[ExI] Italy's Social Ca

[scerir]

Lee Corbin:
> Was there ever a time in the 19th or 20th centuries
> when Italy produced a strong scientific tradition?
> (Surely Enrico Fermi and a few others I could mention
> must have had very good academic circumstances---but then,
> he did leave. :-)

Many of them (here I mean physicists only) did leave because
of Italian racial laws: Emilio Segrè, Ugo Fano, Bruno Rossi,
Bruno Pontecorvo, Giulio Racah, Enrico Fermi's wife (who also
was a physicist), Andrew Viterbi ([1] well, rather a mathematician,
and Qualcomm owner), etc., or because of political or economical
reasons: 'Beppo' Occhialini, Riccardo Giacconi, Federico Faggin
[2], Pierluigi Zappacosta ([3] well, not exactly a scientist) etc.
Many of them thought it was better to remain in Italy or in
Europe (i.e. Edoardo Amaldi co-founded Cern, at Geneva).
I would say there is an Italian scientific tradition,
but it is 'transnational'.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Viterbi
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierluigi_Zappacosta