And taking away the popes temporal domain, he did not recognize it. There were no diplomatic relations between rome, between the Italian Republic and the vatican, that didnt happen until 1929 so for a while he really could be the only pole. So set the stage for in a little bit, fermi is this young man, completely unknown even in his own country and within a decade is going to become this international star. But its during a time when fascism is in rain, full rain in the 1920s, how does that affect the young fermi . What role does that play in his development. There he is in his 20s, he comes from a modest family, his parents had not gone to college. There was nobody else in italy at the time. He was the leader and he was just purely thinking about physics as far as i can tell. The only, he joined the fascist party but cellini appointed him to the Royal Academy, double his salary and he said hey, double my salary is a good thing. So ill pledge allegiance to mussolini. He will be father one way or another, as long as i can do science. I think he was amazingly apolitical and this was a hard aspect of him for us to accept. Both of our parents fled from , in the case of gino, italy and fascism in the case of my parents, and asked nazi germany and that somebody could be totally apolitical is sort of against my brain but that is what he was. He lived for physics. Physics was his religion, going back to the pope analogy, i think it was his calling. And he joined the fascist party, he thought it was a little ridiculous when he was made a fellow in the Royal Academy of italy, he had to wear a uniform and a fancy hat so he was not into any pomp and circumstance at all. His venture in italy was a physicist who was a state senator, the mayor of rome at that time was a physicist so its not like he didnt have any role models there for that mix of science and politics but he chose basically to keep his head low and maybe he hoped it would go away. He uses a wonderful term at some point when things get later on, when you get more tense and he talked about being a colleague of his, talk about physics as soma and this was a term from huxley, brave new world and soma was a mythical drug that you could take to reduce stress and not have to Pay Attention to things around you so i think that he well knew he was not paying attention to things around him. He was on soma. I might add that he came to the United States in the summers of 1930 for the first time in 33, 34 and 35. He came and he came to life, he liked the United States immediately and he came to like it more and more and i think if it hadnt been for his wife who was very attached to italy and to the family there, i think he would have left italy. So he certainly wasnt political but he didnt like fascism and he didnt really like the italian way of life. Flesh out on that a little bit because in the beginning of the book you dedicated to ingram and you make a point of saying in the book that when it when he came in the war started he was considered in a alien and yet he works on the most important project for the us of the whole war effort so how does he become so attached and cz himself as an immigrant or maybe somebody who was born in the wrong place. And wild up in the wrong place in 1938 i should also mention i think you are trying to do this, chronologically which makes sense but we should welcome mention that fermi did marry a woman who was jewish so as things started tightening up in italy and it became clearer and clearer that the racist laws were being imposed, i think there was a growing awareness and i think that awareness increased by the fact that he took a number of trips to the United States in the summer, the first time he came was in 1930. He came with a laura has wife and they went to michigan and he fell in love. He fell in love with the United States. Whats that wonderful term . Im jumping ahead but he really came almost every summer after that to the United States. He loved the freedom of it. It was a very different system in the United States, probably a hierarchal european, the professors, it was very different and he appreciated that. He appreciated the equalization, but teamwork and love the american culture. What i was trying to get at was, where i jumped ahead was that at one point when he decides that he is going to stay here, he tries to convince heisenberg to come from germany and stay in the United States and his quote there, gino, you do it better than i. This goes back to the summer of 1939. He had already immigrated to the United States and he said in italy i was a big shot but here im just a physicist like all the other guys around and its so much better than being a big shot. I wanted to stay here and heisenberg said my country needs me, my people need me in the future. I am a loyal german area im a physicist. And he was, he didnt dress fancy. This is a little bit of a sin, he even added water to his wine when he drank it. Interesting. Lets talk a little bit about his party. Can i ask both of you to sort of independently because we have more than one person. Budding scientist, so what would you say was his creative achievement in science . You can have two different perspectives on it, was it physics or his impact or what he did for the war effort . I started by saying i was in on and i think larry will agree with me on this, he was the only physicist in the 20th century to have achieved both the very top of the profession as both a theorist and anexperimentalist , not through einstein boar or feynman and also hes the last physicist to basically work in all fields of physics. So i would say, if i could pick if i had to three or four things in physics, one at 25, fermis statistical phases for all our doctors and staff, my conductors think about electricity and the introduction, there were two forces in nature, gravity and electromagnetism, introduced in the theory. He was also the first one to use neutrons to bombard nuclei and thats the base of Nuclear Physics and the basis of how fusion and how the bomb was built, what reactors are built, nuclear jettison so he did a lot. And my physicist associate will name three more