Ettore Majorana was alive and living in Venezuela? | Hacker News Reader

Ettore Majorana was alive and living in Venezuela?

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54 pointsrnhmjoj21 comments

Bio from Wikipedia:

Ettore Majorana (Italian: [ˈɛttore majoˈraːna]; born 1906;) was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked on neutrino masses. He disappeared suddenly under mysterious circumstances while going by ship from Palermo to Naples. The Majorana equation and Majorana fermions are named after him. In 2006, the Majorana Prize was established in his memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Majorana

if you can find it "I Ragazzi di via Panisperna"[0] is a good movie about the "Via Panisperna Boys", the group of physicist led by Fermi of which Majorana was a member (the movie is mostly focused on the relation between Fermi and Majorana).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_ragazzi_di_via_Panisperna

[Biographical note: In 1937 he proposed that the neutrinos have mass and are their own antiparticles. This make them slightly different from the other particles, like the electrons. This theory is still not confirmed, but the particle-physicists really like it. More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Majorana ]

Although the nature of neutrinos is still to be uncovered, my alma mater announced the discovered for a "meta" Majorana particle a couple of years ago [1]

[1] http://www.tudelft.nl/en/current/latest-news/article/detail/...

I definitely read a long and interesting article about Majorana, and I was pretty sure I had found it from HN. Some searching finally dredged it up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7870344

I think you meant to paste this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7870344

(Yours goes to a comment replying to the post about Majorana, rather than to the HN top-level post with the article).

Yep, edited, thanks

He didn't want to participate in the building of the atom bomb.

Hero.

"Because another factor which invalidates the suicide theory is that Ettore Majorana had taken his passport and a sum of money with him." [1]

Majorana left with the entire contents of his and his brother's joint savings account and five months salary cheques (previously uncashed). Sounds like he had plans, monastic or otherwise. Sciascia's essay was produced as a radio play by the BBC years ago (possibly decades ago) and struck me as plausible then. The possibility of a fission weapon was inherent in a lot of the detailed work on the nucleus in the late 30s. The Bohr-Wheeler semi-empirical model is just that: fit a polynomial to the known properties of the radioactive materials available and you have your yield...

Is there an Italian speaker with access to the original here who can render a slightly more idiomatic translation?

[1] Leonardo Sciascia The Mystery of Majorana, Tr Sacha Rabinovich, New York Review of Books Classics, 2004

Italian here, but translation of what? If you refer to the "Il fatto quotidiano" article linked here, the story so far is:

- (if the story is true) Majorana was alive and lived in Valencia, Venezuela, between 1955 and 1959

- Italian police is investigating

- An Italian TV Show "Chi l'ha visto?" (it's a very dramatic show where they try to find missing people...) found a guy who lived in Valencia those years and claims he was friend with Majorana, but he didn't know his real identity

- The supposed Majorana called himself Mr."Bini", but one day they convinced Bini to take a photo, the photo traveled back to Italy to the witnes' family

- Police examined this photo and they say Bini's face is compatible with Majorana's one and Bini looks very similar to Majorana's father

- If the story is true, this means Majorana didn't suicide and was not forced by anyone to leave Italy, he just left.

- Police is trying to confirm, finding out the driving license/identity of this Mr. Bini, but they also say that Venezuelan police is kind of lazy..

Didn't want to translate it all, I'm also lazy. There are many stories on Majorana, and a lot of people claimed and still claim to have seen him. There are many many stories, really, another recent one is that he ended up as an homeless guy.

Hope this was helpful.

Yes, very helpful - better job than the original page.

I find this the weakest theory. Nobody would have forced him to participate in the Manhattan project.

> I find this the weakest theory. Nobody would have forced him to participate in the Manhattan project.

It does not necessarily need to be the Manhattan Project. He was in Italy at the time, with a fascist government – he could have been avoiding an atomic program run by the Axis Powers.

Majorana disappeared in 1938; the Manhattan Project was not started until 1942, and even the Einstein–Szilárd letter[0] was not written until mid-1939.

Perhaps a more compelling argument against the theory is that nuclear fission was not demonstrated until 9 months after Majorana's disappearance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

He is the most famous "missing physicist" and people have been speculating a lot about various possibilities.

more on this in another article wrote on Friday: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=it&sl=it&tl=en&u=ht...

Oh here it is. Here there is a guy that says "Majorana was surely alive in 1981 and he was in Rome. I've seen him." He says that Majorana was in Rome with a priest Luigi Di Liegro, founder of Roman Caritas (a catolic institution to help poor people). (still according to the witness) Majorana was a homeless, he was hosted in a monastery. "I was one among the closer assistants of Luidi di Liegro and with him we met Majorana probably the 17 March 1981. It was not the only time, I met him in three-four occasions. " This witness is a "director programmer"(??) from Calabria, he lived in Rome when he was young, but he wants to remain anonymous. "Majorana was in Pilotta Square, on the Università Gregoriana's stair, near Fontana di Trevi. He looked like more than 70 years old", the guy was helping homeless people during those years, he was puzzled by one other homeless saying that guy (Majorana) had the solution to 'Fermat Theorem'", which was solved only in 2000. "Then I said that I wanted to meet him with Di Liegro", the meeting happened and the priest drove Majorana back home. "After one hour and half he came back and said to me: 'you know who that man is? He is the physicist Ettore Majorana, the one missing. I phoned the monastery where he was hosted and they told me he left. Now I brought him back.'" The director of the monastery said "Majorana had the feeling his studies could precede the atomic bomb and he had a conscience crisis and he wanted to be forgotten." It seems Majorana was in another monastery in Napoli before the one in Rome. They were sure he was him for a scar in his right hand. The witness says "I asked priest Luigi to tell Majorana's family, but he said we must not. I tried to speak about the subject several times during the years, but Di Liegro, who never told anyone, not even his most close assistants, he didn't want to speak about it and he told me to shut up. He told me to not say anything to anybody until 15 years until his dead, happened the 12 October 1997. Now the time has passed."

Fuck Google Translate is way better than this crap. I'm scared. Anyway it seems to me that all the people involved are dead, and the this story is carried by an anonymous guy. So it might be 100% imagination.

Joao Magueijo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_Magueijo) has written a biography of Ettore Majorana "A brilliant darkness". An interesting read!

Dedication to physics and mathematics may be unhealthy.

Compared to what? Dedication to football and motorcycles?

Exactly, it's not the dedication, it's the level of dedication. If you immerse yourself in anything to the point that you ignore the rest of your life, the rest of your life will suffer.

I completely agree.

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