I believe that 15 years ago for maybe 20, gino on the death of another famous physicist, the greatest thing you could say about him is that you were so proud to be holding the same union card. [laughter] as someone who also held it and i also feel very lucky to have been asked to interview the two about this book. The physicists physicist may not be wellknown to the public that is in fact one of the greatest heroes of anybody whos done a comic physics. Its so amazing to have this fabulous and authoritative story of his life. We have a preview from the wall street journal that has just come out that says exactly that. So it is a fabulous book and i want to get started by asking for two of them to tell us what their motivation was for writing a book that isnt as wellknown as the einstein. M. I. Too loud . Maybe i will start out i was born in italy and came to the United States as a baby but then went back and he was a hero in italy and went on to become a physicist committee was a double hero. As larry said, hes the physicists physicist. I though thought ive written aw books but there is no book on him fermi, bettina has been my first read her and help her on my other books so i gave it to her and she saw i was in a little bit of distress and i thought that a certain point what am i going to do and i was losing sight as i was so stunned by the physics i was losing sight of this political and social times he lived in and all the adventures. Bettina said to me it might need a lot of restructuring and maybe we can go easy on the quantum mechanics. [laughter] so it became quite a different book and it became our book. Its been a wonderful experience and i think some compliments not only for what she did that she learned a lot of physics. It was about time. [laughter] her father was a physicist and he couldnt do it and i couldnt do it but the book did. [laughter] im going to take a risk and say there might have been a challenging coauthoring the book. No, not at all. [laughter] it was just a bed of roses. No, it was very challenging but in wonderful ways because it was a conversation that was on a level its not that we dont talk about intellectual things but it was a whole different level and it was good arguments between us, most of the time. [laughter] it was a time that was very tough for me to learn the physics. As he said my father tried to teach me physics. I though studied physics at the university of colorado with george, a famous physicist and he knew i was the daughter of a physicist and he asked me to come up and demonstrate answers on the board for everybody. But there was a tremendous give and take in the way that we thought about the book and conceptualize it and there were different times that his battalion personality would come out and my german one would come out. [laughter] but it was a very healthy interaction and exciting. Exciting. How did the title come about, the pope of physics seems like a strange way to describe someone. You have to remember this was rome and there was a little bit of a joke there because fermi was a physicist and people used to joke his answers were always right and he knew everything and of course the pope was regarded as being infallible so the people in rome got nicknames. A very young bunch of physicists in their 20s when they started out so one was the pope and another was the cardinal, anothecardinal,another was the r and so on but theres no question about who was the pope. Of course there was another post that is another matter. The group in general is a rather godless group and that is a certain amount of air reference to this. I a am amused if one looks at amazon. Com and books for a book you will see that the number one bestseller of catholic books. [laughter] some people might be surprised. [laughter] but anyway, they are buying the book. I might add at this time when he was nicknamed the pope after the italians had conquered rome and had taken away the temporal domain he retreated to the vatican so he didnt recognize there were no diplomatic relations between the Italian Republic and the vatican. So far he could be the only pope in italy. Set the stage for us a little bit. Hes this young man completely unknown and within a decade hes going to become an International Star of science that during the time when fascism is imploring. He was the leader. He joins the fascist party and that is because they appointed him to the Royal Academy which doubled the salary and he said doubling my salary is a good thing. I will pledge allegiance to mussolini. It doesnt bother me one way or another as long as i can do my experiments. I think that he was amazingly apolitical and this was a hard aspect for us to accept. Our parents respectably fled in the case of italy and fascism and in my case nazi germany and that somebody could be totally apolitical is sort of against my grain but that is what he was. He lived for physics. Physics was his religion getting back to the pope analogy i think it was his calling. He joined the fascist party and thought it was ridiculous when there was the fellow in the Royal Academy in italy you have to wear a uniform and a fancy hat. He wasnt into any circumstances at all and his mentor in italy was a physicist was a state senator. The mayor of rome at the time was a physicist so it wasnt like he didnt have any role models for the science and politics but he chose basically to keep his head low and he hoped he would go away. It would go away. He uses a wonderful term later on when things get more tense. He and a colleague talked about the term from huxley where there is a mythical drug you could take to reduce stress and not have to Pay Attention to things around you. What i was trying to get at was where i jumped ahead at one point that he will stay here. He tried to convince heisenberg to come from germany and state in the United States. And his quote you know you do it better than i. While this was in the summer of 1939. He had already immigrated to the United States and he said heisenberg, you in italy i was a big shot but here im