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HISTORICAL PRELUDE Ettore Majorana's fame solidly rests on testimonies like the following, from the evocative pen of Giuseppe Cocconi. At the request of Edoardo Amaldi, he wrote from CERN (July 18, 1965): "In January 1938, after having just graduated, I was invited, essen tially by you, to come to the Institute of Physics at the University in Rome for six months as a teaching assistant, and once I was there I would have the good fortune of joining Fermi, Bernardini (who had been given a chair at Camerino a few months earlier) and Ageno (he, too, a new graduate), in the research of the products of disintegration of /-L "mesons" (at that time called mesotrons or yukons), which are produced by cosmic rays [ . . . ] "It was actually while I was staying with Fermi in the small laboratory on the second floor, absorbed in our work, with Fermi working with a piece of Wilson's chamber (which would help to reveal mesons at the end of their range) on a lathe and me constructing a jalopy for the illumination of the chamber, using the flash produced by the explosion of an aluminum ribbon short circuited on a battery, that Ettore Majorana came in search of Fermi. I was introduced to him and we exchanged few words. A dark face. And that was it.
List of contents
Volumetto I.- Volumetto II.- Volumetto III.- Volumetto IV.- Volumetto V.- Selected facsimile pages.
About the author
Erasmo Recami is a Retired Professor at Bergamo State University, Italy, and Senior Associate at INFN-Milan, Italy. His current research includes the structure of leptons, tunneling times, the application of the General Relativity methods to strong interactions, extended Special Relativity, and, in particular, the superluminal group velocities associated with evanescent waves and with the localized solutions to Maxwell Equations.
Summary
HISTORICAL PRELUDE Ettore Majorana's fame solidly rests on testimonies like the following, from the evocative pen of Giuseppe Cocconi. At the request of Edoardo Amaldi, he wrote from CERN (July 18, 1965): "In January 1938, after having just graduated, I was invited, essen tially by you, to come to the Institute of Physics at the University in Rome for six months as a teaching assistant, and once I was there I would have the good fortune of joining Fermi, Bernardini (who had been given a chair at Camerino a few months earlier) and Ageno (he, too, a new graduate), in the research of the products of disintegration of /-L "mesons" (at that time called mesotrons or yukons), which are produced by cosmic rays [ . . . ] "It was actually while I was staying with Fermi in the small laboratory on the second floor, absorbed in our work, with Fermi working with a piece of Wilson's chamber (which would help to reveal mesons at the end of their range) on a lathe and me constructing a jalopy for the illumination of the chamber, using the flash produced by the explosion of an aluminum ribbon short circuited on a battery, that Ettore Majorana came in search of Fermi. I was introduced to him and we exchanged few words. A dark face. And that was it.
