Another great little book by Sciascia. La Scomparsa di Majorana is a brief
history of one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century and his
disappearance (one day in 1938 he was supposed to be on a ferry back to Naples
but was never actually seen landing, and nobody heard from or saw him again).
Ettore Majorana was one of the most gifted theoretical physicists of his
generation, working side-by-side with Enrico Fermi, but also an enigmatic
character (like most geniuses are, I suppose), shy, moody, and struggling to
interact with other people.
In the book Sciascia highlights a number of the
more or less plausible explanations that have been given for Majorana’s disappearance
Sciascia seems to believe that Majorana, possibly worried by the dangers of the
implications of his atomic discoveries, just decided to leave everything behind
and start a new life somehow, somewhere. Maybe the author was a romantic who
didn’t want to believe that Majorana had killed himself, maybe at sea, but a
few months ago allegedly undeniable evidence has proven that the physicist was
living in Venezuela in the 1950s, and that just makes me happy...
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