Emilio Segrè

Born on 1 February 1905 in Tivoli, Italy, Emilio Segrè was a Nobel Prize–winning nuclear physicist who synthesized radioactive elements and discovered the antiproton. Segrè studied under Enrico Fermi in the 1920s and became a professor of physics at the University of Palermo, where in 1937 he discovered technetium (atomic number 43), the first element to be artificially produced. The following year Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government banned Jews from holding professorships in Italy. Segrè and his wife were visiting California at the time and decided to immigrate to the US. Building on his work at Palermo, Segrè isolated several isotopes at the Berkeley Radiation Lab, including the fissionable plutonium-239. After contributing to the Manhattan Project during World War II, Segrè returned to Berkeley and also served a brief stint at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. In 1955, working with Owen Chamberlain, Segrè discovered the antiproton; the two researchers would go on to win the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics. Segrè was also an avid photographer. After he died (here is the Physics Today obituary written by Chamberlain), his wife donated much of his photograph collection to the American Institute of Physics, the publisher of Physics Today. AIP’s photographic archive of physics history, which includes this picture of Segrè, is now named the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives .

Date in History: 1 February 1905