Mind Always in Motion: The Autobiography of Emilio Segre

This memoir by a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project covers that dramatic episode, and others, in the history of modern physics, but the book remains more the story of the man than of an era. Born to a bourgeois Italian Jewish family in 1905, Segre came of age in Fascist Italy, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1938. His career paralleled those of Glen Seaborg, Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez; Enrico Fermi was his friend and mentor. Segre's early research in nuclear decay led to patented isotopes and filled in several places on the periodic table; later he was on Robert Oppenheimer's team at the Los Alamos nuclear test site. In 1959, he won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the anti-proton. As an inveterate letter writer and diarist, Segre could have provided a window on interpersonal controversies among the fathers of fission, but he tactfully declines to report on his relationships with colleagues, never mind settling scores (although he makes an exception for Edward Teller). For general readers with an interest in the history of nuclear physics, Segre, who died in 1989, is among the most personable witnesses. (Oct.)