ETTORE MAJORANA - AN UNSUNG HERO

Generalisation is one of inherent tendency of all men, opinions are created and changed within matter split nanosecond but generalisation are hard to break down. When it comes to generalising a physicist one can say that bad driving and almost an unstoppable urge to publish any new discovery goes on as an integral part of being a physicist(this urge in physicist is certainly less than the organic chemists who go on to transmulate even the most vile piece of work into publication).

Who hasn't heard story of Archimedes' discovery, the man who was so overtaken by his discovery in upthrust that he started running on street naked shouting the word that would go in to history "Eureka".

But strangely there was a certain physicist in 19th century who with his brilliant intuition came up before all others with the discovery of neutron. (No, I am not referring to James Chadwick). Now probably no one would blame him for running on street naked for such a discovery that certainly was the ace in sleeve for noble prize but what he did was something unprecedented, he did absolutely nothing about it. He felt the idea was unworthy to be published .Soon James Chadwick independently discovered the neutron and yes, he won the noble prize for it. Again this physicist made some ground breaking work on nuclear forces, another idea worthy of noble prize but again he didn't bother publishing it and those who subsequently published it again won the noble prize.

This physicist who has left you wondering is Ettore Majorana. For those who say quantum mechanics acts strangely, welcome to world of Ettore Majorana, perhaps the strangest and the most brilliant physicist the world has ever seen.

In the words of Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, "There are many categories of scientists in this world, scientist of second and third category who do their best but do not get very far, there are also scientists of first class who make discoveries of capital importance fundamental for development of science but then there are geniuses like Newton and Galileo, Ettore was one of them. Majorana had greater gifts than anyone else in this world. Unfortunately he lacked one quality which other men ganerally have, plain common sense" Now Fermi himself was an exceptional individual, he had once appeared to take a difficult entrance exam, which included an essay. The given theme was "Specific characteristics of Sounds". The 17-year-old Fermi chose to derive and solve the partial differential equation for a vibrating rod, applying Fourier analysis. The examiner, Professor Giuseppe Pittarelli from the University of Rome, interviewed Fermi and concluded that his entry would have been commendable even for a doctoral degree. Fermi achieved first place in the classification of the entrance exam.

As Magueijo puts it "Everyone and his dog in Italy has written about Majorana" but come out of Italy and the probability of you being struck by lighting whilst riding on a unicycle significantly outweighs the probability of you meeting anyone who has even remotely heard of Majorana. The reason being Majorana himself, he did not lust for fame and always insisted that his work were banal, and on top of that he disappeared in his late twenties to, no one knows where making Fermi say whenever he encountered a difficult problem "..., if only Ettore were here."

His personal life was even more abnormal, he had difficulty expressing himself to feminine individual. Sarcasm was an integral part of Majorana , he had described Neil Bohr as "considerably senile but yet passes for a deep thinker".

There are stories about how Majorana left everyone in bafflement. Seagre, his collegue and childhood friend and not to mention also a noble prize winner, was always jealous of what Majorana possessed so effortlessly, others were rather inspired by him.

The great Sicilian writer, Leonardo Sciascia, was convinced that Majorana decided to disappear because he foresaw that nuclear forces would lead to nuclear explosives a million times more powerful than conventional bombs, like those that would destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For a physicist to foresee that a heavy nucleus could be broken to trigger the chain reaction of nuclear fission was almost impossible. But it was Majorana and hence it was possible. Impossible for what Enrico Fermi called first-rank physicists, those who were making important inventions and discoveries, but not for geniuses such as Majorana.

There are also those who think Majorana's disappearance was related to spiritual faith and that he retreated to a monastery. This perspective on Majorana as a believer comes from his confessor, Monsignor Riccieri.

Remarking on his disappearance, Riccieri confessed that Majorana had experienced "mystical crises" and that, in his opinion, suicide in the sea was to be excluded.

No one in Majorana's family ever believed it was suicide. Majorana was an enthusiastic and devout Catholic and, moreover, he withdrew his savings from the bank a week before his disappearance. The hypothesis shared by his family and others who had the privilege of knowing him (Fermi's wife Laura was one of the few) is that he withdrew to a monastery.

There are many hypothesis of his disappearance but even after approximately 80 years of his disappearance, the mystery remains unsolved.