In one of his songs, Franco Battiato mentions the mysterious and unique disappearance of the physicist Ettore Majorana. Everything indicates that he vanished like when he opens his hand and the fist disappears, to put it in the manner of Dashiell Hammett in the maltese falconquoting that other character also disappeared and named Flitcraft that one day he was walking through the streets of San Francisco and a beam brushed his face. With the dust that rose from the beam as it hit the ground, Flitcraft had a revelation. For him, for Flitcraft, that event was a warning from destiny and, from that moment, he decided to change the course of his life. He was determined to leave everything behind, including his family and the office where he worked. And he was put in the train station.
But what brings us here today, more than the ideas of Batiatto or Hammettt, are the scientific ideas of one of the greatest physicists of all time. Because for him, for Majorana, science was an inner drive, a mysterious toy and a philosophy. Perhaps because of the latter, Majorana connected with another philosopher of science such as Heisenberg, who delayed the development of atomic gadgets for Hitler as much as possible, and sounded the alarm about what could happen if one day a nuclear bomb fell. rennet on the civilian population. But Heisenberg was ignored. The only person who listened was his Italian disciple, young Majorana.
From that moment, he began his flight; a forced flight due to his moral considerations in the management of science, since Majorana did not want to get involved in the development of the nuclear race and deserted forever from public life on March 25, 1938, the date on which he was going to take a ship that would transfer him to Palermo.
From then on, the physicist’s fate is an enigma and his life a legend. Because in reality, Majorana, born in 1906, only published nine scientific articles, all of them related to elementary particles. But his intuition would lead him to consider that one of the elementary particles may, in turn, be his own antiparticle. Because of this, today we know the Majorana fermion, a particle named in his honor and attributed to his teacher, Enrico Fermi (hence the name fermion). For those who do not know yet, Enrico Fermi, Nobel Prize in Physics, was one of the physicists who participated in the Manhattan Project collaborating in the implementation of nuclear toys. It was also Enrico Fermi who compared Majorana to Galileo or Newton.
All things considered, the Majorana story is the story of quantum mechanics, where the particles that nurture matter behave without regard to scientific rationalism. Therefore, in the dimension of the quantum world, invisibility can be achieved, as the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli supposed. According to his principle, a gas can suddenly become transparent if certain conditions are met so that the atoms cannot change their quantum state, and this only happens when the atoms that remain trapped lack space for it. To put it scientifically, the gases are crammed into a form of matter called the Fermi sea.
And that is why when a cloud of quantum gas, whose atoms are packed together, cools down, then it becomes invisible. Something similar to what happened with Majorana, who was never heard from again and who ceased to be seen forever the day she went to take a boat to Palermo. He cooled his life and disappeared like a smile when you purse your lips.
the stone ax it is a section where Montero Glez, with prose will, exerts his particular siege on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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