And suddenly I realized ...
March 25, 1938. Ettore Majorana salt on the ferry that will take him from Naples to Palermo. Before leaving he had confiscated his passport, his family part of the bill, and the last five salaries of his work as a professor. Behind him he leaves two letters. One addressed to Anthony Trucks, director of the Institute of Physics, University of Naples. The other, to the family. Trolleys and apologizes to the students for his sudden disappearance. Family members asked not to wear black.
Majorana, however, arrived in Palermo. Send a telegram, urgent, a truck, asking him to ignore his letter. Then sends another letter, the last one, dated March 26: the sea ... I refused and I will return tomorrow to the hotel Bologna (his accommodation Neapolitan) ... but I intend to give up teaching. Him no one would know anything. The mystery. And the last faint traces. It appears that Majorana, in fact, returned to Naples. To prove this, the return ticket on his behalf, in possession of Tirrenia, and the testimony of a nurse who knew him and would see him through the streets of the city.
begin the search. Police are investigating. It is with these investigations that opens "The disappearance of Majorana by Leonardo Sciascia (1975). With the police, who believe in suicide and wants to store the case, and the family, asking to continue the investigation, extending the convents of Naples and its surroundings, or even the whole of southern Italy and central Europe. But who was
Majorana? Born in Catania on August 5, 1906, Ettore Majorana graduated in theoretical physics in 1929, under the direction of Enrico Fermi, and joined the group of "street kids Panisperna. Those of the atomic bomb. It was one of them. By far the most brilliant, so that the same Fermi tell him the world there are various categories of scientists, people of second and third rank, who are doing their best but do not go far. There are also people 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 those. Sciascia
retraces the studies, the location, even human. The relationships with colleagues, meeting with Heisenberg, the most important German physicist, his passion for philosophy. Heisenberg and the philosophy. And the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb. Heisenberg, the scientist objectively slave, because he lived under the Nazi regime, but he behaved as a free man, and not the atomic bomb did. And scientists free, but that the atomic bomb made it, and why they behaved like slaves, says Sciascia, without any hesitation ... the proposed, worked there, put it to the point and, without conditions or commitments to ask ... delivered to the politicians and the military. And that slaves would be given to Hitler, a dictator of cold and dreadful madness, while the free delivery to Truman, a man of "common sense" which was "common sense" of American democracy, it makes no difference, since Because Hitler had decided exactly how Truman decided, and that is available to detonate bombs on the city carefully, "scientifically" chosen from those within an enemy country.
Heisenberg, therefore, that built the atomic bomb, who did not even started the project, who spent the war worried that other physicists were doing, trying to let them know that he remained in Germany and physicists, had neither the intention nor would they be able to do it. The Heisnberg Sciascia raises a question of ethics of science. The scientist who knows the horror of being able to create, stop, click to stop.
And suddenly I realized ...
As in a film, blends Heisenberg, Majorana reappears in the foreground. E Majorana goes further. Faced with the horror, not only decide to stop, but decided to get rid of. Disappear. Suicide, police said. Retire to a convent, believes the family. The Majorana Sciascia, who is a clairvoyant, has a vision, the horror of the power that was helping to create. A religious vision: the science gave man the power to destroy the world. The Book of Revelation. And it is faced with this vision that Majorana disappears. In order not to reappear again.
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