During December 1938, sensational events in German physics demonstrated that Fermi had completely misinterpreted his neutron experiments, the very ones for which he had just won the Nobel Prize. He would never recover from the embarrassment. Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin (Lise was the second woman to earn a PhD in physics from Berlin) correctly interpreted the phenomenon as the splitting of the uranium atom, which, according to Lise Meitner, is held together by a mechanism similar to the surface tension of a drop of water, and which can explode if subjected to external forces (neutron collisions). The results were published on January 6, 1939. For the second time in less than five years, a small and scattered scientific group, hidden in a quiet corner of a highly oppressive and totalitarian society, had conducted and completed cutting-edge research with historic consequences for the entire 20th century. The bad news for Fermi, about the discovery in Germany, humiliated him: not only could he have discovered fission five years earlier, but he had also been awarded the Nobel Prize for the wrong reason. As the years passed, he would laugh it off. The subsequent idea, that of the chain reaction, had already been conceived by Leo Szilard, a Hungarian, who had also patented it in 1933 in England and transferred the rights to the British Admiralty, fearing it would fall into Nazi hands. The Admiralty, not knowing what to do with it, shelved the matter and forgot about it. Szilard then went to the United States, where he collaborated with Fermi on the Manhattan Project, along with other Hungarian escapees: in addition to Szilard, von Neumann, Teller, Wigner, von Karman, Halmos, Polya, and Erdos. They were all particularly gifted in physics, so much so that Fermi once joked: “Of course extraterrestrials are among us, they just call themselves ‘Hungarians.'”
