By Gregg Herken

THE POPE OF PHYSICS
Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age
By Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin
Illustrated. 351 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $30.

In a controversial lecture more than 50 years ago, the British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow suggested that natural scientists had "the future in their bones." Snow was speaking in 1959, when the public still held scientists — particularly physicists — in a kind of awe, because of their role in the invention of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. But Snow might well have had in mind the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi, the subject of a new scientific biography by the husband-and-wife team of Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/