It’s kind of strange that there’s never been a Hollywood movie about the odd disappearance of physicist Ettore Majorna.
Majorana was one of the students that Enrico Fermi chose for his team when he was named professor of theoretical physics at Sapienza University of Rome. That group, nicknamed the Via Panisperna Boys would make important discoveries about the atomic nucleus.and beta decay
Majorana was apparently the first person to correctly infer the existence of neutrinos, though he never published on the matter–despite Fermi’s urging him to–leading to James Chadwick garnering the Nobel Prize for that finding after Chadwick independently confirmed the existence of the neutrino. As Wikipedia sums up Majorana’s odd indifference to his own discoveries, “Majorana was known for not seeking credit for his discoveries, considering his work to be banal. He wrote only nine papers in his lifetime.”
Because of the rise of fascism in Italy, the Via Panisperna Boys dispersed in 1938. Fermi, of course, famously went to the United States where he worked on the Manhattan Project. In 1938, Majorana mysteriously disappeared at sea. According to Wikipedia,
Majorana disappeared in unknown circumstances during a boat trip from Palermo to Naples on March 25, 1938. Despite several investigations, his fate is still uncertain. His body has not been found. He had apparently withdrawn all of his money from his bank account, prior to making a trip to Palermo. He may have traveled 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 a 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
Majorana’s sudden disappearance was a persistent mystery. Did he kill himself? Was he kidnapped? Did he simply abandon his old life for a new one?
In February 2015, Italian police finally closed their case on Majorana after concluding that his disappearance was the latter–Majorana apparently engineered his own disappearance and was living in Valencia, Venezuela from 1955-59.
In 2008, a man named Roberto Fasani called into an Italian television show that had aired a missing persons program devoted to Majorana. Fasani said that he had met Majorana in Venezuela where he was living under an alias. Fasani was able to produce a photograph of the man he met in Venezuela that Italian police believe is, in fact, Majorana.
Since there is no evidence that there was any coercion or other criminal activity that forced Majorana to be living in Venezuela, Italian police closed their case closed. It would be interesting to find out what this gifted physicist spent his post-disappearance years doing, and what motivated such a drastic ruse.