Enrico Fermi

To the Editor:

It is welcome news to have a new biography of Enrico Fermi, but it is misleading to say, as Richard Rhodes does in his review of “The Last Man Who Knew Everything” by David N. Schwartz (Jan. 28), that this is “the first thorough biography to be published since Fermi’s death 64 years ago in 1954.” In fact, a fine biography, “The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age,” by Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin, appeared in 2016. It received excellent reviews in The New York Times and many other prominent places. People who are intrigued by Fermi will be happy to learn about this wonderful resource.

FRANK WILCZEK

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

The writer won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004.

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To the Editor:

Richard Rhodes’s review of the new biography of Enrico Fermi states that “two Berlin radiochemists discovered nuclear fission.” Not quite so. In 1938 Otto Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann experimentally split uranium into barium and krypton but could not account for the result other than a “bursting.” They contacted Lise Meitner, a physicist at what later became the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, who correctly stated that the cause was nuclear fission, the energy for which had been described by Einstein’s equation E=mc2.

Hahn got the Nobel Prize for his discovery, but Meitner did not, although subsequently she was nominated multiple times.

N. DAVID CHARKES

COLLEGEVILLE, PA.

Trumpocracy

To the Editor:

Adrian Wooldridge, in reviewing David Frum’s new book, “Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic” (Jan. 28), states that “a group that thrived during the golden years of the 1950s and 1960s has seen its incomes stagnate and its job security disappear” and never mentions union representation, which was the central factor of those years of better wages and job security. The fact that an editor of The Economist would fail to point this out is central to the Middle American disaffection and subsequent alienation from the political process that allowed a grifter like Trump to get himself elected with hollow jingoist sloganeering.