Ettore Majorana: Notes on Theoretical Physics (Fundamental Theories of Physics, 133). This item is unavailable.Ettore Majorana: Notes on Theoretical Physics (Fundamental Theories of Physics, 133)

HISTORICAL PRELUDE Ettore Majorana's fame solidly rests on testimonies like the following, from the evocative pen of Giuseppe Cocconi. At the request of Edoardo Amaldi, he wrote from CERN (July 18, 1965): "In January 1938, after having just graduated, I was invited, essen­ tially by you, to come to the Institute of Physics at the University in Rome for six months as a teaching assistant, and once I was there I would have the good fortune of joining Fermi, Bernardini (who had been given a chair at Camerino a few months earlier) and Ageno (he, too, a new graduate), in the research of the products of disintegration of /-L "mesons" (at that time called mesotrons or yukons), which are produced by cosmic rays [ . . . ] "It was actually while I was staying with Fermi in the small laboratory on the second floor, absorbed in our work, with Fermi working with a piece of Wilson's chamber (which would help to reveal mesons at the end of their range) on a lathe and me constructing a jalopy for the illumination of the chamber, using the flash produced by the explosion of an aluminum ribbon short circuited on a battery, that Ettore Majorana came in search of Fermi. I was introduced to him and we exchanged few words. A dark face. And that was it.

This book is unique, since it reveals the outstanding personality underlying Majorana's notes. An extraordinary mixture of mathematical command, physics intuition and creative thought makes the Notes enjoyable for physicists of every discipline. The Notes are interesting for both graduate students and theoretical physics experts. In fact, the contents range from applied physics models, thorough fundamental atomic physics, to advanced group theory. The Notes have never been published and here they appear in the same format as organized by Ettore Majorana. The style is plain, proposed solutions to physics problems are original. These notes are intended as a series of fundamental physics themes treated by Ettore Majorana during the first "burning years" of the Panisperna Group, as the new deal of physics started in Rome around Enrico Fermi.