Appeared in Nuovo Cimento 2, pp. 143-158 (1925)
(translated from Italian by Michele Gallinaro and Sebastian White,New York 2001)
Translators’ Note:
In the fall of 1924, Enrico Fermi visited Paul Ehrenfest at Leydenon a 3-month fellowshipfrom the International Education Board (IEB). Fermi was 23 years old. In his trip reportto the IEB, Fermi says he learned a lot about cryogenics and worked on two scientificpapers, including the following one. It was submitted in German to Zeitschrift f ̈ur Physik.The German version was known to Weizs ̈acker and Williams and cited in the papers (10years) later in which they extended Fermi’s method to the Ultra-Relativistic case. TheGerman version was subsequently translated into a Russian versionand perhaps otherlanguages. Fermi’s Italian version (printed inNuovo Cimento) is less widely known anddoes not appear in the “Collected Works”. Nevertheless, Persico remarks that this wasone of Fermi’s favorite ideas and that he often used it in later life. So,we would like tothink of this as a late 100thbirthday present to the Italian Navigator.We would like to thank Professor T.D. Lee for his encouragement of this project and forinteresting discussions about Fermi. Also Tom Rosenblum at the Rockefeller Archives forbringing Fermi’s correspondence to our attention and Bonnie Sherwood for typing theoriginal manuscript.
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