an engineer, that his competition essay was judged worthy of a doctoral examination (10).His family had enough money to send him to college but he was still able to get scholarships for his academic achievement. He won a fellowship of the Scuola Normale Superiore in 1918. “He spent four years at the University of Pisa, gaining his doctoral degree in physics in 1922…”(12). He was even teaching his teachers there by 1920. While still an undergraduate, Fermi worked out his first theory of permanent value to physics. He also attended the Universities of Rome, Leiden and Gottingen. “His only setback was a period of post doctoral study in Germany in 1923 among such talents such as Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg when his talents went unrecognized” (154). He preferred simplicity and concreteness rather than pretension and the philosophic German style. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theorist, later described Fermi as “not a philosopher” and unable to let things be foggy. He had a passion for clarity.After Fermi graduated, he went straight to work. He began teaching at different universities. “He taught at the University of Florence from 1924 to 1926 and at the University of Rome from 1927 to 1938” (Epstein 87). At the age of 25, he was appointed professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome in 1927. He retained that post until 1938. “He quickly assembled a small group of first-class young talents for his self-appointed task of reviving Italian physics”(Siegfried F5). They judged him infallible and nicknamed him “the Pope.” In 1934, Fermi and his team nearly found nuclear fission, looking for radioactive transformations, in the course of experiments in which they systematically bombarded one element after another with the newly discovered neutron. They missed by the thickness of the sheet of foil, in which they wrapped their ura...