now. Contributions and it is probably not quite the word to use but i would say that fermi has to be remembered for being the person more than any Single Person who was responsible, how you feel about it is another thing but who was responsible for making of the atom bomb. He changed our world. He changed the way we think about the world, he changed navigation, international relations, it opened up a whole new era and that has to be a stand alone in some kind of way i think. So as controversial as it is and maybe will get into that more with the questions , i would say that his Research First and his experiments first and at the university of chicago, underneath the stadium where he has his First Successful experiment in controllingNuclear Fission , the Chain Reaction which inevitably led to the making of the bomb, that has to go off high on my list, he was also a great teacher. Depending on how you countthe numbers , there were eight or 10 nobel prizes but he set the style both in italy and for people from Northern Europe in the 30s starting to work with him and postwar america, when the people who trained the likes of the prs here on the stage were trained so. Huge impact. Huge impact in terms of the people he talks. Yes. Lets talk a little bit about the beginning of the atomic age. I think when you make the movie, thats going to be one of the most exciting scenes, putting that atomic pile together. I always have to see its the most unbelievable part of it that the university of chicago ever had a Football Team but. It was a defunct stage as i recall. Obviously not a very active team. So play out this team tree, how did he put together the team and, is it unique that fermi was a person who could actually do this, create the first selfsustaining Chain Reaction of course as the team points out is the thing that makes it possible. All right. The pile is, you coined the term pile. Its a bunch of bricks with little balls ofuranium in their. With some control rods and when you pull out the control rods , he said we will have a Chain Reaction. , originally it was going to be built in the Argonne Forest but they had trouble with some of the construction work. So fermi went to the head of the project and he said no problem, theres this washboard there, we will just be in the guys, we will put all the bricks in. 45,000 30 pound led bricks. We will have two ships, two shifts of 12 hours and we can do this in 15 days and by the way, he had a prospect to arthur compton. Youd better not tell the president of the university we are doing this. Can you imagine that happening today . In all fairness, he had approved the project but not be experiment. Not the experiment. He didnt know it might blow the campus up. How dangerous was this . In the end it puts out half a watt, not a whole lot but at some really amazing point in the story, fermi says lets stop for lunch and they leave the atomic pile their unguarded and they go off to lunch for an hour and a half and they come back and its right where its supposed to be. I did think that they locked the door. [laughter] but one of the things we were talking about before lunch and larry and i are both here, we will get there yet but he seemed to have always this perfect confidence that things were going to work and he had this already as a kid. He had no teachers as a parent. He said, i know how to do things. I will make it work. And was it dangerous . Probably not, not with fermi there because everybody trusted him. Theres fermi, hes done the calculations. He told them you know, the day before, okay. Were going to put these last few bricks in, the 57 layer of bricks and it will go critical when you pull out the last of the control rods and that is the way it went. I must say that the story of how that happened underneath stag field was a remarkable story, when we went to the archives in chicago where we are both in boxes and theres glass on two sides and they make you wear gloves, a ton of that happened in italy and we went through the italian archives, no gloves. You could handle whatever you wanted. Have coffee while you are studying. But at the university of chicago, they are very careful about it and understandably so but im reading this account of what happened there underneath stag field when Nuclear Fission was successfully found and or controlled and it was such a, i was totally thrown by this, unexpectedly emotional moment to read because you know the world is going to change. And i started crying. I started bursting into tears and gino is sort of looking at me and one of the archivists come rushing in, they come rushing in with a box of peanuts for me. And she said just be careful not to drip but its an amazing story and its one of my favorite parts of the book because you have this room full of 50 people who basically trusting fermi, theyre saying were going to be okay. They could have been blown to smithereens as to the campus in the city. The mayor is there and there is one woman who is the only woman in the room and shes the youngest person in the room, i think she was 26 at that point, Leona Marshall and she is doing theneutron count. Its her voice, its the female voice. Ive always thought this would make a great opera, i dont know if anybodys composer here but the neutron count keeps on accelerating so she starts out in 100, 1009 was thinking itwould be a great aria. Up to the high c which is the pile has gone critical. So it was quite a suspenseful time but the school had faith that fermi knew what he was doing. He was totally, this is just our experiment. I think to add to that, when you pull out the last control rod and the bill goes critical , it generated only half a watt but its increasing and its increasing exponentially. So they are all waiting for fermi to put the rod back in. And he kept wanting to check that the curve really was exponential so it took him slightly less than four minutes to give the order to put the rod end and the people who were there, those four minutes they kept saying when is he going to give the order to put the rod back in western mark they didnt say anything because it was fermi but if it had been anybody else i