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such an easy manner of solving them that other physicists nicknamed him “the Pope.”
    Fermi was born in 1901 into a middle-class family of civil servants and attended Italian public schools. He showed intellectual
     brilliance from an early age and also a cool, reserved manner. He was more prone to deeds than to talk and carefully guarded
     his innermost thoughts. Though somewhat cold, he was absolutely impartial. Fermi’s most striking trait was his willingness
     to accept the world and people as they were. “He took people around him at their own value,” said a friend. “That’s why I
     was very fond of him.” 20 He understood complex theories but preferred making simple points. Likewise, though he did not spend a lot of time analyzing
     people, he seldom misjudged them. Fermi abhorred confrontation and avoided battles that he was not confident of winning. If
     faced with superior force, he invariably withdrew from a contest. Consistent with this, he rarely made promises unless he
     was sure he could deliver on them.
    Fermi began his career as a physicist in 1922, the year he received his doctorate from the University of Pisa. That same year,
     Benito Mussolini marched on Rome at the head of his armed Black Shirts and seized control of the Italian government in the
     name of Fascism. Preoccupied as he was with physics, the menace of Fascism seemed remote to Fermi. In 1923 he won a fellowship
     to study in Germany with the renowned Max Born, who had gathered a group of brilliant young physicists around him at Göttingen,
     including Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli. Heisenberg and Pauli did not bring Fermi into their circle of conversation;
     most of the time the young Italian worked alone in silence. As a result, Fermi, who had succeeded almost effortlessly until
     then, felt ignored and unappreciated at Göttingen, an unwelcome foreigner in Germany. The experience embittered Fermi, who
     would remember it for a long time to come.
    Fermi returned to Italy and took up a professorship of theoretical physics at the University of Rome. Over the next decade
     Fermi turned his physics institute into a leading center for the study of the nucleus. Fermi preferred tackling concrete problems.
     His method was never to waste time and to keep things as simple as possible—a no-nonsense, matter-of-fact, commonsense perspective.
     In this way, he kept going forward until he reached his goal, carefully and relentlessly. He was a master at achieving important
     results with a minimum of effort. Like Szilard, Fermi saw the significance of the neutron and designed experiments around
     it. He decided to bombard nuclei of atoms with neutrons and see what happened. Fermi’s insight was to slow neutrons down by
     sending them through paraffin (a particularly dense substance); the slower the neutrons moved, he thought, the more likely
     they were to stick in the nucleus they were hitting.
    Fermi began his neutron experiments in the mid-1930s in typically methodical fashion: by systematically bombarding all the
     elements in the periodic table. He started with water—testing hydrogen and oxygen at the same time—and finally came to uranium,
     one of the heaviest elements.
    The results were puzzling. Fermi observed that the uranium nucleus captured the bombarding neutron, emitted an unusually large
     amount of radiation, temporarily became a heavier isotope (with the same chemical characteristics but a different atomic weight),
     then decayed to an element heavier by one atomic number. The simplest explanation consistent with the known facts—the yardstick
     typically applied by scientists to interpret experimental results—was that the uranium was mutating up the periodic table.
     These man-made, very heavy “transuranic” elements should be unstable: their radioactive breakdown could explain the copious
     radiation being emitted.
    During these years Fermi grew increasingly alarmed by Mussolini’s policies, first the invasion