One of my goals for this year is to reduce my social media usage. I stopped checking Instagram since the first week of January and I check Twitter way less than I used to. The main reason for this change of behavior was quite simple, get some time back to other things, especially reading and listening to books. The result of my experiment has been, I’d say, eye-opening. With less time checking other people’s lives I am back focusing on mine and I am learning a lot more. I just finished an incredible book about the life of Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb". A true generalist and capable of resolving complex problems by analysing simple things, what we call today Fermi problems.
The title of the book is The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age by David N. Schwartz (Author), Tristan Morris (Narrator), Hachette Audio (Publisher). The book highlights Fermi’s life, the beginning into physics in Italy and the move to America, including of course the creation of the first nuclear reactor and the Manhattan project. As described by Amazon, straddling the ages of classical physics and quantum mechanics, equally at ease with theory and experiment, Fermi truly was the last man who knew everything - at least about physics.
