A misterious disappearance
On Saturday 26 March 1938 the director of the Institute
of Physics at the University of Naples in Italy, Antonio
Carrelli, received a mysterious telegram. It has been
sent the previous day from the Sicilian capital Palermo, and read:
“Don’t worry. A letter will follow. Majorana.” That
same Saturday, Ettore Majorana – who had just been
appointed as full professor of theoretical physics at the
university at the age of 31 – had not turned up to give
his lecture on Theoretical Physics. By
Sunday the promised letter had reached Carrelli. In it
Majorana wrote that he had abandoned his suicidal
intentions and would return to Naples, but it revealed
no hint of where the illustrious physicist might be. The
picture was quickly becoming clear: Majorana, who was
widely regarded as a genius, had disappeared.
Troubled by the news, Carrelli called his friend
Enrico Fermi in Rome, who immediately realized the
seriousness of the situation. It was in this occasion that
Fermi, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics later that year,
expressed himself with Cocconi as above in order to give him an
idea of the seriousness of the loss to the community of
physicists caused by Majorana’s disappearance.