think they might be yellingat him, put the rod back in. So this is now a chart, fermi joins three labsdedicated to the Manhattan Project and this is as you say science. Then the bombgoes off. And you know it works. Now its no longer science, you have to make a decision as to whether to drop this or not. How does fermi feel at this point . Hes still thinking of it as just science or does he know thousands are going to die because we made this thing and it actually is going to work the way we planned for it to work. Well, i think ill start. Please. Its difficult to know exactly how he felt. He felt in terms of science, he felt that ignorance is the worst possible condition you can have and anything is, you know, that knowledge is something inevitable and that if we dont reach that knowledge, somebody else will. That the laws of nature will be revealed, they will uncover them and as a physicist, that he felt this was what his role was, this is what his calling was. So the bomb gets successfully to trinity, as larry just said. And then the decision has to be reached, what does one do with it but actually even before that bomb off in july, in may people in washington who at that point had some foresight said we are going to have to decide what to do with this, it looks like we are going to actually make a bomb and were going to have to decide what to do with it so what do they do . They do what everybody does, they appoint a committee and this is probably an interim committee because it was going to be about the bomb. And with that committee which was a distinguished committee ofpeople, they had a Scientific Panel , for scientists who would buy the interim committee, the committee would advise them. That was the sequence. On the interim committee was oppenheimer of course and fermi was on that along with two other scientists, and they were asked to make a recommendation and they met in los alamos on june 15 and 16th, i believe and there was tremendous controversy about what should be done, should there be a demonstration . There were a whole group of physicists who felt there should be a demonstration on the remote place and that demonstration, we could invite japan, maybe some other countries to that demonstration. They would see the power of this weapon and they would, it would present prevent further words. The other camp was, thats not going to work, the logistics are horrendous for one thing and we need to drop it to show the japanese in particular, germans had alreadysurrendered , but show the japanese that wehave a weapon of mass destruction. And that was the controversy and this committee, this Scientific Panel, of course just looked at it and they made the recommendation that there was no viable alternative other than to drop the bomb on a major city and a Major Industrial center. Fermi was part of that. Fermi looked very much at the technical parts of this but he was part of that decisionmaking. At the same time, when they made that recommendation they said that they had, in making that recommendation that they had no special competence. To make the judgment, the political judgment to drop a bomb, they werevery modest in that regard, saying we are not sure scientists are the best people to make these decisions. But that was the decision that was made and we look very hard, there was nothing that we could find in our research that had any evidence that fermi was hesitant in making that decision. So dont forget, these scientists who were in lost alamos had by and large fled fascism and they were very patriotic about this country. Its obviously a very controversial decision, many thought that this weapon was so powerful that it might bring an end to all wars. That was the view that niels bohr discussed. With lostalamos. And there are physicists who differ. There was a group in chicago, a committee headed by a gentleman, his name is james frank that made a recommendation that it not be used. As a war weapon. Obviously a very tricky one and clearly the president of the United States, you have to remember this was a war and are you going to not use it to be the cause of the danger of bringing into the world such a weapon . Are you going to then tell the parents of men and women in the United States, men and women who were killed in a war that goes on. Men, pretty much meant. That did not use a weapon because of moral scruples . Its very difficult. Dont forget the United States had invested 2 billion in the Manhattan Project at that point and 2 billion and what are we going to show for it . A weapon we are not going to use . Thats a hard for politicians to justify and people were also concerned that if it wasnt used, future scientistsfunding would be in jeopardy. But i think that wasnt the primary. It was all secondary. It was in there. It was an inordinate project. There were 100,000 people behind it. By the way, it was so secret that when fdr died and truman became president , secretary of war, the very same day president truman orsomething, they said i want to tell you. They didnt know the atom bomb had been developed. Im going to ask if two of you want to read a passage. I thought youd never ask. Sure. And guess what im going to read . I had mentioned to you that a very exciting part of this book was for me anyway the whole thing beneath the football field. So this is the scene where the experiment is successful and people were not cheering. They knew the import of this. People were happy the experiment had gone well. They were happy they didnt all get blown up but they understood also the implications of this. So that was in the evening by the time they left but one of the things that the head of the chicago experiment compton had to do was let the people in washington know how this experiment went. And that call was going to be put to james cronin who was president of harvard but also led the Major Committee in washington that was responsible for coming up with an answer about what to do with the bomb. So cronin called james in washington and as was indicated, this was a very secret effort that hutchinson, who didnt know about it so they had to over the phone decide things a bit so they