*Who do you believe is the most underrated scientist in history?* CORRECTION: Marie Curie and Pierre Curie never bombarded atoms with alpha particles. These experiments were done by their daughter Irene and her husband, Frédéric-Joliot Curie. Try brilliant.org/Newsthink/ for FREE for 30 days, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription

Fermi is a legend in nuclear physics! He discovered/invented the first controlled nuclear reactor. Oppy and HIS TEAM built the plutonium implosion fission weapon. Little Boy was built on Fermi’s work with Uranium in Chicago.

Fermi is as well-known as Oppenheimer to anyone who is interested in the history of science.

I actually learn about Fermi first as a kid not Openheimer and for me he was father of nuclear energy.

Fermi certainly got his due. The premier physics research facility in the US (and arguably, the world) is called Fermilab...not Oppenheimer Lab.

Fermi’s major contribution to the Manhattan project was the development of the nuclear reactor, which was later able to produce kilogram quantities of plutonium.

Fermi doesn’t need recognition from anybody. He was the ultimate Guru and acknowledged by all scientists as one of the greatest ever. They used to call him the the “pope” for a good reason.

Fermi well known in scientific community. Even a subatomic particle category is named after him called "Fermion"

Fermi was one of the greatest geniuses of all time, credit to Oppenheimer got coordinating all the geniuses.

Fermi and Von Neumann were critical to the Manhattan Project and legitimate geniuses.

"Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi" written by Fermi's wife is a wonderfull biography.

Fermi was interested in the pacific use of Uranium, but he had to collaborate with the Manhattan project for many reasons. He was indeed the guy who found the path to the chain reaction. Without his research nothing could have been achieved.

Fermi's most significant contributions to Phsyics was his work on quantum statistics, especially in the context of condensed matter. Fermi-Dirac statistics, the Fermi Level, etc. are key ideas in understanding the electronic structure of metals and semiconductors.

If you're interested in Fermi, you need to get a copy of "Atoms in the Family". It was written by Laura Fermi, his wife. The book is a 10 on scale of 10. It describes the first fission reaction experiment that he made in Italy.

"We're cooking" ...This man was indeed ahead of his time

Fermi is VERY famous among those who are more knowledgeable on this topic than a movie marketing campaign. He was critical to the bomb-building project, but he wasn't the director of the project. Big difference...

How was Fermi overlooked? Outside America, he is a lot more famous than Oppenheimer. In the Periodic Table of Elements, we have an element named after him (Fermium), but none named after Oppenheimer

I would argue that Fermi was way more well-known and important than Oppenheimer.

No...He was famous indeed!! We are talking about a giant here, the man that was also call "Pope Physicist. Winner of the nobel prize in 1938 for his work on induced radioactivity, inventor of the nuclear reactor, co discoverer of new radioactive elements, significant contributions in quantum physics statistical mechanics , nuclear and particles physics and more!!

They were all geniuses on the Manhattan Project.

The sad thing is that Italians invented: - the pile (Volta) - the telephone (Meucci) - the radio (Marconi) - nuclear fission (Fermi) - personal computer (Olivetti) But we hardly got anything out of it and any credit or real sustain or economic advance for that. Rather a lot Americans got the public perception credits for many of these inventions. They managed to manipulate perceptions and convince the average public opinion that overall these are all American inventions

It is quite unbelievable the talent that the Manhattan Project had at its disposal. Arguably the greatest minds ever to have been assembled at the one place at the one time. Fermi, von Neumann, Feynman, Teller, Ulam, Bohr, Chadwick, Oppenheimer etc. I doubt we will ever see so many geniuses working on a project again.

Thats why theres a Fermi lab and not an Oppenheimer lab

I always thought fermi was the main scientist while Oppenheimer was more of a project manager.

I actually knew more Fermi than Oppenheimer before the film

Fermi did not build the bomb, period. He made the essential breakthrough that enabled the building of the bomb.

