Franco Rasetti

Dino Franco Rasetti ( born August 10, 1901 in Castiglione del Lago, Italy, † 5 December 2001 Waremme, Belgium ) was an Italian physicist.

Rasetti was born in 1901 in Castiglione del Lago. He was interested since his youth, mainly to zoology and botany. At the University of Pisa at his father's request he began to study engineering, but changed under the influence of Enrico Fermi, with whom he became friends, to physics. In 1922 he received his doctorate in Pisa and then a lecturer at the University of Florence in the Department of Antonio Garbasso ( 1871-1933 ), who was then mayor of Florence. In Florence, where he was also associated with Fermi, he worked on atomic physics. In 1927 he came to the University of Rome as the first assistant to Orso Mario Corbino ( 1876-1937 ), the professor of experimental physics and director of the Physics Institute. There had as a central personality of a separate school of physicists Fermi, who was also responsible for ensuring that Rasetti came to Rome. 1928/29, Rasetti was at Caltech with Robert A. Millikan, where he worked on the newly discovered Raman effect, which brought him international recognition. He pushed in the spectra of deviations from the theoretical predictions, which were attributed later to the existence of the neutron in the nucleus (which the particle statistics in some atomic nuclei changed compared to the acceptance of the construction only of protons and electrons of Fermi statistics to Bosestatistik or vice versa). At Caltech, he met Arnold Sommerfeld and Werner Heisenberg, with whom he became friends. Soon afterwards he turned to nuclear physics. It was 1931/32 and 1934/35 in the laboratory of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin. In 1934 he became a professor in Rome. In 1939, he left shortly before the outbreak of World War II at the University of Laval in Canada, where he founded the Institute of Physics and worked on cosmic radiation. There Bruno Pontecorvo was a year his assistant. An offer during the war in the group around Hans von Halban at the University of Montreal to work Projects in the field of the British part of Manhattan, he refused ( there were, among others, George Placzek, Pontecorvo ). In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked as neutron physics and elementary particle physics, in which he used the cosmic radiation, while watching one of the first the decay of the muon in the laboratory. In 1947 Rasetti was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University, where he remained until his retirement in 1970. Since 1952, he had U.S. citizenship. After his retirement in 1970 he went back to Italy.

Rasetti addressed since his time in Canada with paleontology and collected trilobites, initially from a known reference near Quebec, where he discovered the same new species. He read the works of Charles Doolittle Walcott and tied (on a mountain hike in 1941 in British Columbia ) Contacts for Trilobitenexperten Charles E. Resser from the Smithsonian. He continued his researches, in which he discovered hundreds of new species and the revised classification, and later in the United States continued and brought it in this area as a high reputation: 1952 he was awarded the Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1964 he was a volunteer ( Honorary Research Associate) of the Smithsonian. He donated his entire collection ( a total of around 50,000 copies ) to the Smithsonian and the Canadian Museum of Nature and of his later collectors and research activities in the southwest of Sardinia, the Museum of the Geological Survey of Italy in Rome. Now he kept a copy of which was completely intact ( which is rare ) and came from Mount Stephen, British Columbia.

Rasetti collected also from his youth beetles and was later an expert on native to Italy and the Alps orchids. His interest in botany woke up already at Johns Hopkins University. He was also a passionate mountain climber, a hobby which he had followed, for example, with his friend with him Fritz Zwicky in California. In 2001, he died 100 years old in Waremme, Belgium, his last place of residence.