March 27, 2019 • 30 mins
Had his life had taken a different course, he may have become as widely known as Albert Einstein. In the 1930s, Majorana contributed to the field of quantum mechanics in ways that fundamentally shaped the field. And then he vanished.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson.
Today's topic covers a name that is pretty well known
in physics circles, but if his life had taken a
(00:21):
different course, he may well have become a name as
widely known as that of Albert Einstein or Marie Curie
in the wider public consciousness. In the nineteen thirties, at
Marana contributed to the field of quantum mechanics in ways
that fundamentally shaped the field and are still studied today.
And then his career had taken him to a really
(00:42):
prestigious position, and he was making a good living, and
then he vanished. And what happened to him may never
be known with certainty, but there are certainly many theories
and even some official rulings on the matter, and we'll
talk about those and why some people reject them as
we get to the end of the episode. So it
stays a little bit of his free mystery, and I feel,
for some reason compelled to confess that this is one
(01:03):
of those episodes that I've kind of been like circling
for a long time, Like I would work on it
for and get a few hundred words written and then
just feel strange about it and want to wander off.
Because his story is complex, and he's a person that
unfortunately obviously had a lot going on that was never
really recorded in terms of where his head was at
(01:23):
with some of the things he was working on. So
heads up, there is some discussion of suicide in this episode.
So if that is a problematic area that you are
not comfortable hearing about in your history entertainment, uh, this
may be one to skip over, or you can just
listen to the first part and skip out after the
second break. That's where I was born in the city
of Catania on the island of Sicily near Mount Etna
(01:45):
on August five, n six. Was born in his family
home at Via Etna, and he had an impressive family.
His father, Fabio Massimo Marana, was an engineer and his mother,
Durna Course, was from a wealthy family. The house that
they were living in was actually hers. The family also
owned homes and Palermo and Rome, and Etre's paternal grandfather
(02:09):
was a lawyer and economist and a politician. His uncles
were all very educated and respected influential members of the community.
They worked in fields like education and politics. This was
really a family that prized hard work and study. And
in addition to Etre, the Maiorana has had four other children,
Rosina Salvatore, Luciano and Maria Tore was the fourth of
(02:34):
the five and as a child, Marana exhibited an advanced
ability to calculate mathematical problems, and he also excelled at chess.
And while his education began at home, uh for formal education,
he was sent to Rome to attend the Instituto Massimo
a later me a Jesuit boarding school. And it's I
(02:54):
say to his formal education that homeschooling he got is
pretty universally recognized is incredibly rigorous. His dad was really, really,
really um Some would say he was quite hard on
his kids in terms of like their education and how
not just rigorous it was, but really really challenging, and
he expected them to keep up and excel. And then
(03:16):
when he was in high school, transferred to another school
in Rome, the Liscato Tasso, to finish his pre university education.
When he made that transfer in ninety one, the family
moved to the house that they owned in Rome so
that Roy could finish his education while still living with
his family. He got his a diploma two years later
in nine and he planned to be an engineer like
(03:39):
a Spather, so he enrolled in a two year program
at the University of Rome to prepare for engineering school
and then, following this plan, in nine five, he started
a three year program at the School of Applications for Engineers.
For the next two years, Mayorana stayed on track with
his program, although apparently hydraulics gave him a little bit
of trouble. That was one area where he he had
(04:01):
to work a little bit harder to pass. But in
seven he started a friendship that changed the course of
his life. He met Emilio Segre. And if that name
sounds familiar to our science minded listeners, it is because
he won the Nobel Prize in physics in nineteen fifty nine,
and it was Segla who convinced ere Marana that he
should leave his engineering efforts behind and instead explore a
(04:23):
different avenue, and that was physics. Enrico Fermi incidentally had
done the same thing for Segre when he was an
engineering school when Marana met with Fami, who was the
professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome. One
of the things that Faremi showed him was a statistical
model of the atom, along with a table of calculations
associated with this model. Came back the next day with
(04:47):
his own sheet of calculations and asked to look at
Faremies again, and after he compared these two sheets of calculations,
he revealed that he had been checking Faremi's math. He
told the professor that his own calcula lations were all correct,
and apparently my Irna really was just trusting his own
math above anyone else's, including Fairmi. Yeah, there's also some
(05:10):
theory that he was kind of working on his own
way to do these calculations um and that he was
kind of just figuring out if the table that Faremi
had used would worked as well as the one that
he had been working on. And so in Mayorana, who
was twenty two at the time, entered the physics program
at the University of Rome and he became part of
(05:31):
the group known as the Via Pennispera Boys, named for
the street where the physics offices were, and this group
included Emilio Segra as well as other physicists and chemists,
and up until political unrest led the group to disband.
In their work advanced the science of particle physics, but
in doing so they also advanced the science that enabled
(05:51):
the development of the atomic bomb. The year after he
joined the physics program, my Iron has turned in his thesis,
which was titled on the Quantum Mechanics of Radioactive Nuclei.
When he received a rating of distinction, he decided to
continue his education and to get a university teaching diploma
that was issued in nineteen thirty two, and at this
point he was really considered to be a master in
(06:14):
his field. As nineteen thirty three began, so did a
new phase of Majorana's career. The Italian Research Council issued
him a grant to travel to Leipzig, Germany, the nexus
of theoretical physics at that time, and there he worked
alongside Werner Heisenberg, who had been leading the physics world
into the realm of quantum mechanics. When Heisenberg published his
(06:35):
paper Quantum Theoretical Reinterpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations in
n it changed physics completely by introducing the concept of
quantum mechanics. So for a very brief and dirty reminder
of exactly what quantum mechanics is, we're just gonna turn
to Encyclopedia Britannica rather than trying to paraphrase something potentially wrongly.
(06:58):
It's quote science dealing with the behavior of matter and
light on the atomic and subatomic scale. It attempts to
describe and account for the properties of molecules and atoms
and their constituents electrons, protons, neutrons, and other more esoteric
particles such as quarks and gluons. These properties include interactions
of the particles with one another and with electro magnetic radiation.
(07:22):
I eat light, X rays and gamma rays. And that
is the definition now today, the current modern one, because
they were all sort of developing this science at the time.
