The Man Who Was Both Alive And Dead

[rynner2]

Agh! A real teaser here. A new Scientist article which is only available in full to subscribers. It begins:

The man who was both alive and dead

05 August 2006
Zeeya Merali
Magazine issue 2563

To be or not to be? The question became an obsession with Ettore Majorna, the celebrated Italian physicist who disappeared mysteriously in the 1930s
TO BE, or not to be? The question that tormented Hamlet also seems to have been an obsession with Ettore Majorana, the celebrated Italian physicist who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the 1930s. An analysis of his letters suggests that Majorana answered the question with his own unique quantum mechanical twist, managing to achieve the illusion of being both dead and alive at the same time.

Born 100 years ago this week, Majorana's genius was likened to that of Newton and Galileo by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, his supervisor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. Majorana is today credited with predicting that neutrinos have mass - something that was only confirmed during the last decade. And more of his prescient theories are now coming to light (see "Ahead of his time"), suggesting that Majorana's achievements were underestimated when he was alive.

The young physicist's promising career was cut ...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg1 ... 125634.500

Can anyone post the rest? :?

 

[WhistlingJack]

You ain't seen me - right..?

02 August 2006

The man who was both alive and dead

under embargo until 02 Aug 2006 18:00 GMT

TO BE, or not to be? The question that tormented Hamlet also seems to have been an obsession with Ettore Majorana, the celebrated Italian physicist who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the 1930s. An analysis of his letters suggests that Majorana answered the question with his own unique quantum mechanical twist, managing to achieve the illusion of being both dead and alive at the same time.

Born 100 years ago this week, Majorana’s genius was likened to that of Newton and Galileo by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, his supervisor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. Majorana is today credited with predicting that neutrinos have mass – something that was only confirmed during the last decade. And more of his prescient theories are now coming to light, suggesting that Majorana’s achievements were underestimated when he was alive.

The young physicist’s promising career was cut short with his sudden disappearance at the age of 31 during a boat trip between Palermo and Naples in Italy. His body was never found despite several investigations, and opinion is divided on whether he committed suicide, was kidnapped, or changed his identity and started a new life.

Now, theoretical physicist Oleg Zaslavskii at Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine is suggesting that the ambiguity surrounding his fate was part of an elaborate illusion engineered by Majorana himself to demonstrate quantum superposition. This paradox, in which a particle can simultaneously exist in two mutually exclusive quantum states, is exemplified by Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment in which the cat can be both alive and dead.

Majorana wanted to mirror this paradox with events in his own life, says Zaslavskii (link). The argument centres on a bizarre series of messages that Majorana sent to his family and to Antonio Carrelli, the head of the Institute of Physics at the University of Naples. First, Majorana sent a letter expressing his intention to commit suicide, which he followed with a telegram refuting the idea that he was suicidal. It was his third letter, however, that struck Zaslavskii as most odd. In it, Majorana describes his hope that Carrelli received both the original letter and the telegram at the same time.

“A sender should hope that the second message came first, to cancel the earlier one with the more disturbing content,” says Zaslavskii. Instead, Majorana wanted two mutually exclusive outcomes – his suicide or survival – to co-exist, making it the “quantum mechanical version of the Hamlet question”, he says. When Zaslavskii analysed other events surrounding the disappearance he saw the same pattern. For instance, Majorana is thought to have hired impostors to pose as himself during the boat trip. “I suddenly realised that all these separate and seemingly extravagant details are united by the same underlying idea,” says Zaslavskii. “It was very impressive.”

“Zaslavskii has quite consistently shown how skilfully Majorana could have implemented his knowledge of quantum physics,” says Gennady Gorelik, a science historian at Boston University. “His theory resolves the strange and crazy behaviour of a great physicist and shows that it could have been logically organised.”

But Majorana’s actual fate and motivations will probably remain a mystery. “It’s very difficult for any historian to know what is going on in the mind of another figure,” says Gorelik. “But perhaps it takes another theoretical physicist like Zaslavskii to be able to make the intuitive leap into Majorana’s mind.”

Author: Zeeya Merali.

alphagalileo.org

 

[rynner2]

You ain't seen me - right..?

No I ain't seen no-one...

 

[James_H]

From the Wikipedia page on Ettore Majorana, re: his mysterious disappearance:

Majorana disappeared in unknown circumstances during a boat trip from Palermo to Naples on 25 March 1938. Despite several investigations, his body was not found and his fate is still uncertain. He had apparently withdrawn all of his money from his bank account prior to making his trip to Palermo. He may have travelled to Palermo hoping to visit his friend Emilio Segrè, a professor at the university there, but Segrè was in California at that time. On the day of his disappearance, Majorana sent the following note to Antonio Carrelli, Director of the Naples Physics Institute:

Dear Carrelli,

I made a decision that has become unavoidable. There isn't a bit of selfishness in it, but I realize what trouble my sudden disappearance will cause you and the students. For this as well, I beg your forgiveness, but especially for betraying the trust, the sincere friendship and the sympathy you gave me over the past months.

I ask you to remember me to all those I learned to know and appreciate in your Institute, especially Sciuti: I will keep a fond memory of them all at least until 11 pm tonight, possibly later too.