Fermi is clearly significantly more famous than Oppenheimer as a physicist. Perceiving Oppenheimer as a more important physicist must be obvious U.S. unconscious bias. It remains that Oppenheimer indeed oversaw the fabrication of the bomb, and may thus legitimately be called the "father of the atomic bomb". His work in there was more of an engineer than of a physicist, but it does not follow that Oppenheimer would not be quite a remarkable figure of the time

There were many men over a 50 year period who were responsible for the bomb and splitting of the atom not just one man

Yes, Oppenheimer did not invent the bomb, but was responsible for coordinating the creation of the bomb, with many physicists. He did that well

Fermi is famous as hell! Here in Switzerland at the Lago Maggiore in Ticino there is a hydrofoil ship that belongs to the public transport network with the name "Enrico Fermi"! :)

Actually, if you learn physics - Fermi is a far more important and named figure than Oppenheimer who was mostly a man-manager and politician.

Fermi was the only scientist after Isaac Newton and Maxwell who was both an expert experimentalist and theoretical physicist.

Other comments probably have made this point, but Oppenheimer did not "oversee the Manhattan project". He was responsible for managing the work at Los Alamos where scientists and engineers designed and built the actual bomb using . The director of the Manhattan Project was General Leslie Groves.

Nolan writing the movie: I will deliberately avoid to mention this man achievements.

He's far far far more famous than Oppenheimer to anyone with an education in physics.

Those of us who studied physics at university are fully aware of the genius and importance of Enrico Fermi -it's good to be reminded just how great and versatile a physicist he really was- but the fact remains that other great scientists in the Los Alamos team also made important and essential contributions to the development of the bomb. Fermi had a steely determination and stubbornness that could sometimes upset others; he could certainly be difficult if he thought he was in the right; however he could be forgiven for having a "dark side" given the pressure they were all under. A interesting upload-thank you.

Justly deserved tribute. Nice! “You can tune a piano but, you can’t tune a fish!” 😂☮️

Dirac is truly someone who does not get credit they deserve. What he did was amazing. Feynman’s hero as a young man was Dirac.

Fermi, Leo Szilard, Feyman, Oppenheimer and many, many more. This was the largest group of extremely talented genius in history. No one should be credited with the development although the absence of any one of them might have caused the effort to fail. In this sense Fermi was essential to the effort, but that is true of so many others.

The last physicist to excel in both theory and experiment.

Fermi, Teller, Ulam. Lots of overlooked scientists worked on this.

I know much more about Fermi than I do Oppenheimer, but then again I worked at the Enrico Fermi power plant for 30+ years.😁

Fermi was Steve Wozniak and Oppenheimer Steve Jobs

I always cry when i watch anything related to science. The missed opportunity to pursue physics still haunts me.

Who said that Enrico Fermi was not "as famous" as J Robert Oppenheimer? But he was not credited with making a bomb because he and Szilard made a working nuclear reactor, not a bomb. So he established the exothermic process of nuclear fission and obtained energy from it.... without making the ignition process of creating an explosive device of mass destruction.

Without him , no stable bomb . Glad he made money from his patents . We need a movie on Fermi

The bomb inventors saved millions of lives both Allied and Japanese. Count the cost on both sides if an invasion had taken place. I wish the idealists who condemn, would allow reality into their thinking?

This guy was a genius, they could not have been succesfully made this bomb in time without him 👌

maybe overlooked by the general community, but in the physics community fermi is a hero. one of the greatest. oppenheimer is not.

He was present when the X-10 Graphite Reactor went critical at Oak Ridge and witnessed the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert. After the war, Fermi became a professor at the University of Chicago, dying of stomach cancer in 1954.

Best freaking channel ever!!! I am so addicted to it and easy to follow knowledge!

Just buy “The last man who knew everything” and you will find out that Fermi wasn’t underrated EVER.

Another good one. I would love to see a video outlining how you make a video,. From how you pick a topic, what areas you focus on within that topic, and how you find and select certain photos and videos to include. I would say Briilant has made you brilliant but I believe there was another cause for your brilliance. I bet you have amazing parents. That would make a good video topic to see how you were nurtured and guided to become who you are today. Tell them thank you, for raising you to be someone who so many people like me have come to rely on for educating us in such an entertaining way.

At the Argonne Nation Lab they have the original notebook and signed bottle on display.

Love your videos! Keep it up!

I did credit him in my video about Nuclear warheads and it's history and their impact on humanity as Enrico Fermi and Glenn Seaborg were responsible for the production of plutonium in Manhattan project, but unfortunately I did not talk about how he's the man who started the race to expand the periodic table and how he's also the first man to design and build a nuclear reactor.

