecdote that characterizes him (or her): Oppenheimer’s poisoned apple, Einstein’s days as a patent clerk, Feynman’s lockpicking. Fermi’s characteristic anecdote, for my reckoning, comes from Rhodes’s account of Fermi’s time at Los Alamos. Los Alamos was in the desert of New Mexico, and, as a lark, the scientists there adopted much of the dress and activities of cowboys, including swing dancing. Fermi, awkward nerd that he was, had no idea how to swing dance, and spent an entire night sitting on the edge of the dance and furiously trying to work out the pattern in his head. At some point, he got up, asked the instructor (one of the scientist’s wives) to dance with him, and, much to her surprise, carefully led her through all the steps with grim determination. This was Fermi in a nutshell: identify what’s interesting, work furiously to understand it, and then end up at the front of it.
Linked is a blog post biographying the physicist Enrico Fermi and his contribution to the Manhattan Project and how that came to happen.