Fermi's legacy

摘要

Enrico Fermi was one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century. He was born in Rome in 1901, and became Italy's first professor of theoretical physics, aged just 25, at the University of Rome. He created some of the cornerstones of modern theoretical physics, such as the Fermi-Dirac statistics, which explain the quantum behaviour of electrons, protons and neutrons, and the theory of beta decay, a radioactive process in which certain nuclei emit electrons or positrons. He also discovered the artificial radioactivity caused by neutron bombardment, and was awarded a Nobel prize in 1938 for his discovery of the properties of slow neutrons.