Edoardo Amaldi
Edoardo Amaldi, son of Laura Basini and Ugo Amaldi, was born in Carpineto Piacentino (Piacenza) on 5 September 1908. With a keen interest in technical and scientific subjects (his father was professor of Mathematics and Mechanics at the university) he entered the Engineering faculty in Rome, skipping the last year of school. After one year of university, his physics professor, the director of the Physics Institute in via Panisperna, Orso Mario Corbino, invited the most gifted students with a keen interest in pure physics, to take advantage of the golden opportunity that had become available in that Institute: it was 1926 and the new luminary of physics, Enrico Fermi, had come to teach theoretical physics in Rome, the first to do so in Italy. Amaldi seized this opportunity and transferred to the course in Physics.
Under the guidance of Fermi and Franco Rasetti, Amaldi soon became involved in the research activities of the group, which included Emilio Segrè and Ettore Majorana, who had also been "recruited" by Corbino from the faculty of Engineering. Under Rasetti's expert guidance in experimental physics, he gained his degree in 1929; they became faithful companions of mountaineering excursions. From Fermi he learnt contemporary physics, enthusiasm for research and a complete devotion to physics as a real leader. During his years at the university, Amaldi was one of the few real friends of the complex genius, Ettore Majorana. He was easily accepted by the group, not only thanks to his cleverness as a physicist, but also thanks to his young age: in fact he was the youngest of the group at the beginning.
According to the new policy of research invented in those years by Fermi and Corbino, Amaldi often spent brief periods of study abroad at the most important physics laboratories. As usual at that time, when only a few people studied physics, Amaldi soon became Corbino's assistant. He already had accumulated some experience, in spite of his age, when in the years 1932-34 the group began their great adventure with neutrons. Under Fermi's intense leadership, "i ragazzi di via Panisperna", the so called "via Panisperna boys", were able to exalt the induction of artificial radioactivity in the various elements of the Mendeleev periodic table by means of bombardment with slow neutrons, paving the way for the applications of nuclear fission (1934). Amaldi was one of the leaders in this golden season of Italian physics, which lasted only a few years: Fermi's group invented not only the physics of slow neutrons, but also a new way of conducting and communicating physics. They were the first example of what is now common: a team of researchers sharing tasks and signing scientific articles with four, five, six names.
After 1938 the group scattered throughout Italy and abroad. The dismal development of the Fascist governmental policy contributed in a decisive way to the end of that period, especially after the departure of Fermi. To escape from the racial laws, which would affect his Jewish wife Laura Capon, Fermi went to the United States after being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938, without even returning to Italy from Sweden. But the reasons were also strictly connected to the difficulty in carrying on high level physics research, since Mussolini and his government no longer funded research to the extent they did in the first half of the 1930s.
Amaldi himself was thinking of going to the USA, where he would have had no difficulty in finding a university chair in physics, but he decided to remain in Italy. This choice proved a winning one: in fact, the reconstruction of the Italian scientific environment after the second world war, and in particular in Rome, was due almost entirely to Amaldi. He kept the chair of General Physics at the University "La Sapienza" of Rome for almost forty years, teaching and following generations of physicists, trying to maintain and strengthen the inimitable style learned from Fermi. From his initial work in nuclear physics with Fermi and the others, he did pioneering work in the field of cosmic rays and then devoted himself to the new field of particle physics.
He became a point of reference for Italian particle physics, which had arisen after the war. He contributed directly to the realisation of national and international projects. Things like the electrosincrotron in Frascati, the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), CERN in Geneva, the European Space Agency (ESA) exist thanks to Edoardo Amaldi's far-seeing commitment.
In the last part of his career he turned to new fields: from a scientific point of view he contributed to the institution of new research on gravitational waves in Rome; from a political and social standpoint he promoted initiatives and workshops on disarmament and the pacific use of nuclear physics: the Amaldi Conferences continue to bear witness to his pacifism. He was not new to this kind of commitment: during the war in fact, while Fermi in the USA was studying controlled chain reactions that would lead to the first pile and to the first nuclear weapons, Amaldi in Rome had decided to interrupt his research in nuclear physics, fearing political and military manipulations.
Amaldi authored about 200 scientific publications, as well as textbooks for secondary schools and universities. He also wrote historical-scientific books, like for example, the biography of his missing friend Ettore Majorana.
Amaldi died unexpectedly on 5 December 1989, still in full activity, while he was president of the Accademia dei Lincei, of which he had been a member since 1948.