just a physicist like all of the other guys around here. And it is so much better than being a big shot. Why dont you stay here . And heisenberg said basically, my country needs me. My country will need me in the future. I am a loyal german. And he said okay i am a physicist. And he, he was fairly, he did not dress fancy. He did not have a fancy aeven, this is a bit of a sin for an italian. Even added water to his wine when he drank as you know. [laughter] interesting. Lets talk a little bit about the science. Im going to ask both of you and sort of independently because we have . Budding scientist. Yes. What would you say was his greatest achievement in science . And you can have two different perspectives on that. Because aphysics for his impact for what he did for the war effort. Well, you know i started by saying i was in awe. He was the only physicist in the 20 century to ever achieve a very top profession as both a theorist and experimentalist. You know ahe was a last physicist to work in all fields of physics. I would say i can pick probably if i had to, three or four things in physics that i would say 1 to 25. The basis for all you know conductors and semi conductors and transistors the way we think about the metals. The introduction, there were two forces of nature. Gravity and electromagnetism. He introduced one third one in a series that most of us work on. Daily and, he was also the first man to use neutrons to bombard nuclei and that is the basis of Nuclear Physics and the basis of how a fusion and how the bomb was built. Also how reactors are built, nuclear medicine. So he did a lot. [laughter] i think my associate here will name three more now. [laughter] contributions and it is probably not the right word to use but i would say that enrico fermi has to be remembered for being the person, more than any Single Person who was responsible, how you feel about is another thing but who was responsible for the making of the atom bomb. It changed our world. To change the world rethink desolate we think about the world. It changed our in international relations, it opened up a whole new era and that has to be a standalone 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 and his experiment 1st and the university of chicago, underneath the stadium where he has the First Successful experiment in Controlling Nuclear aa chain reaction. Which inevitably led to the making of the bomb. That has to go very high on my list. He was also a great teacher. I mean, depending on how you count the numbers. Six or eight or 10 of the students got nobel prizes. But the style was set both in italy and people from Northern Europe in the 30s who came to work with him and postwar america. When the people who trained the likes of the peons here on the stage were trained. So . A huge impact just in terms of the people and who they touched. Lets talk a little bit about the beginning of the atomic age in 1942. I think when you make the movie, that is going to be one of the most exciting scenes, putting the atomic together and i also have to say the most unbelievable part of this is that the university of chicago ever had a football team. [laughter] so . It was a defunct stadium. Wish you could put an atomic pile into. So play of the scene here. How does he put together aand is it unique that enrico fermi was able to do this all right. Well, the pile is, you coined that term pile. It is a bunch of bricks with lead and balls of uranium in there. With some control odds and when you can plot the control rods he said you will have a control reaction. Originally it was going to be built in the organ on forest but there into trouble with some of the construction workers. So fermi went to the head of the project and said no problem. There is a cart there, we will just come to me and the guys a we would just put all of the bricks in. You know. Is not a problem. It is 45,000 30 pound lead breaks. Will have two ships and we can do this in 15 days. And by the way he said, the project to arthur compton, you better not tell the president of the university that we are doing this. [laughter] can you imagine that happening today . [laughter] in all fairness ahe had approved the project rightly. Not the experiment. On campus. He did not know it might blow the campus up. [laughter] so how dangerous was this experiment equate at some really amazing point in the story, fermi says lets stop for lunch. They leave the atomic pile there. They go to lunch come back and it is right where it is supposed to be. I think they put a lock on the door. [laughter] but, one of the things we were talking about before lunch, and larry and i are both physicists and bettina said we will get there yet. But he seemed to have always this perfect confidence that they were going to work the way he built them. And he had this already as a kid. You know there was no, he had no teachers, his parents ahe said i know how to do things. I will make it work. And awas it dangerous . Probably not. Not with fermi there because everybody trusted, there is fermi. He has done the calculations. He told them you know, the day before, okay when you put these last bricks and, the 57th layer of bricks than it will go critical when you pull out the last of the control rods. And that is exactly the way it went. And must say that the story of how that happened underneath awas a remarkable story when we went to the archives at the university of chicago where we are both, bringing in boxes and is in a room that has glass on two sides and they make you wear gloves. None of that happened in italy when we went to the italian archives. No gloves, you can handle whatever you wanted. But . A little coffee while you are studying. [laughter] it at the university of chicago they are very careful about and understandably so. And reading this account of what happened there underneath field when Nuclear Fission was controlled and it was such a, i was totally thrown by this. Unexpectedly, emotional moment to read this because you know the world is going to change. And i start crying and i just