The bomb was conceptualized by Leo Szilard. Fermi did the experimental work.

Fermi is known for his peaceful use of nuclear energy as well as his sub nuclear particle as Neutrino.

There is no point of comparison between Fermi and Oppenheimer. Fermi was a first rate physicist and he was able to complete his work in physics. Oppenheimer is different, he directed the construction of the atomic bomb which was used without his approval against japan. After that he was involved in politicals turmoils and his career as a physicist was gonne for ever. Everybody recognize Fermi's work in physics (he is in the pages of any physics textbook) . Oppenheimer is different, he was named the 'father of the atomic bomb', which kills thousands of people, and he is accused of spying for the soviets. Oppenheimer is a 'villain', but to me he is truly a victim.

Leo Szilard and Fermi imagined-made/built the reactor in Chicago respectively. Then Fermi went on from there and literally built the reactor with his own hands, stacking the graphite blocks with the help of football players. Szilard never got his hands dirty. Szilard was on the outside looking in after the team in White Sands built the Trinity bomb.

Excellent video on an interesting topic about an interesting person. Thanks!

There shouldn't be any confusion about Fermi/Oppenheimer over the utilizing of atomic energy. Fermi did the FIRST pioneering experiments to show the practicality of what other famous Theoretical Scientists such as Einstein & he himself, Oppenheimer had been found out. Oppenheimer was THE father of the large scale development of the world famous atomic bomb that we all of know.

Thank you.

leo szilard, jonny von neumann, ede teller

This entire comment stream is entertaining as well as perplexing. Those who think that Fermi was overlooked obviously never studied science in a serious fashion. And to debate who was more (or the most) critical to the development of the bomb is pointless. How far back in physics history do you want to go? Why not include the Curies? It's a chain - remove any one link and it doesn't work. Bethe even said in an interview later in life that Oppenheimer possessed the quickest mind he had ever seen. And while Oppy was important in getting the project together, I don't think that makes him more or less important than others.

Nicola Tesla I think. He does not get credit for many of his own inventions.

Fermi's name comes up all the time in atomic/nuclear/solid-state physics. Oppenheimer, not so much. Oppenheimer's contribution was as principal investigator of the Manhatten Project.

After the first successful American nuclear tests and bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, Stalin felt the need to act and urged Soviet scientists to develop an atomic bomb as well. But the project stalled. When a Chinese delegation visited Moscow in July 1949, Stalin showed them a film allegedly depicting the first Soviet nuclear test a few weeks before it took place. But where did this film come from? Where did the test take place? "Atomic Film" Delays in creating the bomb disrupted Stalin's foreign policy plans. A few months earlier, Stalin had received from his personal envoy to Mao Zedong, Ivan Kovalev, that the Chinese communists had discovered a secret American plan at Chiang Kai-shei headquarters. Accordingly, the Americans were preparing for World War III. Together with the national Chinese and Japanese, they intend to use atomic bombs to crush the People's Liberation Army of China. Stalin made it clear to Kovalev that the United States was not yet ready for a great war. On July 9, the first reception of the Chinese delegation led by the second highest party figure Liu Shaochi was held at Stalin's dacha. The second conversation, which is of particular interest to us, began on the evening of July 11 in the Kremlin. Liu Shaochi asked Stalin if he wanted to help the People's Liberation Army land in Taiwan. Stalin denied it. Liu then raised the question of how great Stalin considered the danger of World War III. The dictator acted calmly. The “imperialists” are not yet sufficiently armed to resist the Soviet Union at any moment. Liu then asked permission to visit Soviet nuclear laboratories. This request was no doubt agreed with Mao, who was familiar with and interested in nuclear weapons. Mao kept his intentions secret from the public, calling the atomic bombs "paper tigers". However, Stalin did not want to show the guests the nuclear laboratories and instead invited them to watch the film. An atomic bomb exploded. The tests, as Stalin Liu said, took place in the far north of the Soviet Union, in a deserted area near the Arctic Circle. Strangely enough, the screening of the film took place a few weeks before August 29, 1949, the first successful Soviet atomic bomb test in Semipalatinsk. Two key actors independently confirmed the fact of the film: Kovalev, Stalin's expert on China, reported it in his memoirs, as did Shi Zhe, Mao's translator. What drove Stalin to this bluff? His attempt to oust the Western Powers from West Berlin failed. Worse, the Berlin crisis contributed to the merger of many Western European countries and the United States into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April 1949. America's nuclear arsenal, though small, was growing, and the Soviet Union did not yet have an atomic bomb. In Europe, Stalin was on the defensive. His attention, therefore, more than ever, was focused on Asia, where the centre of the world’s revolutionary movement had moved. Despite some reservations about Mao, Stalin saw the Chinese Communists as strategic allies. It must therefore be important for him to look as strong as possible. Nothing could illustrate this better than possessing an atomic bomb. German film? My guess is going in a different direction. Perhaps the film was found somewhere in Germany after the end of the war. What at first sounds like a wild conspiracy thesis is confirmed by documents I found in the inventory of sources of the archive of modern Russian history in Moscow, which lists hundreds of files of German mining. In addition to the files, films were also recorded. Most of them were rocket launches. The contents of one roll of film are described as follows: "The film about the launch of Fau-2 and the detonation of an atomic bomb". This designation of the name appears to have been literally translated from the German film into Russian. The film was handed over to the vice-chairman of the Special Committee on Missile Construction (Committee No. 2) Ivan Grigorievich Zubovich in May 1946. There is no way to prove whether these are indeed recordings of a nuclear fission bomb test. They are more likely to test a hybrid bomb consisting of a large amount of explosives and a small amount of fissionable and thermonuclear material. Only the original films or other archival materials that have not yet been discovered can provide information about this.

