Abstract
The visible aspect of Majorana’s genius, that is, what there was to be appreciated by those of his contemporaries who did not know him well (and such is true until quite recently), is limited to just ten scientific papers, written and published over fewer than ten years. This short list can be found at the end of the book, and it will reveal little to the inexperienced eye, either by the quantity or by the topics, which have nothing particularly “brilliant” about them.
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Notes
- 1.
Paper P10 was published posthumously, in 1942, thanks to his friend Giovannino Gentile.
- 2.
It is in fact totally general, and allows the graphical representation of a state with arbitrary angular momentum.
- 3.
This is also attested, for instance, by the fact that the Schwinger paper (1977) we were quoting from was included among the seminal papers of the Nobel laureate (Milton 2000).
- 4.
Majorana published his paper P8 both in German and in Italian (about three months later), with almost no difference between the two versions. The most relevant difference (in my opinion) may lie in the fact that the author is a little more explicit in his criticism of Heisenberg’s theory in the Italian edition. In the following quotes we will refer to this version.
- 5.
“I do not believe in your perception of ‘holes’, even if the existence of the ‘antielectron’ is proved”, Pauli would write to Dirac on 1 May 1933 (Pauli 1985).
- 6.
This episode is also quoted in (Recami 1987) and, above all, in an unpublished note by Wick, kept in the Wick Archive at the Library of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. The theoretical calculations we are speaking about here are reported in Majorana’s Quaderni, kept in Pisa.
- 7.
The following quotations from letters are taken from this bibliographic reference.
- 8.
See Heisenberg’s letter to Sommerfeld of 17 June 1933, reported in (Pauli 1985).
- 9.
A very similar topic is dealt with in (Heisenberg 1931), although focusing more on applications than purely theoretical: the symmetry between holes and electrons in an occupied atomic level or in an occupied energy band of a crystal.
- 10.
Among the first to be impressed by Majorana’s theory and its consequences, we may mention Giulio Racah, Hans A. Kramers, Wendell Furry, Nicholas Kemmer, Eugene Wigner, Frederik J. Belinfante, and, of course, Wolfgang Pauli (Esposito 2014).
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Esposito, S. (2017). Ten Short Papers. In: Ettore Majorana. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54319-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54319-2_3
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