Speaker
Description
Within the framework of the CREF project In the Footsteps of the Via Panisperna Boys, we reconstruct the relationships between Enrico Fermi, Enrico Persico and Aldo Pontremoli during the 1920s at the Institute of Physics of the University of Rome. Drawing on previously unavailable archival sources, we examine the scientific, institutional and personal dynamics that shaped their interactions, showing how cooperation and competition coexisted in the formative years of modern theoretical physics in Italy.
Particular attention is devoted to the International Congress of Physicists held in Como in September 1927, one of the most significant scientific events organized in Italy during the interwar period. The congress, whose Secretary General was Aldo Pontremoli, provides a privileged vantage point from which to analyse the roles played by the three physicists within both national and international scientific networks. By situating their participation in the broader context of the transformation of Italian physics after the First World War, we highlight how the congress represented the culmination of a process that had also involved the establishment of the first Italian chair in theoretical physics.
The Como meeting thus emerges not only as a landmark event in the international circulation of physics, but also as the final stage of a remarkable convergence among Fermi, Persico and Pontremoli, interrupted only a few months later by Pontremoli's tragic death during the Arctic expedition of the airship Italia.