Everything about Emilio Segr totally explained
Emilio Gino Segrè (
February 1,
1905 –
April 22,
1989) was a
Italian physicist and
Nobel laureate in
physics, who with
Owen Chamberlain, discovered
antiprotons, a
sub-atomic antiparticle.
Biography
Segrè was born in
Tivoli, near
Rome, and enrolled in the
University of Rome La Sapienza as an
engineering student. He switched to
physics in 1927 and earned his
doctorate in 1928, having studied under
Enrico Fermi.
After a stint in the
Italian Army from 1928 to 1929, he worked with
Otto Stern in
Hamburg and
Pieter Zeeman in
Amsterdam as a
Rockefeller Foundation fellow in 1930. Segrè was appointed assistant professor of physics at the University of Rome in 1932 and served until 1936. From 1936 to 1938 he was Director of the Physics Laboratory at the
University of Palermo. After a visit to
Ernest O. Lawrence's
Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, he was sent a
molybdenum strip from the laboratory's
cyclotron deflector in 1937 which was emitting anomalous forms of
radioactivity. After careful chemical and theoretical analysis, Segrè was able to prove that some of the radiation was being produced by a previously unknown element, dubbed
technetium, and was the first artificially synthesized
chemical element which doesn't occur in nature.
He was a colleague and close friend of
Ettore Majorana, who disappeared mysteriously in 1938.
While Segrè was on a summer visit to
California in 1938,
Mussolini's
fascist government passed
anti-Semitic laws barring
Jews from university positions. As a Jew, Segrè was now rendered an indefinite émigré. At the Berkeley Radiation Lab, Lawrence offered him a job as a Research Assistant -- a relatively lowly position for someone who had discovered an element -- for US$300 a month. However, in Segrè's recollection, when Lawrence learned that Segrè was legally trapped in
California, he reduced his salary to US$116 a month which many, including Segrè, saw as exploiting the situation. Segrè also found work as a lecturer of the physics department at the
University of California, Berkeley.
While at Berkeley, he helped discover the element
astatine and the isotope
plutonium-239 (which was later used to make
Fat Man, the
atom bomb dropped on
Nagasaki). He found in April 1944 that
Thin Man, the proposed plutonium "gun-type" bomb, wouldn't work (because of the presence of Pu-240 impurities), and priority was given to Fat Man, the plutonium "implosion" bomb.
From 1943 to 1946 he worked at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory as a group leader for the
Manhattan Project. In 1944, he became a
naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught at
Columbia University,
University of Illinois and University of Rio de Janeiro. On his return to
Berkeley in 1946, he became a
professor of physics, serving until 1972. In 1974 he returned to the University of Rome as a professor of
nuclear physics.
Segrè was also active as a
photographer, and took many photos documenting events and people in the history of modern science. The
American Institute of Physics named its photographic archive of physics history in his honor.
Segrè died at the age of 84 of a
heart attack.
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