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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
On Saturday March 26, 1938 the director of the Institute of Physics at the University of Naples in Italy, Antonio Carrelli, received a mysterious telegram. It had been sent the previous day from the Sicilian capital Palermo, some 300 km across the Tyrrhenian Sea, and read: “Don't worry. A letter will follow. Majorana.” That same Saturday, Ettore Majorana – who had just been appointed as full professor of theoretical physics at the university at the age of 31 – had not turned up to give his three-weekly lecture on theoretical physics. By Sunday the promised letter had reached Carrelli. In it Majorana wrote that he had abandoned his suicidal intentions and would return to Naples, but it revealed no hint of where the illustrious physicist might be. The picture was quickly becoming clear: Majorana had disappeared.
Worried by these circumstances, Carrelli called his friend Enrico Fermi in Rome, who immediately realized the seriousness of the situation. Fermi was working in his laboratory with the young physicist Giuseppe Cocconi at the time. In order to give him an idea of the seriousness of the loss to the community of physicists caused by Majorana's disappearance, Fermi told Cocconi:
You see, in the world there are various categories of scientists: there are people of a secondary or tertiary standing, who do their best but do not go very far. There are also those of high standing, who come to discoveries of great importance, fundamental for the development of science […]. But then there are geniuses like Galileo and Newton. Well, Ettore was one of them. Majorana had what no-one else in the world had.
Fortunes and misfortunes of a genius
Physicists working in several areas of research know quite well the name of Ettore Majorana, since it is currently associated with fundamental concepts like Majorana neutrinos in particle physics and cosmology or Majorana fermions in condensed matter physics. For non-specialists, the name of Ettore Majorana is usually intimately related to the fact that he disappeared rather mysteriously in 1938 and was never seen again.
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