Abstract
On 11 April 1952, the police headquarters in Naples sent a letter to the university asking for “the place of birth and full personal details” of “Ettore Majorana son of Fabio, born 5 August 1906”, who, “in 1938, was a tenured professor at this university”.
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Notes
- 1.
The original manuscript of this document is providentially kept in the Central State Archive in Rome, in Ettore Majorana’s personal file at the Ministry of Education (Dir. Gen. Istr. Sup. - Fascicoli Personale Insegnante e Amministrativo, II° Versamento - 2° Serie - B93).
- 2.
This information was handwritten on the letter from the Questura (police headquarters) and then registered by the Ufficio del Personale (human resources). The corresponding document was therefore an internal note of the university, which was shown to the chancellor to help him write his answer; then it was archived in Majorana’s personal file, specifically recreated on this occasion. No other document appears in this file.
- 3.
Mainly annual reports of the University of Naples and oral statements by the same people.
- 4.
Actually, Carrelli’s statement for Sciuti is also (partially) incorrect, as it brings forward the actual dates when the assistant was hired by three months, giving 1 January to 1 September 1939, instead of 29 March to 31 August 1939, as confirmed by the chancellor’s statement.
- 5.
Aldo Covello’s statement, given to the writer on 7 July 2005. From now on, only this statement is reported, as an example. In fact, statements by other former students and collaborators express similar sentiments.
- 6.
See the Bollettino del Ministero dell’Educazione Nazionale (Part II: Administrative Acts), year 50 (1923), p. 802.
- 7.
This information can be obtained from the note for the accounting period 1928–29 at the Institute of Physics in the University of Rome. These accounts are kept at the Museum of Physics in the Sapienza University of Rome.
- 8.
See the Bollettino del Ministero dell’Educazione Nazionale (Part II: Administrative Acts), year 58 (1931), vol. II, p. 1604.
- 9.
Winning the selection for a university chair meant being hired as professore straordinario (adjunct professor or, in other words, not permanent), followed by a three-year probationary period. At the end, a special board would assess the adjunct professor’s work and, if the response was positive, he would be attributed a permanent tenure (full professor).
- 10.
See the Bollettino del Ministero dell’Educazione Nazionale (Part II: Administrative Acts), year 61 (1934), vol. II, p. 2378.
- 11.
Radicati di Brozolo was called by Carrelli to Naples for the tenure of theoretical physics in 1953.
- 12.
This episode is reported by Carlo Miranda in the meeting of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Naples on 15 and 22 July 1976, as can be read in the minutes.
- 13.
Carrelli’s last paper dates back to 1970, but his scientific production continued essentially uninterrupted until then, and even in his last period, he produced many single-author papers.
- 14.
Under some circumstances, if we illuminate a turbid medium with natural light, and observe the light scattered in a direction perpendicular to the incident light, we notice that this is richer in blue colours than expected according to Rayleigh’s original theory. This effect, called “residual blue” by Tyndall himself, is explained by supposing that light is scattered twice, thus increasing the blue component of the scattered beam.
- 15.
The final paper is in (Carrelli 1925).
- 16.
As was his habit, Carrelli did not deal with the theory of relativity at an advanced level, while Majorana did. And this even though Carrelli himself had already carried out some theoretical research on particular relativistic topics. See, for instance, the paper in (Carrelli 1928).
- 17.
It is worth noticing that the testimony reported by the journalist Zullino, which clearly comes from Carrelli himself, is the only one referring to Majorana’s lectures on the theory of relativity (and also the one with the correct number of lessons, only four), and it comes about forty years prior to the discovery of the Moreno papers.
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Esposito, S. (2017). Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Famous Director. In: Ettore Majorana. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54319-2_7
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