start bursting into tears. And gino is sort of looking at me and then one of the archivist comes rushing in with a box of kleenex for me. And she said excuse me, could you just be careful not to drip on the . [laughter] but it is an amazing story and one of my favorite parts of the book. Because you have this room full of 50 people who basically have faith in fermi. Theyre saying we will be okay. They could have been blown to smithereens as could have the campus and the city. And they are there and there is evidently one woman who is the only woman in the room and she is the youngest person room i think she was 26 at that point. And she is doing the neutron count. It is her voice, is the female voice. I was that this make a great opera. I dont know if anyone abut anyway, the neutron count keeps on accelerating. You know as she starts out and 100,000 and i was always thinking will be a great aria enough 10, 20 aup to the high c which is that it has been critical. So it was quite a suspenseful time. But people had faith that fermi knew what he was doing. He was cool about it, he was totally, this is just another experiment. I think to add to that, that when you pull out the last control rod and the piles is critical, it generated only one half lot but it is increasing and it is increasing exponentially. So they are all waiting for fermi to give the order to put the ride back in. [laughter] and he kept wanting to check that the current really was exponential. So he took them slightly less than four minutes to give the order to put the rod and. And the people who were there, those four minutes athey kept saying, when is he going to give the order to put the rod back in . And they did not say anything because it was fermi. But if it had been anybody else it might have been them yelling put the rod back in so, fermi joins three labs all dedicated to the Manhattan Project. And this is all as you say, science for him. Then the bomb goes off in july. And you know it works. Now it is no longer science. You have to make a decision as to whether to drop this or not. How does fermi feel at this point . Is he still thinking of it as just science . For thousands of people are going to die because we have now made this thing and actually is going to work the way we plan for it to work . Well, can i start . Yes, please. It is 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 do not reach that knowledge somebody else will. That the loss of nature will be revealed. We will uncover them and as a physicist, that he felt this was what his role was. This was what his calling was. So the bomb gets developed, it goes off successfully as larry just said. And then the decision has to be reached. What does one do with it . But actually, even before that bomb went off in july, and may there, people in washington who at that point had some foresight said we are going to have to decide what to do with this. Looks like we are actually going to make a bomb and were going have to decide what to do with it. So what did they do . They do what everyone does, you appoint a committee. And this is called the interim committee because it was just going to be about the bomb. And with that interim committee which was a distinguished committee of people, they had a Scientific Panel. There were four scientists that would decide the interim committee. And that was a sequence. On the interim committee was oppenheimer of course, and fermi was on it with two other nobel prize is assists. And they were asked to make a recommendation. And they met in los alamos on june 15 and 16th. And there was tremendous controversy about what should be done. Should there be a demonstration . It was a whole group of physicists who felt they should be a demonstration in some Remote Island some 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 prevents further war. The other camp was, that is not going to work. The logistics are harming this for one thing. And we need to drop it to show the japanese in particular, the germans had already surrendered. The japanese that we have a weapon of mass destruction. That was the controversy in this committee, this panel the Scientific Panel of port scientists look at it and they made the recommendation that there was no viable alternative other than to drop the bomb on a major city, a Major Industrial center. Fermi was part of that. Fermi looked very much at the technical parts of it that was part of the decisionmaking. At the same time when they made that recommendation, they said that they had no end in athey had no special competence. To make the judgment, the political judgment to drop a bomb. They were very modest in that regard saying were not sure scientists are the best people to make these decisions. But that was a decision that was made. We looked very hard. There was no, nothing that we could find in our research that had any evidence that fermi was hesitant in making that decision. So, do not forget the scientists who were in los alamos had by and large sled fascism and were very patriotic about this country. It is obviously a very controversial decision. Many thought that this weapon was so horrible that it might bring an end to all wars. There was a view that a discussed with him in los alamos. And there are physicists who deferred, a group in chicago, a committee headed by a eminent physicist named 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 is a war and are you going to not use it because of the danger of bringing into the world such a weapon . Are you going to tell the parents of the men and women who are killed in the war that goes on that might have been stopped . Men. Pretty much men. That he did not use a weapon because of moral scruples . That is a decision . A very tough one. And do not forget that the United States had invested 2 billion at that point. And what are we going to show for it . A weapon that we are not going to use. That is a hard thing for politicians to justify. And people also concerned that if it wasnt used future scientific funding would be in jeopardy. But i thi