And if you want another insight, there is a very
short BBC video on YouTube on which the painfully charming
Brian Cox describes quantum mechanics in sixty seconds. I love
(07:43):
it because I really like Brian Cox, and we will
link to that in the show notes. So the point
of all this is that it was a really big
deal for my Ironic to work with the man who
had invented this whole new field of physics just a
few years earlier. And it he wasn't only there with Heisenberg.
As we said, Leipzig was a hotbed of theory and
(08:03):
discovery at this point, so other jailblazers and physics were
there as well, including Friedrich Hund, Felix Book, and Rudolph Piles.
Spent the first half of nineteen thirty three in Leipzig,
and then he traveled to Copenhagen to spend time with
Danish physicist Niels Henrick David Bore. He returned to Germany
late in the summer and then went home to Rome
(08:25):
that autumn. Before this trip and his relatively brief career
in physics so far, my Irona had already published ten
papers and been working on others. But once he got
back to Rome in late nineteen thirty three, he stopped
writing almost entirely. He had also gotten sick while he
was traveling, and he had ongoing complaints of digestive issues.
(08:45):
Doctors chalked this up to nervous exhaustion and it never
really went away. Yeah, and he did write, but not
in like a sort of organized way that resulted in papers.
He was writing his ideas down, but he really didn't
have like the drive that he wants did to communicate
his ideas and thoughts in a way that other people
(09:05):
could read them. It almost seems as though the young
man who had trusted his own mass more than Enrico
Fermi's kind of got lost. In ninety three is Marana
traveled around Europe and worked with these people in quantum mechanics.
After that, he seemed to stop seeing his work as
unique or exceptional, so much so that he really didn't
feel compelled to write about it. We're about to get
(09:27):
to a moment in physics history that really could have
belonged to my Irana, but he dragged his feet and
it went to someone else. But before we get to that,
we are going to have a word from one of
our sponsors. Into the now famous couple. Irne Jolio Curie
(09:50):
and her husband Frederick conducted experiments that indicated that there
was an unknown particle that could enter matter and expel
a proton, and the couple positive that it could be
a foe puton, but Mayorana, thinking that it must be
a particle with mass similar to that of a proton
intuited the existence of what we now know today as neutrons.
But he's not the person who got the credit for
(10:11):
this discovery, because even though Fairmi told him he needed
to write a paper on this work, he never did it.
Other physicists had also been working with the same information
that had been compiled by the Jolio curies, and it
was James Chadwick of the UK who ultimately got credit
for discovering the neutron. Marana had just sat on his
(10:31):
work for too long and all of this, I mean,
it's sort of making it sound like he just didn't
do it forever, but this all happened in just a
few months. Yeah, I mean, this field of physics and
particle physics was really rapidly kind of exploding at this time.
That's why we talked about, you know, Leipzig being the
this hot point of information development, and and similarly Rome
(10:55):
had a lot of stuff going on as well. And
as Mayorana seemed to pull himself a little bit away
from physics, he started to develop interests in other fields
outside of science, and he wrote a little bit about those,
but again never at the level that he had been
writing papers before. So philosophy, economics, and politics all grabbed
his attention to varying degrees. In nineteen thirty seven, a
(11:17):
new opportunity presented itself. The University of Rome was opening
a competition for new physics chairs. Fairy led the selection
committee and strongly encouraged my Irona to go after one
of these positions, and this finally got him out of
the writing slump that he had been in. He turned
in a paper called Symmetrical Theory of the Electron and
the Positron. Tore Marona was not granted any of the
(11:39):
three available positions, though, and as an aside, there is
actually some nebulousness around the writing of this paper. It
has been alleged that fairm Me may have written the
paper on Mayorana's behalf based on research notes that Mayorana
had handy when this topic was broached between the two men.
Even as that idea has floated around, it's been met
with some really via meant rebuttal Italian physicist Erasumo Ricami,
(12:03):
who published a collection of Byrona's notes, wrote this in
a article quote, we have been told that rumors arose
e g In the U s A about the fact
that e. Ferremi himself could have written down E. Mayrona's
seven article on neutrinos on the basis of Marana's idea.
A fact like that is rejected by all people who
(12:25):
have been studying my Irona's writing since decades for the
reasons that one the characteristic E. M's sharp style appears
the same in all his papers, while it is quite
different from Faremi's style. To E M had practically prepared
his ninety seven article by nineteen thirty three, as results
from many documents hand written by him. Three. Enrico Fermi,
(12:49):
even if he recognized E. Mayrana as much higher than
himself in theoretical physics, was a big man and never
would have acted as Marana's secretary. I sort of loved
like no, his ego would not have let him do
that either. But all that aside. The reason that Marana
wasn't offered any of the positions that he had been
(13:09):
applying for in that chair competition wasn't because his paper
was poorly received. It was because his quote high fame
of singular expertise reached in the field of theoretical physics
was believed to be far beyond that of all of
his other competitors. He was instead offered a different position,
teaching quantum mechanics at the Naples Physics Institute, a job
(13:30):
that he started in January nine eight. Marana moved first
into the Hotel to Naples, then to the Hotel Terminus,
and upgraded two more lavish digs at the Hotel Bologna
not long after classes started on January. But Better, a
who was far beyond even his peers in academia, did
not really simplify his lectures for students. He really lost
(13:53):
their attention as a consequence. His mother and his sister
attended his opening lecture, and it was his mother's suggestion
that got him to move to the nicer Hotel Terminus.
Somewhere around this time, things seemed as though they shifted
to a darker place for Mayorana. He had always been
really shy, and most people described him as an extreme introvert,
(14:13):
but he became even more reclusive. He hired a nurse
for his guest writis because that was still troubling him,
He withdrew all of his money from the Naples bank,
where he had an account, and then on March he
sent this note to his boss, Antonio Correlli, who was
the director of the Naples Physics Institute. Dear Correlli, I
have made a decision that was by now inevitable. It
(14:35):
doesn't contain a single speck of selfishness. But I do
recognize the inconvenience that my unanticipated disappearance may cause to
the students and yourself. For this too, I beg you
to forgive me, But above all, for having betrayed the trust,
the sincere friendship, and the sympathy that you have so
kindly offered me over the past few months. I beg
you also to remember me to all those I've come
(14:57):
to know and appreciate it, your institute in particular, Scutie.
But of all I shall preserve the dearest memories at
least until eleven o'clock this evening, and possibly beyond. But
then he also sent a telegram to Corelli telling him
to disregard that note that he had just sent, and
he wrote another note to his family, and aside from
the date place and mentioned that it was for his family.
