Enrico Fermi

Anniversaries are being marked for Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist born 125 years ago, best known for creating the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and for his work on radioactivity and quantum theory. Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics and helped develop the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. The Fermi paradox, questioning why humanity has not detected alien life, also bears his name.

A New Yorker retrospective revisits the Chicago Pile-1, the world's first nuclear reactor, built beneath the Stagg Field stands at the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi's team achieved the first controlled self-sustaining chain reaction in December 1942. The piece reflects on how that crude graphite-and-uranium experiment launched the nuclear age, and readers are debating its legacy for energy today.