E. Majorana

This was followed rapidly by a telegram cancelling his earlier plans. He apparently bought a ticket from Palermo to Naples and was never seen again.

Several possible explanations for his disappearance have been proposed, including:

Hypothesis of suicide
proposed by his colleagues Amaldi, Segrè and others
Hypothesis of escape to Argentina
proposed by Erasmo Recami and Carlo Artemi (who has developed a detailed hypothetical reconstruction of Majorana's possible escape and life in Argentina)
Hypothesis of escape to Venezuela
proposed the Rai 3 talk show "Chi l'ha Visto?" published a statement stating that Majorana was alive between 1955 and 1959, living in Valencia, Venezuela.
Hypothesis of escape to a monastery
proposed by Sciascia (putatively the Charterhouse of Serra San Bruno)
Hypothesis of kidnapping or murder
by Bella, Bartocci, and others, to avoid his participation in the construction of an atomic weapon
Hypothesis of escape to become a beggar
by Bascone and Venturini (called the "omu cani" or "dog man" hypothesis)

Extended summaries and investigations
The Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia has summarized some of the results of these investigations and these hypotheses, however, some of Sciascia's conclusions were refuted by some of Majorana's former colleagues, including E. Amaldi and E. Segrè.

Recami critically examines various hypotheses for Majorana's disappearance who various rival explanations concerning Majorana's disappearance, including those advanced by Sciascia, and presents suggestive evidence for the proposal that Majorana travelled to Argentina.

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has also recently published a book that examines the case of Majorana's disappearance.

Case reopened by Rome Attorney's Office and closed with presumed emigration to Venezuela
In March 2011, Italian media reported that the Rome Attorney's Office had announced an inquiry into the statement made by a witness about meeting with Majorana in Buenos Aires in the years after World War II.[16][17] On 7 June 2011 Italian media reported that the Carabinieri's RIS had analyzed a photograph of a man taken in Argentina in 1955, finding ten points of similarity with Majorana's face.

On 4 February 2015, the Rome Attorney's Office released a statement declaring that Majorana was alive between 1955–1959, living in Valencia, Venezuela. These last findings, based on new evidence, made the Office declare the case officially closed, having found no criminal evidence related to his disappearance which probably was a personal choice.

Here's a PDF document about the case: The Mysterious Disappearance of Ettore Majorana by Barry Holstein.

This article quotes an eyewitness who apparently met him in Venezuala:
Ettore Majorana: The Mystery Might Be Solved (Science20.com, 2011)

I left to Venezuela because of disagreements with my father in April 1955. Once in Caracas, I went to Valencia with Ciro, a Sicilian friend, who presented me to a mr. Bini. I connected Bini to Majorana thanks to Carlo, an Argentinian. He said "Do you realize who that guy is ? He's a scientist. He's got a brain you can't imagine. He is mr. Majorana". They had met in Argentina. He was of average height, with white hair, few and wavy. The white hair of a man who was once black-haired. One could see it from the fact that he wore his watch over his shirt, so to wash his hands he opened his sleeves and black hair could be seen. He was shy, often silent, and if you invited him to a night club he wouldn't come. He might have been 50-55 years old. He had a roman accent but one could see he was not. One could also see he was well-learned. He looked like a prince. I sometimes told him "What the hell do you live for ? You are always sad". He said he worked, we dined together, then he would disappear for 10-15 days. He had a yellow Studebacker. He only paid for the gas, otherwise he looked always penniless. Sometimes I used to tell him "You care so much for this car and have all these papers". These were sheets with numbers and commas, bars. He never wanted to be photographed, and since I once had to lend him 150 bolivars, I sort of blackmailed him, I asked him to get a picture of him to send it to my family. He was shorter than I was. When I found the picture I decided to speak, otherwise it was useless for me to say I had known Majorana."

The author of the article expresses a hope that the physicist's remains may be found; as far as I am aware, they haven't been to date.

 

[CuriousIdent]

Intriguing. So if he did survive he likely took his secret to is death. All the prove a philosophical point.

It would be interesting to see the photograph for comparison.

 

[James_H]

It would be interesting to see the photograph for comparison.

The young Majorana

A photo that supposedly shows an older Majorana on the right. Source

 

[INT21]

Either you had a point or you didn't . Unless you're Schrodinger and your both did and didn't until you made it.

I do understand that he was talking about probability. I just find it annoying that he should do it in this manner.
You can apply that logic to almost anything. Either the bus will arrive, or it won't. Either way I won't know until it arrives or it doesn't.

I dissagree your passing electron analogy. The electron will pass my window whether I observe it or not; assuming it exists.

 

[ramonmercado]

Podcast about Majorana.

Podcast Episode 340: A Vanished Physicist

In 1938, Italian physicist Ettore Majorana vanished after taking a sudden sea journey. At first it was feared that he’d ended his life, but the perplexing circumstances left the truth uncertain. In today’s show we’ll review the facts of Majorana’s disappearance, its meaning for physics, and a surprising modern postscript. ...

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2021/04/26/podcast-episode-340-a-vanished-physicist/