(15:19):
In the heading, it simply read quote, I've got a
single wish that you do not wear black for me.
If you want to bow to custom, then bear some
sign of morning, but for no more than three days
after that, remember me if you can in your hearts
and forgive me. But Maaanna did not send that note,
and we will return to how it was discovered in
just a moment. Whether these two notes are suicide notes
(15:43):
has remained up for debate, because while the English translation
certainly seems to be that he never explicitly mentioned death,
and the word choices that he made in Italian apparently
have some ambiguity that doesn't really carry over to English,
and these inflations. Additionally, some of the characteristics that are
(16:03):
often associated with suicide notes in terms of handwriting aren't
really present in these notes. His handwriting is really clean,
with very strong lines. A lot of times handwriting analysis
will report that there's some irregularity in suicide notes. There
are some questions about handwriting analysis and like how much
(16:23):
you can lean on it. But that is one piece
of all this, right, That's the sort of tricky thing
about Mayorana. And we'll we'll talk about some theories in
a moment that there is even the evidence and I
have to use the air quotes is really just kind
of like pattern recognition and trying to pick out irregularities
that do or do not make sense, to try to
identify situations and what may have been going on. But
(16:46):
really it's it's a very, very complex and mysterious case.
But the day after these two notes were written, Mayorana
checked into a hotel in Palermo, and then he wrote
other notes which on far less grave. He first telegrammed
his boss Antonio Carrelli, a note which read, don't be alarmed.
A letter follows. That letter did arrive soon after, and
(17:09):
it read quote, I hope that my letter and telegram
have reached you together. The sea has rejected me, and
tomorrow I'll return to the hotel Bologna, perhaps traveling together
with the same letter. I have, however, decided to give
up teaching. Don't take me for an Ibsen heroine, because
the case is quite different. I'm at your disposal for
(17:30):
further details. So even though the sound of that second
note was, as I said, less grave, Correlli was still
very concerned. This was still a weird series of missives
to have received, and he was so concerned that he
reached out to the Mayorana family and at Today's brother
Salvatore and Luciano traveled to Naples. Immediately after the family
heard from Correlli, they went to Mayorana's apartment at the
(17:53):
Hotel Bologna, and it was there that the note written
to the family was found sitting on his desk. After
March eight, no one had contact with a Marana. He
took a steamer from Palermo to Naples on and on
the ship he talked to a fellow academic named ster Erry,
who was a professor at the University of Palermo. But
(18:16):
there's no record of Marana ever disembarking from this ship.
There are also even some people who think he never
really got on that ship and that was a case
of misidentification that it was him. But in any case,
the search began and the Mayorana family offered a reward
of thirty thousand lire, but no trace of the physicist
was found. Even Benito Mussolini, who was serving as Italy's
(18:39):
Prime minister at the time, was contacted by both the
Mayorana family and by Enrico Fermi with pleas to mobilize
every possible means to hunt for Etre. Fermy was very
passionate in his letter to the Prime Minister, making it
very clear that Mayorana was far too important to science
to not exhaust all avenues of search. He wrote, quote,
(19:00):
I do not hesitate to declare, and this is not hyperbole,
that of all the Italian and foreign scholars whom I
had the opportunity to meet, Majorana is the one who,
for the depth of his genius, has impressed me the most.
Although there was a police search, no trace of the
physicist was ever found. The last police note on the
matter was filed on August six. In December, he was
(19:24):
formally decreed as having resigned on March five, siding abandonment
of duty. Yeah, they had to be very structured about
how like these academic positions were opened and ended, so
they had to actually make a formal degree that he
was not working there anymore. One of Etana's papers, which
he wrote for publication in a sociology periodical and not
(19:48):
a scientific journal, was published posthumously. One of his brothers
had found the paper, which was the value of Statistical
Laws in Physics and Social Sciences, among his things after
his disappearance, and that was published in two in the
journal Sciencia. And this paper in some ways marries all
of those interests that we talked about him pursuing before
(20:09):
he vanished from his life, as well as quantum mechanics,
and it puts forth the idea that complex economic and
social systems can be studied and investigated using the same
means that one would analyze and model physical systems like
atoms and sub atomic particles. So where did this gifted
physicists go? We will talk about the many hypotheses and
(20:30):
ideas about his disappearance after we have another word from
a sponsor that keeps stuffy miss and history class going.
Because of the manner of Mayodanna's disappearance and the lack
of any trace of him afterward, there have been many
(20:51):
ideas about what exactly happened to him that have come
up in the intervening eight decades. So the most obvious
of these, of course, is that he died by suis side,
and the notes to his family and his boss do
seem to point in that direction. But family members really
remained adamant that as a devout Catholic, he would not
have committed the sin of taking his own life. And additionally,
(21:12):
as we mentioned, there was nobody that was ever recovered.
So the suicide theory hinges on the idea that he
jumped into the sea en route from Palermo to Naples,
and that does make sense given that he never reappeared
on shore Naples, but there's also no conclusive evidence, and
his faith also figures into another popular theory that he
(21:34):
ran away to live in a monastery for the rest
of his days. A young man fitting his description reportedly
did go to the Kisa de Guzo Novo, which is
a church in Naples that could be its own episode,
one day and asked to be admitted into the religious
order there, and that man, who may or may not
have been may A Donna, was told that some logistics
(21:54):
had to be worked out first regarding lodging, and so
he didn't really pursue it, and he left. He thanked
them and just disappeared. And a member of the clergy
to whom Mayorana had confessed on several occasions, did indicate
that while the young man did have crises of faith
from time to time, suicide based on his knowledge of
Mayorana really seemed entirely outside the realm of possibility. So
(22:16):
the theory goes that he found a monastery outside of
Naples that would take him. So both of those and
many other ideas all hinge on this idea that my
Aerna saw the destructive power and the work that was
being done in theoretical physics, and that it drove him
away from the field that he's so excelled in, and
that that left him either with no desire to live
(22:39):
or no desire to participate in society. Yeah. I mean,
like I said, there aren't a lot of of notes
written about like what was going on internally with him,
so it's all conjecture, but certainly those were some things
that were happening. Um. Another idea that has been popular
over the years is that he may have actually been
murdered by Nazis. Marana had, as you may recall, worked
(23:02):
closely with Werner Heisenberg, who eventually worked on Germany's nuclear
weapons project during the Second World War, using some of
the science and technology that they had developed together. So
proponents of this theory believe that because Mayorana became something
of a loose end in relation to Heisenberg's work, that
he was simply eliminated. To complicate matters even more, as
(23:23):
we have often discussed in previous episodes involving missing persons,
there are almost always eyewitness accounts claiming that they have
seen the person in question, and in the case of
my Irana, he was allegedly spotted at a convent in Portici,
Italy on April twelfth, That was two weeks after he disappeared.
