September 24, 2001

The U.S. Postal Service will honor University of Chicago 
physicist Enrico Fermi by issuing a new 34-cent stamp in his honor on 
Saturday, Sept. 29, the centennial of his birth. The Postal Service 
and the University will commemorate the new stamp during a dedication 
ceremony from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. Sept. 29 at Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 
59th St.

Following the ceremony, from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., the University's 
Enrico Fermi Institute will sponsor a special symposium titled 
"Fermi Remembered." Speaking at the symposium will be scientists 
who were students and colleagues of Fermi when he was a professor 
at the University of Chicago from 1946 until his death in 1954. 

Speakers will include Nobel laureates Jack Steinberger, S.B. '42, 
Ph.D. '48, and Murray Gell-Mann, a physics faculty member at the 
University of Chicago from 1951 to 1954.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Fermi crammed a lot of science into his 53 years on this Earth. 
He applied his fertile mind to scientific questions ranging from the 
fundamental characteristics of the atom to the potential for 
extraterrestrial intelligence, but he also produced the first controlled, 
nuclear chain reaction and conducted pioneering research on the 
most powerful subatomic particle accelerator of its day.

"What's significant about Fermi is if you look through his career, 
he never just did the same thing. He kept moving on to new scientific 
challenges," said Nobel laureate James Cronin, University Professor 
Emeritus in Physics at the University of Chicago.

"I'm hoping that we will have a discussion where we will see not 
just routine praise of Fermi, but incisive evaluation of what he did 
and didn't do and what his foibles were," said Cronin, S.M. '53, 
Ph.D. '55, who organized the symposium.

Among the symposium speakers will be Roger Hildebrand, the 
Samuel K. Allison Distinguished Service Professor in Physics, 
who joined the University of Chicago faculty as an assistant 
professor in 1952. Hildebrand said that an examination of  Fermi's 
notebooks, which are archived in the Special Collections Department 
of the University's Regenstein Library, reveal both his remarkable 
insights and his characteristic modesty.

"He always used to have a little bound notebook that would just 
fit in his coat pocket," Hildebrand recalled. "When you look at them 
it's just marvelous. They are just full of ideas. When other physicists, 
usually younger ones, would discover something, if you look at 
Fermi's notes you can often find that he thought of it long before, 
and he would never say anything about it."

Fermi earned the Nobel Prize in 1938 for his discovery of new 
radioactive elements produced by the addition of neutrons to the 
cores of other atoms, and for the discovery of nuclear reactions 
brought about by slowly moving neutrons. Nevertheless, he is 
probably best known outside of scientific circles for his role in 
producing the first controlled, nuclear chain reaction at the 
University of Chicago during World War II. "Fermi was just 
extraordinary in just getting right to it and getting it built, not 
fooling around and also not cutting corners," Cronin said.

Following the war, Fermi became the Charles H. Swift 
Distinguished Service Professor and a member of the newly formed 
Institute for Nuclear Studies. In 1951 the Institute began operating 
a 450 million electron volt synchrocyclotron, the most powerful 
particle accelerator of its day. In 1953, Fermi and his Chicago 
colleague Herbert Anderson used the synchrocyclotron to observe 
the first "excited state" of nuclear particles. Fermi and Anderson's 
discovery was a major step toward the realization that nuclear 
particles had structure, now described in terms of the more 
fundamental particles known as "quarks," Cronin said.

Fermi also conducted theoretical studies in astrophysics at 
Chicago. His mastery of both experimental and theoretical physics 
was one of his hallmarks a scientist. His colleagues used to say 
that there were three kinds of physicists. "There were 
experimentalists, there were theorists and there was Fermi," 
Hildebrand said.

One theory that Fermi developed at Chicago with colleague 
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar concerned the acceleration of 
cosmic rays, high-energy particles of unknown origin that periodically 
bombard the Earth. Fermi and Chandrasekhar, who would receive the 
1983 Nobel Prize in physics, devised a theory for the acceleration of 
cosmic rays that involved colliding magnetic fields in interstellar space. 
Their theory remains one of the leading explanations for the 
phenomenon today, Hildebrand said.

Fermi's wide-ranging scientific musings also led him to formulate 
Fermi's Paradox. If the universe contains a multitude of 
high-tech extraterrestrial civilizations, Fermi wondered, then why 
haven't the citizens of Earth already encountered them?

For more information about "Fermi Remembered" or to register 
for the event, see http://fermi-remembered.uchicago.edu/ . 

For information about a related event being held at Fermi National 
Accelerator Laboratory, see 
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/events/special.html. 

For information  about a high-school web site design contest in 
Fermi's honor sponsored by the University of Chicago and Argonne 
National Laboratory, see http://www-news.uchicago.edu/fermi/.