Ettore Majorana (1906 - 1938 [very tentatively])

"There are several categories of scientists in the world; those of second or third rank do their best but never get very far. Then there is the first rank, those who make important discoveries, fundamental to scientific progress. But then there are the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton. Majorana was one of these." - Enrico Fermi, 1938

Ettore Majorana: enigma.

Ettore Majorana is a physicist that fascinates me both for his incredibly prescient views on many physical problems as well as his uncommonly blasé attitude towards his own discoveries; not to mention the bizarre circumstances surrounding his disappearance in 1938. Majorana was born in Sicily in 1906 and worked under the (also incredibly gifted) Enrico Fermi in Rome throughout the 1930s. Majorana, however, was wholly nonplussed with just about anything he achieved in his life. He considered every last one of his discoveries banal, as if everything that came to him was banal or trivial; "pfft, c'mon guys, anybody could come up with this stuff." 

He was the first person to correctly identify the neutron after the discovery of a neutral particle that can enter matter and expel a proton (other contemporary scientists concluded this must be some kind of photon). He explained to Fermi, his mentor, about this idea and why it had to be the case - Fermi tells Majorana that this was huge and he should publish it right away.

He doesn't bother, believing on some level that everything that can be understood is banal. Later that year James Chadwick discovers the neutron in an experiment with beryllium and wins the Nobel prize.

Wild.

Nowadays Majorana is most well known for his work on the theory behind neutrinos, positing a representation in which the particle is described in such a way that it's identical to its antiparticle (these are known as Majorana particles). In effect, Majorana suggested that for a chargeless particle like the neutrino, which is not wholly dissimilar to the electron except for its lack of charge, only two components are needed to describe its movement in space-time rather than the four given by the Dirac equation. After discussing his theory with his mentor, Fermi once again told Majorana he should get all over publishing that, but having remembered the shit he pulled with the neutron and with the sneaking suspicion that Majorana wasn't going to do a goddamned thing, he wrote it all up and published it himself under Majorana's name. Were it not for this we probably wouldn't know a single thing about Majorana's scarily prescient work on neutrinos. Thanks, Fermi!

Pictured: Enrico Fermi's loving gaze.

In another paper (astonishingly actually published by the man himself) Majorana already laid out some of the first hints towards the concepts of supersymmetry, spin-mass correlation and spontaneous symmetry breaking - some of the most important ideas in modern particle physics. In 1932. It only took the rest of the physics community a couple dozen years to catch up to him.

Then, nothing. It appears Majorana simply dropped out of life. His reclusive nature was amped up to 100 and he seldom left his home, shutting himself off from the world for 4 years and writing a great many papers that covered a very broad spectrum of topics (these were, of course, unpublished). In this time he wrote about geophysics, electrical engineering, mathematics and relativity to name but a few. I almost get the feeling he was on a desperate search for something to hold his interest or challenge him.

After a tantalisingly brief reappearance as professor of theoretical physics at the University of Naples, Ettore Majorana disappeared from the face of the planet.

He withdrew all the money from his bank account and wrote a note to the director of the Naples Institute of Physics asking to be remembered by his colleagues. The note stated that he had made an unavoidable decision and that he was sorry for the inconvenience his disappearance would cause; then while undertaking a boat trip from Palermo to Naples he up and vanished into thin air, never to be seen again.

There have been numerous hypotheses concerning his disappearance:

• Sicilian writer, Leonardo Sciascia, was convinced that Majorana had fled (possibly to work as an engineer in Argentina) because he had foreseen the destruction that could be wrought with nuclear forces, explosives millions of times more powerful than any that were around at the time. If so this would be tragically ironic given his mentor, Fermi's, later involvement in the Manhattan Project.
• Some people believe he decided to end his life while at sea (of which I am thoroughly unconvinced, if this were his aim why would he withdraw all his money?).
• A hypothesis that he escaped to a monastery (again, slightly baffling).
• Finally, there's a hypothesis that he escaped to become a beggar. This is lovingly referred to as the "dog man" hypothesis and it is my personal favourite solely because dog man is such an endearing title.

Either way, Majorana was never found and, provided he hasn't jury-rigged some way to grant him an incredible extended stretch of life, is presumably now dead. Looks like Fermi was right when he stated:

"Ettore was too intelligent. If he has decided to disappear, no-one will be able to find him."

(Although that still didn't stop him trying, unsuccessfully, to get no other than notorious fascist and, at the time, Prime Minister of Italy, Benito Mussolini, to support the search.)