He reportedly came there and asked to join the religious order.
(23:46):
Many years after his disappearance, in the nineteen seventies, a
number of sightings were reported in Argentina. Yeah, there are
some weird things where he is reportedly seen. I'm not
even including all of the alleged sightings at convents, and
that he wanted to to basically live in a convent
rather than in a monastery. Again, these are all theoretical
(24:06):
and people have their own ideas about why he may
have done that. Um, but we just don't know. So
in case you're like, hey, you said monastery once and
convent later both have played into these rumors. One of
these sightings, reported by Chilean physicist Carlo Rivera Cruchaga, indicated
that he had met a woman named Mrs Talbert who
claimed to know et Maana in Buenos Aires and this
(24:28):
took place in Ninette and that woman who told him
that Majorana was friends with her son identified at in
a photo from a physics book that Rivera had with him.
Rivera returned to Buenos Aires in nineteen fifty four and
intended to follow up on the matter. He was hoping
to get an introduction, but Mrs Talbert was no longer
living there that he could find. In nineteen sixty one,
(24:51):
on another trip, Rivera said that a waiter saw him
working on physics equations and mentioned another scientist who had
sometimes come in and work on similar problems at the table.
That waiter also identified e Mayorana as that man that
he was talking about in a photo that Rivera had
with him. So these rumors that he started a new
(25:11):
life in South America had been in play for years,
and those sightings seemed to back it up. Then in
two thousand eight, another piece of evidence emerged, and that
year a man named Francesco Fasani called into the Italian
news program who has seen it? And he claimed to
have a photo of etter A Mayorana, although he knew
him as Mr Beanie, and Fasani said that the man
(25:34):
that he met in Venezuela in NINETI was in his
fifties and was very shy. And refined in his manners
so that all seemed to line up with the man
that people knew as a Mayanana. He was about the
right age that he would have been, and the shy
refinement was also something people associated with him, and based
on this information, this case was actually reopened in Rome
(25:55):
in two and the photo was submitted to the authorities
and analyzed, and it was determined that ten points of
facial identification in the photo coincided with those of a
known photo of Mayorana, and it was also determined that
he had significant hereditary compatibility with photos of his father, Fabio,
who he looked very much like, so they used a
(26:16):
picture of his father as an elder version to compare
it to. In early the Rome public Prosecutor closed the case,
having concluded that Majorana had indeed lived in Venezuela in
the nineteen fifties, having gone there apparently of his own will,
and thus there was neither suicide nor homicide to investigate.
(26:36):
That ruling hasn't been accepted by everyone, though, including Antonio Zikiki,
the president of the Edi A Maiorana Foundation and Center
for Scientific Culture. He really stands by the belief that
Maiorana had a religious crisis and spent the rest of
his days in a convent or a monastery. In any case,
even if the ruling of the Roman Public Prosecutor is
(26:57):
accurate in its assessment, there are still so many unanswered questions.
Mayorna's motives for dropping out of his life are still
a matter of pure speculation, and how his life ultimately
ended remains a complete mystery. Faremy once described Myerana to
Italian physicist Giuseppa Coconi quote, because you see, in the
(27:17):
world there are various categories of scientists, people of second
and third rank who do their best but do not
go very far. There are also people of the first
rank who make discoveries of great importance that are fundamental
for the development of science. But then there are the
geniuses like Galileo and Newton. Well E was one of these.
Myrna had what no one else in the world has,
(27:39):
but unfortunately he lacked what is instead common in other men,
plain good sense. And I should point out that that quote,
which gets used a lot in discussion of is not
actually something directly quoted. Uh. Most of the time people
are actually quoting cocons relay of that information. So just
in case you look it up in your Hey, Uh,
(28:01):
that's what's up. I'm so fascinated Byana, as I know
a lot of people are. Again, this always comes up
anytime someone prematurely either dies or decides to completely check
out of life, as he seems to have done. Um,
there was so much amazing stuff he could have done
and achieved, but uh, we don't. We'll never know. Just
(28:22):
sort of sad um. And you know, no one ever
knows what might be going on in the mind of
someone who makes choices like that, so it is all speculative,
which I think is part of why people become kind
of obsessed with his story. I have a way more
upbeat listener mail. Great. This is from our listener Kyle,
who knows the key to my heart, which is to
(28:43):
write about delicious life hacks you can do and also
put it on a Disney postcard which features the hat
box ghost. My favorite thing in the Honey Mansion. Yeah,
it's so cute. I'm keeping this one forever, he writes,
Holly and Tracy. He was after hering for my wife,
daughter and son in the Princess Half Marathon. I enjoyed
(29:04):
the former podcast subject Onna Mansion. One. Congratulations to your
family for running. I've done that race many times and
have loved it. I hope they had a great time.
And then Kyle goes on to say I wanted to
add to your podcast on the history of vodka. I
use vodka and saltzer water instead of water in my
fried batter. With the lower evaporation point. Tempura comes out
extra crispy, yum. My daughter, Amy, and I love your show.
(29:27):
I am. I think it, says a through hiker Um
because this is one of those cases where a postcard
got a little bit obscured by postal markings. And he
says he has listened to them to all of the
episodes since the beginning, and keep up the good work, Kyle. Kyle,
I love this tip. I'm gonna use it and see
how it worked. Wonderful. Yeah, We've gotten lots of good
um uh little notes about vodka, some more from from
(29:51):
veterinary offices and people who work in medicine, but this
one I wanted to read because it's like a tip
anyone can use and it sounds fun and delicious. So
so if you're making tempura, use Kyle's thing. I'm gonna
presume that his mix is like a fifty fifty on
vodka and salt water. Um, and just substitute that for
your water and your fried batter. That sounds phenomenal. I'm
(30:12):
in Uh. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History podcast at how stuff
works dot com. We're also everywhere on social media as
missed in History, and you can visit our website missed
in History dot com to see every episode of the
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(30:34):
I Heart Radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever else
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is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson.