Oppenheimer's insistence on radiological weapons is why he was chosen to be a test engineer at Trintiy.

It is very interesting that nobody mentions the great Scientist Lise Meitner who was the first to comprehend what happens during fission , the phenomenon which took us to the construction of the so called Atomic Bomb

The high school in the musical Zombie Prom is named for him, as is the real-life Scuola Italiana Enrico Fermi in Chicago! Oh, and Jimmy Neutron name-dropped him in at least one episode. “By the spirit of Enrico Fermi…science shall never take a backseat to mindless pop culture again!”

Oppenheimer was the face of the Atomic Bomb, but there were many brilliant minds behind it. Not just Fermi. Heisenberg, Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, just to name a few made great contributions towards understanding the strong force and how to unleash that energy. Some of them may not have worked directly at Los Alamos, but their research and theory helped pave the way for understanding fission and ultimately fusion. That research had long lasting impacts on our viewpoints of energy, the formation of stars, and the ultimate fate of all stars in our universe. Energy, cosmology, and physics were changed forever by those gods of physics in the early 20th century as they slowly peeled back the layers of reality to peer into the looking glass of quantum mechanics.

2:00 thats muscle hes pulling out

One of the many italians mind of the other century, incredible how many geniuses were born in a so little country in a little span of time

He didn’t get enough credit because he didn’t help bomb Japan. And maybe also because he is an Italian.

Enrico fermi is the REAL father of the atomic bomb. He was such a prolific scientist who would've made even more contributions had he lived 15-25 more years. The man, estimated to have an iq of 190, was so well-rounded in his field, having great command on theory, experiments, and math.

Fermi is fortunate. He got a Nobel Prize and is well-known. He doesn't need the "credit". Besides the "credit" would only damage his reputation.

one of my heroes with faraday and maxwell

I am an electrical engineer. I have learnt some Semiconductor Physics. His work for the bomb is trivial in magnitude and consequence.

Who split the atom and built the atomic bomb? Ernest Orlando Lawrence! Period.

Maria Skłodowska - Curie.

The Fermi paradox isn't a paradox at all, if you consider the known Universe's size & Humanity's age, closely. When you are talking about millions of light years in distances, it's no wonder no extra terrestrial life has ever contacted us. Millions of alien civilizations might have developed & gone extinct in a .million different star systems, millions of light years away & ago, without ever getting the chance to look for fellow naighbors in the cosmos! Couple that with the mere 200,000 years or so that Homo Sapiens have roamed the earth, a blink of an eye in the cosmic time scale, one can logically conclude that we haven't been here long enough to find our fellow cosmic dwellers! The distances are just too f*****g crazy! 😰

Fermi was a brilliant physicist to bad today he's only known by the Fermi paradox to most people

Forgotten? There’s an element named for him.

Enrico Fermi won a Nobel price for the discovery of the “neutrino” and the chain reaction in 1936.

