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Saturday Night Science: The Pope of Physics
By the start of the 20th century, the field of physics had bifurcated into theoretical and experimental specialties. While theorists and experimenters were acquainted with the same fundamentals and collaborated, with theorists suggesting phenomena to be explored in experiments and experimenters providing hard data upon which theorists could build their models, rarely did one individual do breakthrough work in both theory and experiment. One outstanding exception was Enrico Fermi, whose numerous achievements seemed to jump effortlessly between theory and experiment.
Fermi was born in 1901 to a middle class family in Rome, the youngest of three children born in consecutive years. As was common at the time, Enrico and his brother Giulio were sent to be wet-nursed and raised by a farm family outside Rome and only returned to live with their parents when two and a half years old. His father was a division head in the state railway and his mother taught elementary school. Neither parent had attended university, but hoped all of their children would have the opportunity. All were enrolled in schools which concentrated on the traditional curriculum of Latin, Greek, and literature in those languages and Italian. Fermi was attracted to mathematics and science, but little instruction was available to him in those fields.
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On my first trip to DC, an immigrant cabbie pointed out buildings to college-aged me. As he highlighted the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and every other building I already knew, we drove by an imposing monolith near the mall. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s the Department of Agriculture,” he said.
Thursday’s “
Casper
This is the last in a three-part series on e-cigarettes. Part I is available 
I like it when people speak simple truths in the face of vapid political correctness. John McEnroe did that last weekend, and is experiencing the predictable pushback from an aggrieved press.
So President Trump had something to say this morning about Amazon, the internet, and taxes. As the POTUS 
On this special 50th episode of Whiskey Politics, we are honored to welcome Peter Robinson, Speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan. Among hundreds of other speeches, Peter is now celebrating the 30th anniversary of the history-making Brandenburg Gate speech where against advice from the White House, State Department, and Germans, President Reagan called on General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” We discuss this pivotal moment in history, the relationships with Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman and his upcoming Ricochet and Uncommon Knowledge interview with Pat Sajak at the Reagan Library.
Dollar Shave Club
We now have the answer to a question that has hung in the air for months: Why did the Republican leadership not have an Obamacare repeal and replace plan on the shelf and ready to go the minute the election went their way? Why didn’t they use the time since the law’s 2010 passage to craft the Republican alternative?
This is the second in a three-part series on e-cigarettes. Part I is available