talk a little bit in disguise here so this is compton talking to cronin and he says jim, you will be interested to know the italian navigator, who could that be . Has just landed in the new world. Cronin cited response was that so, are the natives friendly . I answered everyone landed safe and happy. Safe and happy. At the end of that conversation, as dartmouth darkness began to descend that december afternoon, those in the squash court filtered slowly out and then who had been the first to greet fermi of the pile was the last physicist to leave in the evening. When he finally filed out, one of the guards stationed outside asked him whats going on doctor . Did something happen in there . Something had indeed happened. None of those in the squash court forgot being there when the pile went critical. It only generated a maximum power of half a watt, scarcely enough to light a flashlight battery. However if that ray had been allowed to grow unchecked it would have killed everyone in the court and read havoc on the city of chicago. So ill read something from the very beginning of the book in the prologue. I knowwhere it is. Thats a swap there. But obama, they werent sure the bomb would work so there was a test at trinity and there was a lot of concession, they had a bedding work on whether it was going to work or not. And how big of a bomb it would be so they are all lying in the desert in new mexico in the desert, looking at the distance, at the site where the ball is due to explode. And it finally went up. The famous mushroom cloud. And the reactions were very. My uncle, i have an uncle that was fermis First Student in rome and they worked together a lot at los alamos. He was at fermis side when the bomb went off. His impression, he always tried to imitate fermi couldnt quite get there, he wasnt quite as irrational and he saw it and i was thinking oh my god, weve set the world on fire. He said its impossible, fermi did it but the reactions were, some of them are on record, oppenheimer remembered the lines from the book, the bhagavadgita scriptures, i am becoming death, the destroyer of worlds. Another physicist who sat there express themselves in much more prosaic language. We are all scientists. Well, ill go on, more of what fermi was doing and this is now reading from the book, as the blast went off, a few seconds after the blast fermi stood up and began carrying a large piece of paper and then dropping them from his operating hand, 40 seconds later the shockwave hit and the mid air pieces were blown a short distance away. The distance to where they landed some feet away, he consulted a little chart he had prepared a forehand. Shortly afterwards, fermi told those around him he estimated the blast force is roughly equal to 10 tons of tnt. He was right, by the way. Not on exactly but treated as another experiment. Were going to draw this part to a close and ask you guys questions but please join me in thanking them. [applause] we have two people in the aisles here with microphones, i will remind you that this is being recorded, so if you want to raise your hand, until the microphone reaches you, i will call on you. What happened to the pile at the university of chicago . Is it still there . They worked very hard and they rebuilt it where they originally wanted to have it at the oregon forest. So the pile was known as cp one, cd2 was assembled in the end and increased in the Argonne Forest site. There are still, we just got an email from a friend of ours at the university of chicago saying he thinks he may have discovered one of the original bricks and he wants to have it tested. The bricks weighed 20 pounds. These are three bricks so they are not insignificant in size and when the Construction Company basically faked out on the job and the physicists in the building got the help incidentally of some very strong kids in chicago that were from the neighborhood of the backyards, these were basically immigrant kids who helped them all the bricks and it took a highpaying, this is 25 feet high and it was big. So. And it was unheated in december in chicago. Any questions . Could you stand up please . Youve written rebooked before this and this was the first time the two of you collaborated, how do you deal with whos going to write what . I got to write the sexy parts. No, i think you are asking gino, why dont you talk about it thenill give you my perspective. The draft went back and forth, sometimes it was primarily physics, i would probably write the first draft. If it was primarily politics, bettina would write the first draft but it all went back and forth between us, thats the way it was because thats the way i remember it. Thats accurate. Is ian back there . How did the us choose an Italian Fascist to head up this project . How did i want . How did the United States choose an Italian Fascist to head up their Manhattan Project . Well, there are a couple of ways to interpret that. The fbiinvestigated him. That hes a fascist, dont trust him, he should not be cleared for government work. A professor at chicago was on the project told the head of the project said hey, if you want to talk to somebody about how to do this, talk to fermi. And he was cleared. I think it might be a little unfair to characterize him as an Italian Fascist area he belonged to the Italian Fascist party so thats technically. When he escaped italy, it was actually via stockholm. He actually escaped, picked up his nobel prize on the way to the United States. So thats the way they had very carefully strategized that, that would be how they would get out of italy. When he got the nobel prize, he did not get the fascist boot nor did he dress in the uniform of the academy of the Royal Academy. He was not identifying as a fascist and the newspapers in italy were all over him, the story there was not that he won the nobel. The story was that he was being disrespectful to italy. They did not regard him as a fascist. When he came to this country, he was not regarded as a fascist, he was regarded as an eminent is assist who could get things done and who had been introduced to the United States when he landed with his family in new york on january 2, 1939. He turned to them beaming and said we have just established the American Branch as a family. So i think he didnt identify that way. And he was not identified that way even though the army at one point thought him a risk. Here he was working on the most secret project. He hada bodyguard. He had a name, this was when he was at los alamos, henry farber was his name. That was the name he traveled by but he was considered a loyal american. Let me add to that, the Italian University system is a state system so the universities essentially all of them are state universities and in 1931 all professors were asked to swear their loyalty to mussolini and basically to join the fascist party. 