Love this history lesson!

What a collection of geniuses. Many became anti nuke. Next villain was Stalin, as again Churchill saw the threat early. So many physicists were exposed to radiation, including at the test sites. Died of cancer. So many were Jewish or had Jewish relatives, got the heck of Europe just in time. Szilard was a visionary in the wide sense as well as a brilliant scientist. He wrote the Einstein letter to Roosevelt. All these guys knew Fermi was at another level and also a natural leader and all round good person. Do you know Dyson's story about meeting Fermi early in his research? Fermi said I can fit a curve to anything, doesn't mean it's true. Big lesson for Dyson at a young age. Oppenheimer did good theoretical work over his career, had to deal with Groves. Now Putin has replaced Stalin and so called populists are thriving, even in the US. What would Fermi and his cohort and Eisenhower think about modern times? Have we learned anything?

There are a lot little imprecisions. The estimation of the yeld to 10KTon was pretty accurate since the fermi method was based on order of magnitude, quite like the number of piano tuners in Chicago… The paradox also should be interpreted as an extension of this statistical problem analysis. Technically at lunch he was thinking at Drakes equation. Just a ton of years in advance, even before nasa, Apollo, Sagan. Such a genius indeed

Very Nice story of 1st Atom bomb, and 1 lakhs peoples working on This project 👍major scientists Einstine, Fermi, Pauli, Niels Bore many others 👍

J. Robert Oppenheimer did NOT head up the Manhattan Project. What he did is lead the bomb design effort. General Leslie Groves headed the Manhattan Project.

And maybe, but just maybe Ettore Majorana already knew everything.... The description that Fermi did about Majorana Is touching, on the verge of being scary ... "...a genius, on par with Newton and Galileo, he has something that nobody have, unfortunately he lacks something that most people have, Common sense."

Great video.

When you STUDY science, and not just READ it, Fermi is always given more prominence than Oppenheimer.

Most astonishing to me was the fact that he never had to read a textbook twice. As complex as it could be, reading it once allowed him to grasp the very content immediately. As a side note, Majorana was even more clever...

The nuclear power plant south of Detroit is named after him.....

4:55 "hitler pressed Mussolini to target Italian Jew", is not exactly true. Mussolini had ever at least since the 20s a quite anti-Semitic, but it not a systematic anti-semitism, so it means that for jews where are a possibility to live in Italy and join to PNF but they will be treated like a second-class citizens, or the fact that they was a Jew was a negative (but not exclusionary) factor on choice to be appointed at the role of responsibility in the state and/or party administration. But slowly, the anti semitism become more systematic, that leads to the racial laws, and with the war and after the 1943 armistice in the Italian Social Republic an active persecution of lives of Italian Jews.

0:00: 💣 Enrico Fermi's experiments and his interest in probability theory led to the creation of the atomic bomb. 2:40: 🔬 Enrico Fermi's contributions to physics include the development of Fermi-Dirac statistics, his explanation of beta decay, and his discovery of nuclear fission. 5:40: 💣 The race to understand and control nuclear fission, leading to the development of the atomic bomb. 8:16: 🔬 Fermi's pivotal role in creating the controlled release of nuclear energy and his contributions to the Manhattan Project. 11:04: 💣 Enrico Fermi, the father of the atomic bomb, made significant contributions to physics and faced moral dilemmas regarding the development of more powerful weapons. He also pondered the Fermi Paradox and battled stomach cancer before his death at the age of 53. 14:07: 🔑 Tech companies use Fermi problems in job interviews to assess problem-solving skills. Brilliant offers courses to cultivate analytical thinking. Recap by Tammy AI

Cool video

„Never got credit…“ I believe that is not true. I have learned very early that Fermi was the first to keep a nuclear chain reaction running in his Chicago reactor „under the staircase“ shortly before the first atomic bomb was fired. That was always seen as a significant step towards the atomic bomb and energy. Finally even a chemical element, Fermium, was named after him. So why „no credit“?

Eh, of all the different types of cancer, stomach cancer probably has less connection to radiation than many others, such as thyroid cancer, leukemia, lymphoma. etc. The current thinking is that chronic infection of the stomach by H. pylori, a bacteria, is the main cause of stomach ulcer, and chronic H.pylori infection is what eventually leads to stomach cancer.