Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) was the first person to provide experimental evidence that induced radioactivity is possible by slow neutrons bombardments. For his works on artificial radioactivity he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938. He received his PhD at Pisa in 1922, the same place where Galileo founded the scientific method by experimental verifications of natural physical laws. Galileo discovered the constant of gravitational acceleration. Likewise, Fermi’s team of researchers first reported a summary of induced radioactivity to scientific journals as the Geiger counters detections found in the chemical elements of iron, silicon, phosphorus, chlorine, vanadium, copper, arsenic, silver, tellurium, iodine, chromium, barium, sodium, magnesium, titanium, zinc, selenium, antimony, bromine, and lanthanum.
In 1924 at the University of Florence, Fermi calculated the physical properties of certain gases obeying Pauli’s exclusion principle. The same was done simultaneously but independently in England by Paul Dirac. Their experimentally derived formulations are now known as Fermi-Dirac statistics, contrasting the Bose-Einstein statistics. The former applies exclusively to matter particles called fermions of quarks and leptons. The latter applies to quantize energy particles called bosons of photons, W’s, Z’s, and gluons including the yet to be discovered gravitons. Fermi was unique among the scientists of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. He was both an accomplished theorist and experimentalist. Although he died at a fairly young age of 53 years old, he was best remembered as the one who invented the first nuclear reactor, leading to the experimental success of controlled nuclear fission. The most powerful particle accelerator in the United States is honored to be named Fermilab located at Batavia, near Chicago, Illinois.