1200 professors at the time, only 12 refused it and those were all emigrating or reaching retirement so they felt hey, if we dont do this then we will be replaced by people who are really fascist but this is something we should do so fascism in italy is of course, was a terrible thing. Its not quite the same i think as nazism was in germany. It wasnt that terrible. As nokias in. Well, maybe not totally. Totally bad and terrible. How about here . Please stand up so the camera can see you. I think its odd were talking about fascism in 2016. I cant imagine why. But i do wonder at sort of a love of physics and that yielding a passively about the world. Both in terms of his joining the party but more in terms of him building a machine that you cant possibly use and then saying lets use it against an enemy whose air force weve already destroyed and the bomb at will conventionally. He never thought about what it meant to have an atomic weapon or if he did, it wasnt as much fun as the experiment and im wondering about that, thathas city , sort of in a gene way. Pacitti, lets also say that he was italian but this was the recommendation made by the Scientific Panel of the interim committee which was, had other than fermi had the three most distinguished physicists involve on the Manhattan Project, namely lawrence and oppenheimer. So bettina, take it away. We literature the fact that something that bothered us throughout the book in terms of our own stance and the challenge for this book in terms of me was trying to look at this person for who he was and not to through my lens always. And its very tempting for all of us to look at the world through our own lens which means that of course you have to speak out, of course you have to. And it doesnt apply at all to today but of course you have to speak out. And here was somebody who was just in a priesthood kind of of, who didnt feel that way. But i think its hard to make a judgment about this in terms of what it if this had been arrived at by a country, another country, they have used it . Would london have been a victim of the atomic bomb . If germany had gottenthere first . So there are those questions, its a complicated answer. I dont have an answer actually, its so complicated but its one that faces today in terms of a threat of nuclear war and how do we handle that. But people here had almost 2 months to discuss from what i can understand anyway, if there is an atomic bomb headed our way through a missile or something, we have about 10 minutes the other day i think Elizabeth Warren said it was four minutes to make a decision, these decisions are not easy, we dont have a mechanism in place to make them today. I would add to that that at the time, the air force, the Japanese Air Force was destroyed but it was believed that there would have to be a land invasion and that there would be losses, large losses involved in that because there was a group of the Japanese Armed forces that would fight to the very end so that also in that mix of decision. Given the secrecy and the number of people who worked on this and the number of Government People who had to know something, what do you know about how the discussion went . Did any of those thousands of people say no or leave . Well, theres two questions there in terms of how it was a secret project and how it took effect in state so secret and it is amazing to think about because it was, academia governance, industry. They were all in secret about this among 10,000 people working on it and yet it was a secret project. So were their discussions . Yes there were discussions. There were discussions that lost alamos. Again, prior to even the test at trinity being successful. There was a scientist that lost alamos named Robert Wilson who insisted to fermi, to oppenheimer that there be discussions about this so that people could air their opinions. The decisionmaking is software for scientists, they knew about the discussions, they knew about the controversies and they made their judgment for better or worse, they made her judgment. But it was widely discussed within the lab. If that makes sense, externally people didnt know about it. We havent even mentioned laura and shes quite an amazing woman, she didnt know. She didnt know what had happened when fermi came back from the test in the trinity test. She knew that he had not driven home that night. And whether that was, he was exhausted or he was emotionally spent, we dont know, but it was there for him not to be at the drivers wheel and she had no idea what had happened. And others, there were mainly why it is at lost alamos, afterwards it was dropped. Lost alamos i think there was initially great jubilation that the war was one and then the horrors of it became known and began and there were moral questions that were asked and were debated, scientists formed a group called the association of lost alamo scientists which the acronym for that quickly is called alas. And these were people who were saying we have to figure out what to do about the atomic future and fermi did not join that group. I would add to that i believe also as if anybody left theproject , as far as we know there was only one person who left, a man named, a polish physicist who had emigrated to england and came over as part of the English Mission and then joseph grotto bought he left at the end of 1944 when it was beginning to come clear that the germans did not have the capacity to build the weapon