Fascinating.

 

In 1915, a fourteen-year-old boy walked into a Roman bookstall and found a dusty Latin textbook titled Elementorum physicae mathematicae, written in 1840 by a Jesuit priest named Andrea Caraffa. Most teenagers would have walked past it. This boy bought it, took it home, and taught himself physics. His name was Enrico Fermi, and he was about to become one of the most brilliant minds in human history.

Enrico wasn’t born into wealth or academic privilege. His father worked for the Italian railroad. His mother was a schoolteacher. They were solidly middle-class, not elite. But Enrico was different from the moment he could think. By age ten, he was building electric motors for fun. By fourteen, he had mastered geometry, algebra, calculus, and classical mechanics—entirely on his own, using that Latin physics textbook and whatever math books he could find in used bookstores.

He didn’t have tutors. He didn’t have special programs. He just had an insatiable need to understand how the universe worked.

By seventeen, Enrico was ready for university. But not just any university—he applied to Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy’s most elite and demanding institution. The entrance exam lasted three days. Eight hours each day. Twenty-four hours of testing designed to break all but the most exceptional students. Enrico’s final essay topic: “Describe the characteristics of sound.” What he wrote wasn’t an essay. It was a doctoral-level dissertation on acoustics, wave mechanics, and partial differential equations—written by a seventeen-year-old who’d never taken a formal physics course. The examiners read it in stunned silence. One later admitted they’d never seen anything like it. This wasn’t a talented student. This was something else entirely.

Fermi’s humor was as sharp as his mind. He was known for making complex physics problems into jokes, for explaining impossible concepts through simple analogies, and for being simultaneously the most intelligent person in the room and the most fun to be around. One of his professors—Corbino, a respected physicist—once admitted to Fermi: “If you explain it to me, I understand it.” Think about that. A professor told a twenty-year-old student that he needed the student to explain physics to him.

By age twenty, Fermi was publishing papers on quantum mechanics and statistical physics—topics so cutting-edge that most Italian physicists didn’t even recognize them as legitimate science yet. Italy’s physics community was stuck in classical 19th-century thinking. Fermi was already living in the quantum future. In 1922, at age twenty-one, Fermi defended his doctoral thesis on X-ray diffraction. Eleven examiners sat in the room. Fermi presented his work—complex, groundbreaking, mathematically sophisticated research that pushed the boundaries of what was known about atomic physics. When he finished, silence. The examiners looked at each other. They looked at their notes. They looked back at Fermi. They awarded him magna cum laude—the highest honors.

But nobody clapped. Nobody celebrated. They didn’t know how to measure what they’d just witnessed. It was like watching a student prove something so far beyond the curriculum that you can’t even grade it properly. One examiner later said they weren’t sure if they were examining Fermi or if Fermi was examining them. 

And that was just the beginning.  Read the rest at the always good Virtual Mirage