From: Ron Kita
Greetings Vortex, I am not sure IF this has been covered earlier: http://ecatreport.com/andrearossi/on-rossi-being-inspired-by-enrico-fermi Funny Rossi mentions Fermi in 1939 instead of 1934. LOL - what a putz Andrea can be on occasion. He is an inventor – not a scientist and certainly not a historian. He apparently does not understand the importance of Fermi’s “big mistake” and the “Five Year Miracle” which saved Europe from Fascism. Nor… the underlying reason that Fermi renounced his homeland and how racism effectively lost the War for the racists. Go back to the pivotal years following the Great Depression. The headlines of 1934 were about a new element discovered by Fermi which was the heaviest element known to science (at the time). A description of the new element, together with proof of its existence, appeared in the British science journal Nature, and the celebrated discoverer was Professor Enrico Fermi of the Royal University, Rome. Fermi claimed it was element 93, now known as Neptunium. This was probably incorrect, as it last turns out - but it was a new element – slightly heavier and vastly more important. Fermi left Italy in 1938 to escape new Italian racial laws instituted by the Fascists which affected his Jewish wife Laura, and he emigrated to the United States. So where is the miracle you ask? Remember that another of Fermi’s seminal discoveries, also overlooked, was the power of neutrons. Fermi came up with the idea to use neutrons as projectiles fired into a target atom's nucleus. This is long before the Manhattan project. Many of these already heavy nuclei absorb extra neutrons during this process, creating isotopes, one of which was fissile. Quite a discovery in and of itself; however, Fermi made other extraordinary discoveries which somehow never caught the attention of the soon-to-be overlords of Europe - the Nazis. Oh, almost forgot. No. 93 is Neptunium, was the new discovery - but it is likely not what Fermi actually found, given the circumstance as we now know them to be. What Fermi probably found was element 94 - now called plutonium… though this account is not the "official" story, and Seaborg of Hahn are today credited with that discovery. We will never really know, for sure. Had Hitler’s scientists known about Plutonium, however, we would be looking at a different Europe than the one we see today. It is a miracle that they overlooked this. The “Five Year Miracle” which is the lack of a bomb in the hands of the Nazis when they had access to the required information in 1934 … thanks to Fermi - still stands in some minds as perhaps the major real miracle in the past 2000 years, at least in the appreciation of anyone who really understands what was going on in Europe at the time. Jones
