Fermi and the Giants of Physics
Fermi was one of the few Physicists who was equally gifted in both theoretical and experimental Physics; his counterpart in this regard would be I. Newton (1643-27). Fermi worked on the Manhattan Project and has been considered the last man to know everything, thus being a polymath; another “Giant” to have this accolade bestowed upon him is Thomas Young (1773-29) of Young’s modulus fame as well as the Double Slit experiment. I recall whilst studying as a Maths/Physics undergraduate being baffled by this experiment and by the result that an interference pattern is observed even if a single photon is an incident at the double slits. From that moment onwards, I knew Quantum Physics would be a unique, amazing, yet bizarre theory. I think one of the best descriptions of the theory (Quantum) was given by the legendary “Giant” N. Bohr (1885-62).
“Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it”. N.Bohr.
Fermi-Dirac Statistics
Returning to Fermi, he is one-half of the Fermi-Dirac (1902-84) Statistics. I recall like it was yesterday that when I first started teaching Mathematical Economics at SOAS and the LSE in 2003 and 2004, respectively and being a Mathematical Physics graduate, I was only familiar with Statistics taught in these areas such as the Fermi-Dirac, the Bose-Einstein and The Maxwell-Boltzmann Statistics and I was thrown into the deep end by my Line Managers who asked me to teach Statistics to Social Scientists so I quickly had to embark on a steep learning curve and to get to grips with the well-known Statistics of these areas, e.g. the normal, t, F, and chi-squared distributions.
Fermi-Dirac statistics are applicable to particles that obey Pauli’s (1900-58) Exclusion Principle and the other half of that tag team, and Paul Dirac coined the term Boson in honour of his friend Satyendra Bose (1894-74) for particles that satisfied these Statistics. It is perhaps not so well known that after Bose sent Albert Einstein (1879-55) his work, Albert added to it and created Bose-Einstein Statistics. Continuing with Dirac, he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge who predicted the existence of anti-matter from his beautiful namesake equation.
Conclusion
In conclusion, one can mention Fermi’s paradox, which relates to the existence of extraterrestrial life, and it is simply the statement, “Where is everyone?
Putting this into context, Fermi posed the question, if there is life elsewhere in the universe, why haven’t they made themselves known to us and hence where are they?
No doubt one knows the Drake equation, which attempts to quantify the number of technically advanced civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, but I will refrain from discussing it here.
I am fortunate to teach Fermi problems to my students at UCL but not Fermi-Dirac Statistics.
I have run out of space again, sorry Professor.
 was given by the legendary “Giant” N. Bohr (1885-62).){kind=link}