Marco Pizzi

The Majorana Sea Marco Pizzi

"A compelling reconstruction of an Italian mystery, with a skilful balance between reality and fiction that renders the text enjoyable and captivating." Teatro Helios Award, Passione Drammaturgia 2012, Pieve di Teco (Imperia, Italy). Ettore Majorana was an incredibly talented physicist and a deep, solitary man who mysteriously disappeared in 1938, at the age of thirty-two. Enrico Fermi considered him the greatest mind he never met and compared him to Galileo and Newton. On his disappearance the most different and fantastical interpretations have been written: he closed himself in a nunnery wanting to have no part to the atomic bomb; he become a Nazi collaborator; he was kidnapped by Russian 007; he committed suicide for love or others unknown reasons... This play is a literary reconstruction of Majorana's last years, accessible to both the scientist and the general reader. The play is in fact based on historical testimonials but is also full of human and philosophical issues. The key point of this new analysis is the unexpected discovery of the positron, a breakthrough which made obsolete Majorana's infinite-component equation and broke in two parts his scientific and personal life. For four years Majorana no longer frequented the physics department and preferred to live an isolated existence. In 1937, he returned to physics with a theory on the neutrino, his most long-lasting contribution to science; but one year later he took his 'inevitable' decision. The unknown final of his existence is depicted with a sort of 'path integral' on the possible ways he ended his life.