Ettore Majorana - The genius physicist who disappeared mysteriously

Once ranked alongside Galilei and Newton, physicist Ettore Majorana disappeared while he was at the height of his career .

Ettore Majorana (born 1906) is an Italian physicist. He is known for his important contributions to nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. He was born in Catania, Italy, and studied at the University of Naples Federico II and La Sapienza University in Rome.

From an early age, Ettore Majorana showed signs of being a brilliant mathematician or physicist. Born in Sicily in 1906, Majorana graduated from high school early and moved to Rome to study engineering and physics under the guidance of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Enrico Fermi. Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize for demonstrating the existence of new radioactive elements created by neutron radiation and for his part in discovering nuclear reactions caused by slow neutrons. He was very impressed with Majorana, who later became his colleague, according to IFL Science .

Ettore Majorana was a young physicist highly regarded by Fermi. (Photo: Kanijoman).

"There are several groups of scientists in the world. The second or third rate ones try their best but never get very far. The first rate are those who make important discoveries, crucial to scientific progress. But there are also geniuses like Galileo and Newton. Majorana is one of them ," Fermi shared.

Majorana achieved a lot in his short career. He could have even won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the neutron . In fact, the person who won the prize for that discovery was James Chadwick in 1935. In 1931, Irène Curie and Frédéric Joliot studied radiation from beryl hitting paraffin wax, which knocked protons off hydrogen atoms, causing them to move and bounce back at high speeds. The pair thought their experiment proved the existence of the photon, which was the only neutral particle they knew at the time. However, Majorana and Chadwick soon realized that the mysterious particle had to be neutral and have a mass close to that of a proton to be able to push it away.

Majorana wrote to Fermi about his hypothesis and Fermi asked him to write a paper, but that did not happen. Chadwick had time to conduct his own experiments and publish his results. However, Majorana had a distinguished career. He worked with Bohr and Heisenberg as well as Fermi, developing Heisenberg's theory of nuclei and predicting the Majorana fermion, which was observed in 2014.

In 1938, Majorana disappeared. On 25 March, he left a note for Antonio Carrelli, director of the Physics Institute of Naples, to say that he would not be returning. He then sent a second letter from Palermo, saying that he would return the following day, but that he had no intention of continuing his teaching. However, Carrelli was worried and contacted Majorana's family. Police confirmed that Majorana had traveled from Palermo to Naples by steamer on 25 March, but he had not been seen since.

One theory about Majorana's disappearance is that he committed suicide. But others suggest that Majorana's savings were drained a week before he disappeared, suggesting he may have decided to move abroad or join a monastery. There is even speculation that Majorana was assassinated by the Nazis, who feared his work would lead to the development of an atomic bomb before they did.

However, in 2008, a witness called the Italian television program Chi l'ha visto (Who saw him) and said that he had a photo of Majorana. This information prompted the Rome Justice Department to reopen the case. Italian police analyzed the photo and found similarities between the photo of a man in his 50s named Bini and previous photos of Majorana.

This information convinced the Rome Ministry of Justice to launch its own investigation into the case, during which the Carabinieri (Italian military police) analyzed the photograph and discovered similarities in the photo taken around 1955 in Argentina with earlier photos of Ettore Majorana.

In February 2015, the Rome Attorney General's Office announced that Majorana was indeed still alive after disappearing from Naples. He had moved into hiding in South America, where he lived until his death . Police believe that Majorana had remained in contact with his uncle, physicist Quirino Majorana, discussing scientific topics under the name WG Conklin. A postcard from Quirino was found in Bini's car.

"Ettore Majorana, a great physicist ranked alongside figures such as Newton and Einstein who mysteriously disappeared in 1938, was still alive in 1955-1959 in the Venezuelan city of Valencia' – the final message of the Rome Attorney General's Office gave such information.

Why did Majorana leave his job and family to live in seclusion in another part of the world? Some family members and researchers believe that Majorana sought to escape because he feared the moral and psychological consequences of his work, which helped create atomic weapons, which made him feel powerless over himself, leading to the negative decision above.