Today's topic covers a name that is pretty well known
in physics circles, but if his life had taken a
(00:21):
different course, he may well have become a name as
widely known as that of Albert Einstein or Marie Curie
in the wider public consciousness. In the nineteen thirties, at
Marana contributed to the field of quantum mechanics in ways
that fundamentally shaped the field and are still studied today.
And then his career had taken him to a really
(00:42):
prestigious position, and he was making a good living, and
then he vanished. And what happened to him may never
be known with certainty, but there are certainly many theories
and even some official rulings on the matter, and we'll
talk about those and why some people reject them as
we get to the end of the episode. So it
stays a little bit of his free mystery, and I feel,
for some reason compelled to confess that this is one
(01:03):
of those episodes that I've kind of been like circling
for a long time, Like I would work on it
for and get a few hundred words written and then
just feel strange about it and want to wander off.
Because his story is complex, and he's a person that
unfortunately obviously had a lot going on that was never
really recorded in terms of where his head was at
(01:23):
with some of the things he was working on. So
heads up, there is some discussion of suicide in this episode.
So if that is a problematic area that you are
not comfortable hearing about in your history entertainment, uh, this
may be one to skip over, or you can just
listen to the first part and skip out after the
second break. That's where I was born in the city
of Catania on the island of Sicily near Mount Etna
(01:45):
on August five, n six. Was born in his family
home at Via Etna, and he had an impressive family.
His father, Fabio Massimo Marana, was an engineer and his mother,
Durna Course, was from a wealthy family. The house that
they were living in was actually hers. The family also
owned homes and Palermo and Rome, and Etre's paternal grandfather
(02:09):
was a lawyer and economist and a politician. His uncles
were all very educated and respected influential members of the community.
They worked in fields like education and politics. This was
really a family that prized hard work and study. And
in addition to Etre, the Maiorana has had four other children,
Rosina Salvatore, Luciano and Maria Tore was the fourth of
(02:34):
the five and as a child, Marana exhibited an advanced
ability to calculate mathematical problems, and he also excelled at chess.
And while his education began at home, uh for formal education,
he was sent to Rome to attend the Instituto Massimo
a later me a Jesuit boarding school. And it's I
(02:54):
say to his formal education that homeschooling he got is
pretty universally recognized is incredibly rigorous. His dad was really, really,
really um Some would say he was quite hard on
his kids in terms of like their education and how
not just rigorous it was, but really really challenging, and
he expected them to keep up and excel. And then
(03:16):
when he was in high school, transferred to another school
in Rome, the Liscato Tasso, to finish his pre university education.
When he made that transfer in ninety one, the family
moved to the house that they owned in Rome so
that Roy could finish his education while still living with
his family. He got his a diploma two years later
in nine and he planned to be an engineer like
(03:39):
a Spather, so he enrolled in a two year program
at the University of Rome to prepare for engineering school
and then, following this plan, in nine five, he started
a three year program at the School of Applications for Engineers.
For the next two years, Mayorana stayed on track with
his program, although apparently hydraulics gave him a little bit
of trouble. That was one area where he he had
(04:01):
to work a little bit harder to pass. But in
seven he started a friendship that changed the course of
his life. He met Emilio Segre. And if that name
sounds familiar to our science minded listeners, it is because
he won the Nobel Prize in physics in nineteen fifty nine,
and it was Segla who convinced ere Marana that he
should leave his engineering efforts behind and instead explore a
(04:23):
different avenue, and that was physics. Enrico Fermi incidentally had
done the same thing for Segre when he was an
engineering school when Marana met with Fami, who was the
professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome. One
of the things that Faremi showed him was a statistical
model of the atom, along with a table of calculations
associated with this model. Came back the next day with
(04:47):
his own sheet of calculations and asked to look at
Faremies again, and after he compared these two sheets of calculations,
he revealed that he had been checking Faremi's math. He
told the professor that his own calcula lations were all correct,
and apparently my Irna really was just trusting his own
math above anyone else's, including Fairmi. Yeah, there's also some
(05:10):
theory that he was kind of working on his own
way to do these calculations um and that he was
kind of just figuring out if the table that Faremi
had used would worked as well as the one that
he had been working on. And so in Mayorana, who
was twenty two at the time, entered the physics program
at the University of Rome and he became part of
(05:31):
the group known as the Via Pennispera Boys, named for
the street where the physics offices were, and this group
included Emilio Segra as well as other physicists and chemists,
and up until political unrest led the group to disband.
In their work advanced the science of particle physics, but
in doing so they also advanced the science that enabled
(05:51):
the development of the atomic bomb. The year after he
joined the physics program, my Iron has turned in his thesis,
which was titled on the Quantum Mechanics of Radioactive Nuclei.
When he received a rating of distinction, he decided to
continue his education and to get a university teaching diploma
that was issued in nineteen thirty two, and at this
point he was really considered to be a master in
(06:14):
his field. As nineteen thirty three began, so did a
new phase of Majorana's career. The Italian Research Council issued
him a grant to travel to Leipzig, Germany, the nexus
of theoretical physics at that time, and there he worked
alongside Werner Heisenberg, who had been leading the physics world
into the realm of quantum mechanics. When Heisenberg published his
(06:35):
paper Quantum Theoretical Reinterpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations in
n it changed physics completely by introducing the concept of
quantum mechanics. So for a very brief and dirty reminder
of exactly what quantum mechanics is, we're just gonna turn
to Encyclopedia Britannica rather than trying to paraphrase something potentially wrongly.
(06:58):
It's quote science dealing with the behavior of matter and
light on the atomic and subatomic scale. It attempts to
describe and account for the properties of molecules and atoms
and their constituents electrons, protons, neutrons, and other more esoteric
particles such as quarks and gluons. These properties include interactions
of the particles with one another and with electro magnetic radiation.
(07:22):
I eat light, X rays and gamma rays. And that
is the definition now today, the current modern one, because
they were all sort of developing this science at the time.
And if you want another insight, there is a very
short BBC video on YouTube on which the painfully charming
Brian Cox describes quantum mechanics in sixty seconds. I love
(07:43):
it because I really like Brian Cox, and we will
link to that in the show notes. So the point
of all this is that it was a really big
deal for my Ironic to work with the man who
had invented this whole new field of physics just a
few years earlier. And it he wasn't only there with Heisenberg.
