Chapter Five— On My Own: Professor at Palermo (1936–1938): Scent of Orange Blossoms
1. See U. Panichi; "Commemorazione del Corrispondente Carlo Perrier," Rend. Lincei 6 (1949): 386. [BACK]
2. There is still a copy of the lecture notes for this course in the library of the Palermo Physics Institute. [BACK]
3. G. Bernardini, G. Gentile, Jr., and G. Polvani, Questioni di fisica (Physics topics) (Florence: Sansoni, 1947). Only the first volume was pub-
lished. The planned contents of the other two are given in it, but they never appeared. [BACK]
4. On Lawrence, see Herbert Childs, An American Genius: The Life of Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Father of the Cyclotron (New York: Dutton, 1968), and J. L. Heilbron and Robert W. Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory , vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). I thank the authors for access to the manuscript of the latter book. [BACK]
5. See E. M. McMillan, "The Transuranium Elements: Early History," in Les Prix Nobel in 1951 (Stockholm: Nobelstiftung, 1952), pp. 165-73. [BACK]
6. Abelson later collaborated with McMillan in the discovery of neptunium. In time he became director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and editor in chief of Science . His scientific work was mostly in geochemistry and isotope separation. See also L. W. Alvarez, Adventures of a Physicist (New York: Basic Books, 1987), ch. 4, and E. Segrè, "A cinquant'anni dalla radioattività artificiale provocata da neutroni," Rendiconti della Accademia nazionale delle scienze, detta dei XL, memorie fis., 5th ser., 8, pt. 2 (1984): 165. [BACK]
7. There is a vast literature, often fictional in character, on Oppenheimer. See esp. Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, ed. A. K. Smith and C. Weiner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). [BACK]
8. See C. Artom, G. Sarzana, C. Perrier, M. Santangelo, and E. Segrè, "Rate of Organification of Phosphorus in Animal Tissue," Nature 139 (1937): 836-38, and "Phospholipid Synthesis during Fat Absorption," Nature 139 (1937): 1105-6. [BACK]
9. From my laboratory notebooks for 1937. [BACK]
10. C. Perrier and E. Segrè, "Alcune proprietà chimiche dell'elemento 43," Rend. Lincei, 6th ser., 25 (1937): 723-30, and 27 (1937): 579-81. Also "Some Chemical Properties of Element 43," Journ. of Chem. Phys. 5 (1937): 71216, and 7 (1939): 155-56. [BACK]
11. We know today that the longest lived isotopes of technetium have a period of 4.2 million years, a time too short to permit survival from primordial material. Minute amounts of technetium produced in nature by the spontaneous fission of uranium were detected by P. K. Kuroda et al. in 1961. [BACK]
12. Claimants to the discovery of Element 43 prematurely called it ilmenium, davyum, lucium, nipponium, and masurium, among other names, but their claims were not substantiated. See H. W. Kirby, "Technetium," Gmelin Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry, 8th ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1982). [BACK]
13. See Hilde Levi, George de Hevesy: Life and Work (Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1985). [BACK]
14. C. Perrier and E. Segrè, "Technetium: The Element of Atomic Number 43," Nature 159 (1947): 24. [BACK]
15. See E. Segrè, "Italian Physics in Amaldi's Time," and Edoardo Amaldi, "The Years of Reconstruction," in Perspectives of Fundamental Physics: Proceedings of the Conference Held at the University of Rome, 7-9 September 1978, Dedicated to Edoardo Amaldi , ed. Carlo Schaerf (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1979). [BACK]
16. See also Edoardo Amaldi, "E. Majorana: Man and Scientist," in Strong and Weak Interactions, ed. A. Zichichi (New York: Academic Press, 1966), and E. Segrè, in Storia contemporanea , vol. 19 (Bologna, 1988), p. 107. [BACK]