Ettore Majorana: The "Genius" Physicist Who Predicted Neutrons And Then Disappeared Completely

Fermi put him alongside geniuses such as Galilei and Newton. In 1938, he vanished.

JAMES FELTON
Senior Staff Writer

Published
March 28, 2023



A black and white photo of Ettore Majorana.
Ettore Majorana in his youth. Image credit: Kanijoman/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

From when he was a small child, it was clear Ettore Majorana was going to be a brilliant mathematician or physicist. Born in Sicily in 1906, Majorana completed high school early, before heading to Rome to study engineering and then physics, under the supervision of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi.

Fermi – awarded the prize "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" – was impressed by his student, who became his colleague.

"There are several categories of scientists in the world; those of second or third rank do their best but never get very far. Then there is the first rank, those who make important discoveries, fundamental to scientific progress," Fermi reportedly said of Majorana. "But then there are the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton. Majorana was one of these."

In his short career, Majorana achieved a lot. In a universe where Majorana was more inclined to publish his work, he might even have won a Nobel Prize for discovering the neutron (which was actually given to James Chadwick in 1935). In 1931, Irène Curie–Joliot and Frédéric Joliot studied radiation from beryllium hitting paraffin wax, pushing out protons from hydrogen atoms as it did so, and making protons move and recoil at speed.

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/ettore-majorana-the-genius-physicist-who-predicted-neutrons-and-then-disappeared-completely-68189