As we said, Leipzig was a hotbed of theory and
(08:03):
discovery at this point, so other jailblazers and physics were
there as well, including Friedrich Hund, Felix Book, and Rudolph Piles.
Spent the first half of nineteen thirty three in Leipzig,
and then he traveled to Copenhagen to spend time with
Danish physicist Niels Henrick David Bore. He returned to Germany
late in the summer and then went home to Rome
(08:25):
that autumn. Before this trip and his relatively brief career
in physics so far, my Irona had already published ten
papers and been working on others. But once he got
back to Rome in late nineteen thirty three, he stopped
writing almost entirely. He had also gotten sick while he
was traveling, and he had ongoing complaints of digestive issues.
(08:45):
Doctors chalked this up to nervous exhaustion and it never
really went away. Yeah, and he did write, but not
in like a sort of organized way that resulted in papers.
He was writing his ideas down, but he really didn't
have like the drive that he wants did to communicate
his ideas and thoughts in a way that other people
(09:05):
could read them. It almost seems as though the young
man who had trusted his own mass more than Enrico
Fermi's kind of got lost. In ninety three is Marana
traveled around Europe and worked with these people in quantum mechanics.
After that, he seemed to stop seeing his work as
unique or exceptional, so much so that he really didn't
feel compelled to write about it. We're about to get
(09:27):
to a moment in physics history that really could have
belonged to my Irana, but he dragged his feet and
it went to someone else. But before we get to that,
we are going to have a word from one of
our sponsors. Into the now famous couple. Irne Jolio Curie
(09:50):
and her husband Frederick conducted experiments that indicated that there
was an unknown particle that could enter matter and expel
a proton, and the couple positive that it could be
a foe puton, but Mayorana, thinking that it must be
a particle with mass similar to that of a proton
intuited the existence of what we now know today as neutrons.
But he's not the person who got the credit for
(10:11):
this discovery, because even though Fairmi told him he needed
to write a paper on this work, he never did it.
Other physicists had also been working with the same information
that had been compiled by the Jolio curies, and it
was James Chadwick of the UK who ultimately got credit
for discovering the neutron. Marana had just sat on his
(10:31):
work for too long and all of this, I mean,
it's sort of making it sound like he just didn't
do it forever, but this all happened in just a
few months. Yeah, I mean, this field of physics and
particle physics was really rapidly kind of exploding at this time.
That's why we talked about, you know, Leipzig being the
this hot point of information development, and and similarly Rome
(10:55):
had a lot of stuff going on as well. And
as Mayorana seemed to pull himself a little bit away
from physics, he started to develop interests in other fields
outside of science, and he wrote a little bit about those,
but again never at the level that he had been
writing papers before. So philosophy, economics, and politics all grabbed
his attention to varying degrees. In nineteen thirty seven, a
(11:17):
new opportunity presented itself. The University of Rome was opening
a competition for new physics chairs. Fairy led the selection
committee and strongly encouraged my Irona to go after one
of these positions, and this finally got him out of
the writing slump that he had been in. He turned
in a paper called Symmetrical Theory of the Electron and
the Positron. Tore Marona was not granted any of the
(11:39):
three available positions, though, and as an aside, there is
actually some nebulousness around the writing of this paper. It
has been alleged that fairm Me may have written the
paper on Mayorana's behalf based on research notes that Mayorana
had handy when this topic was broached between the two men.
Even as that idea has floated around, it's been met
with some really via meant rebuttal Italian physicist Erasumo Ricami,
(12:03):
who published a collection of Byrona's notes, wrote this in
a article quote, we have been told that rumors arose
e g In the U s A about the fact
that e. Ferremi himself could have written down E. Mayrona's
seven article on neutrinos on the basis of Marana's idea.
A fact like that is rejected by all people who
(12:25):
have been studying my Irona's writing since decades for the
reasons that one the characteristic E. M's sharp style appears
the same in all his papers, while it is quite
different from Faremi's style. To E M had practically prepared
his ninety seven article by nineteen thirty three, as results
from many documents hand written by him. Three. Enrico Fermi,
(12:49):
even if he recognized E. Mayrana as much higher than
himself in theoretical physics, was a big man and never
would have acted as Marana's secretary. I sort of loved
like no, his ego would not have let him do
that either. But all that aside. The reason that Marana
wasn't offered any of the positions that he had been
(13:09):
applying for in that chair competition wasn't because his paper
was poorly received. It was because his quote high fame
of singular expertise reached in the field of theoretical physics
was believed to be far beyond that of all of
his other competitors. He was instead offered a different position,
teaching quantum mechanics at the Naples Physics Institute, a job
(13:30):
that he started in January nine eight. Marana moved first
into the Hotel to Naples, then to the Hotel Terminus,
and upgraded two more lavish digs at the Hotel Bologna
not long after classes started on January. But Better, a
who was far beyond even his peers in academia, did
not really simplify his lectures for students. He really lost
(13:53):
their attention as a consequence. His mother and his sister
attended his opening lecture, and it was his mother's suggestion
that got him to move to the nicer Hotel Terminus.
Somewhere around this time, things seemed as though they shifted
to a darker place for Mayorana. He had always been
really shy, and most people described him as an extreme introvert,
(14:13):
but he became even more reclusive. He hired a nurse
for his guest writis because that was still troubling him,
He withdrew all of his money from the Naples bank,
where he had an account, and then on March he
sent this note to his boss, Antonio Correlli, who was
the director of the Naples Physics Institute. Dear Correlli, I
have made a decision that was by now inevitable. It
(14:35):
doesn't contain a single speck of selfishness. But I do
recognize the inconvenience that my unanticipated disappearance may cause to
the students and yourself. For this too, I beg you
to forgive me, But above all, for having betrayed the trust,
the sincere friendship, and the sympathy that you have so
kindly offered me over the past few months. I beg
you also to remember me to all those I've come
(14:57):
to know and appreciate it, your institute in particular, Scutie.
But of all I shall preserve the dearest memories at
least until eleven o'clock this evening, and possibly beyond. But
then he also sent a telegram to Corelli telling him
to disregard that note that he had just sent, and
he wrote another note to his family, and aside from
the date place and mentioned that it was for his family.
(15:19):
In the heading, it simply read quote, I've got a
single wish that you do not wear black for me.
If you want to bow to custom, then bear some
sign of morning, but for no more than three days
after that, remember me if you can in your hearts
and forgive me. But Maaanna did not send that note,
and we will return to how it was discovered in
just a moment. Whether these two notes are suicide notes
(15:43):
has remained up for debate, because while the English translation
certainly seems to be that he never explicitly mentioned death,
and the word choices that he made in Italian apparently
have some ambiguity that doesn't really carry over to English,
and these inflations. Additionally, some of the characteristics that are
(16:03):
often associated with suicide notes in terms of handwriting aren't
really present in these notes. His handwriting is really clean,
with very strong lines. A lot of times handwriting analysis
will report that there's some irregularity in suicide notes. There
are some questions about handwriting analysis and like how much
(16:23):
you can lean on it. But that is one piece
of all this, right, That's the sort of tricky thing
about Mayorana. And we'll we'll talk about some theories in
a moment that there is even the evidence and I
have to use the air quotes is really just kind
of like pattern recognition and trying to pick out irregularities
that do or do not make sense, to try to
identify situations and what may have been going on. But
(16:46):
really it's it's a very, very complex and mysterious case.
But the day after these two notes were written, Mayorana
checked into a hotel in Palermo, and then he wrote
other notes which on far less grave. He first telegrammed
his boss Antonio Carrelli, a note which read, don't be alarmed.
A letter follows. That letter did arrive soon after, and
(17:09):
it read quote, I hope that my letter and telegram
have reached you together. The sea has rejected me, and
tomorrow I'll return to the hotel Bologna, perhaps traveling together
with the same letter. I have, however, decided to give
up teaching. Don't take me for an Ibsen heroine, because
the case is quite different. I'm at your disposal for
(17:30):
further details. So even though the sound of that second
note was, as I said, less grave, Correlli was still
very concerned. This was still a weird series of missives
to have received, and he was so concerned that he
reached out to the Mayorana family and at Today's brother
Salvatore and Luciano traveled to Naples. Immediately after the family
heard from Correlli, they went to Mayorana's apartment at the
(17:53):
Hotel Bologna, and it was there that the note written
to the family was found sitting on his desk. After
March eight, no one had contact with a Marana. He
took a steamer from Palermo to Naples on and on
the ship he talked to a fellow academic named ster Erry,
who was a professor at the University of Palermo. But
(18:16):
there's no record of Marana ever disembarking from this ship.
There are also even some people who think he never
really got on that ship and that was a case
of misidentification that it was him. But in any case,
the search began and the Mayorana family offered a reward
of thirty thousand lire, but no trace of the physicist
was found. Even Benito Mussolini, who was serving as Italy's
(18:39):
Prime minister at the time, was contacted by both the
Mayorana family and by Enrico Fermi with pleas to mobilize
every possible means to hunt for Etre. Fermy was very
passionate in his letter to the Prime Minister, making it
very clear that Mayorana was far too important to science
to not exhaust all avenues of search. He wrote, quote,
(19:00):
I do not hesitate to declare, and this is not hyperbole,
that of all the Italian and foreign scholars whom I
had the opportunity to meet, Majorana is the one who,
for the depth of his genius, has impressed me the most.
Although there was a police search, no trace of the
physicist was ever found. The last police note on the
matter was filed on August six. In December, he was
(19:24):
formally decreed as having resigned on March five, siding abandonment
of duty. Yeah, they had to be very structured about
how like these academic positions were opened and ended, so
they had to actually make a formal degree that he
was not working there anymore. One of Etana's papers, which
he wrote for publication in a sociology periodical and not
(19:48):
a scientific journal, was published posthumously. One of his brothers
had found the paper, which was the value of Statistical
Laws in Physics and Social Sciences, among his things after
his disappearance, and that was published in two in the
journal Sciencia. And this paper in some ways marries all
of those interests that we talked about him pursuing before
(20:09):
he vanished from his life, as well as quantum mechanics,
and it puts forth the idea that complex economic and
social systems can be studied and investigated using the same
means that one would analyze and model physical systems like
atoms and sub atomic particles. So where did this gifted
physicists go? We will talk about the many hypotheses and
(20:30):
ideas about his disappearance after we have another word from
a sponsor that keeps stuffy miss and history class going.
Because of the manner of Mayodanna's disappearance and the lack
of any trace of him afterward, there have been many
(20:51):
ideas about what exactly happened to him that have come
up in the intervening eight decades. So the most obvious
of these, of course, is that he died by suis side,
and the notes to his family and his boss do
seem to point in that direction. But family members really
remained adamant that as a devout Catholic, he would not
have committed the sin of taking his own life. And additionally,
(21:12):
as we mentioned, there was nobody that was ever recovered.
So the suicide theory hinges on the idea that he
jumped into the sea en route from Palermo to Naples,
and that does make sense given that he never reappeared
on shore Naples, but there's also no conclusive evidence, and
his faith also figures into another popular theory that he
(21:34):
ran away to live in a monastery for the rest
of his days. A young man fitting his description reportedly
did go to the Kisa de Guzo Novo, which is
a church in Naples that could be its own episode,
one day and asked to be admitted into the religious
order there, and that man, who may or may not
have been may A Donna, was told that some logistics
(21:54):
had to be worked out first regarding lodging, and so
he didn't really pursue it, and he left. He thanked
them and just disappeared. And a member of the clergy
to whom Mayorana had confessed on several occasions, did indicate
that while the young man did have crises of faith
from time to time, suicide based on his knowledge of
Mayorana really seemed entirely outside the realm of possibility. So
(22:16):
the theory goes that he found a monastery outside of
Naples that would take him. So both of those and
many other ideas all hinge on this idea that my
Aerna saw the destructive power and the work that was
being done in theoretical physics, and that it drove him
away from the field that he's so excelled in, and
that that left him either with no desire to live
(22:39):
or no desire to participate in society. Yeah. I mean,
like I said, there aren't a lot of of notes
written about like what was going on internally with him,
so it's all conjecture, but certainly those were some things
that were happening. Um. Another idea that has been popular
over the years is that he may have actually been
murdered by Nazis. Marana had, as you may recall, worked
(23:02):
closely with Werner Heisenberg, who eventually worked on Germany's nuclear
weapons project during the Second World War, using some of
the science and technology that they had developed together. So
proponents of this theory believe that because Mayorana became something
of a loose end in relation to Heisenberg's work, that
he was simply eliminated. To complicate matters even more, as
(23:23):
we have often discussed in previous episodes involving missing persons,
there are almost always eyewitness accounts claiming that they have
seen the person in question, and in the case of
my Irana, he was allegedly spotted at a convent in Portici,
Italy on April twelfth, That was two weeks after he disappeared.
He reportedly came there and asked to join the religious order.
(23:46):
Many years after his disappearance, in the nineteen seventies, a
number of sightings were reported in Argentina. Yeah, there are
some weird things where he is reportedly seen. I'm not
even including all of the alleged sightings at convents, and
that he wanted to to basically live in a convent
rather than in a monastery. Again, these are all theoretical
(24:06):
and people have their own ideas about why he may
have done that. Um, but we just don't know. So
in case you're like, hey, you said monastery once and
convent later both have played into these rumors. One of
these sightings, reported by Chilean physicist Carlo Rivera Cruchaga, indicated
that he had met a woman named Mrs Talbert who
claimed to know et Maana in Buenos Aires and this
(24:28):
took place in Ninette and that woman who told him
that Majorana was friends with her son identified at in
a photo from a physics book that Rivera had with him.
Rivera returned to Buenos Aires in nineteen fifty four and
intended to follow up on the matter. He was hoping
to get an introduction, but Mrs Talbert was no longer
living there that he could find. In nineteen sixty one,
(24:51):
on another trip, Rivera said that a waiter saw him
working on physics equations and mentioned another scientist who had
sometimes come in and work on similar problems at the table.
That waiter also identified e Mayorana as that man that
he was talking about in a photo that Rivera had
with him. So these rumors that he started a new
(25:11):
life in South America had been in play for years,
and those sightings seemed to back it up. Then in
two thousand eight, another piece of evidence emerged, and that
year a man named Francesco Fasani called into the Italian
news program who has seen it? And he claimed to
have a photo of etter A Mayorana, although he knew
him as Mr Beanie, and Fasani said that the man
(25:34):
that he met in Venezuela in NINETI was in his
fifties and was very shy. And refined in his manners
so that all seemed to line up with the man
that people knew as a Mayanana. He was about the
right age that he would have been, and the shy
refinement was also something people associated with him, and based
on this information, this case was actually reopened in Rome
(25:55):
in two and the photo was submitted to the authorities
and analyzed, and it was determined that ten points of
facial identification in the photo coincided with those of a
known photo of Mayorana, and it was also determined that
he had significant hereditary compatibility with photos of his father, Fabio,
who he looked very much like, so they used a
(26:16):
picture of his father as an elder version to compare
it to. In early the Rome public Prosecutor closed the case,
having concluded that Majorana had indeed lived in Venezuela in
the nineteen fifties, having gone there apparently of his own will,
and thus there was neither suicide nor homicide to investigate.
(26:36):
That ruling hasn't been accepted by everyone, though, including Antonio Zikiki,
the president of the Edi A Maiorana Foundation and Center
for Scientific Culture. He really stands by the belief that
Maiorana had a religious crisis and spent the rest of
his days in a convent or a monastery. In any case,
even if the ruling of the Roman Public Prosecutor is
(26:57):
accurate in its assessment, there are still so many unanswered questions.
Mayorna's motives for dropping out of his life are still
a matter of pure speculation, and how his life ultimately
ended remains a complete mystery. Faremy once described Myerana to
Italian physicist Giuseppa Coconi quote, because you see, in the
(27:17):
world there are various categories of scientists, people of second
and third rank who do their best but do not
go very far. There are also people of the first
rank who make discoveries of great importance that are fundamental
for the development of science. But then there are the
geniuses like Galileo and Newton. Well E was one of these.
Myrna had what no one else in the world has,
(27:39):
but unfortunately he lacked what is instead common in other men,
plain good sense. And I should point out that that quote,
which gets used a lot in discussion of is not
actually something directly quoted. Uh. Most of the time people
are actually quoting cocons relay of that information. So just
in case you look it up in your Hey, Uh,
(28:01):
that's what's up. I'm so fascinated Byana, as I know
a lot of people are. Again, this always comes up
anytime someone prematurely either dies or decides to completely check
out of life, as he seems to have done. Um,
there was so much amazing stuff he could have done
and achieved, but uh, we don't. We'll never know. Just
(28:22):
sort of sad um. And you know, no one ever
knows what might be going on in the mind of
someone who makes choices like that, so it is all speculative,
which I think is part of why people become kind
of obsessed with his story. I have a way more
upbeat listener mail. Great. This is from our listener Kyle,
who knows the key to my heart, which is to
(28:43):
write about delicious life hacks you can do and also
put it on a Disney postcard which features the hat
box ghost. My favorite thing in the Honey Mansion. Yeah,
it's so cute. I'm keeping this one forever, he writes,
Holly and Tracy. He was after hering for my wife,
daughter and son in the Princess Half Marathon. I enjoyed
(29:04):
the former podcast subject Onna Mansion. One. Congratulations to your
family for running. I've done that race many times and
have loved it. I hope they had a great time.
And then Kyle goes on to say I wanted to
add to your podcast on the history of vodka. I
use vodka and saltzer water instead of water in my
fried batter. With the lower evaporation point. Tempura comes out
extra crispy, yum. My daughter, Amy, and I love your show.
(29:27):
I am. I think it, says a through hiker Um
because this is one of those cases where a postcard
got a little bit obscured by postal markings. And he
says he has listened to them to all of the
episodes since the beginning, and keep up the good work, Kyle. Kyle,
I love this tip. I'm gonna use it and see
how it worked. Wonderful. Yeah, We've gotten lots of good
um uh little notes about vodka, some more from from
(29:51):
veterinary offices and people who work in medicine, but this
one I wanted to read because it's like a tip
anyone can use and it sounds fun and delicious. So
so if you're making tempura, use Kyle's thing. I'm gonna
presume that his mix is like a fifty fifty on
vodka and salt water. Um, and just substitute that for
your water and your fried batter. That sounds phenomenal. I'm
(30:12):
in Uh. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History podcast at how stuff
works dot com. We're also everywhere on social media as
missed in History, and you can visit our website missed
in History dot com to see every episode of the
show that has ever existed, all put together in one
place for your listening pleasure. UH. If you would like
to subscribe to the show, that sounds like a fabulous
idea in my opinion, you can do that on the
(30:34):
I Heart Radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever else
you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
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Holly Frey
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