'The Last Man Who Knew Everything' is a detailed and sympathetic biography of Enrico Fermi
The title of David Schwartz's new biography of the great physicist Enrico Fermi, The Last Man Who Knew Everything, requires instantaneous clarification, and Schwartz provides it: about physics.
Fermi, one of the seminal 20th-century thinkers on atomics and quantum theory, was renowned even among his fellow hyper-specialists for being a hyper-specialist, a man who not only knew everything about physics – Schwartz's book isn't the first one to make clear that Fermi's colleagues were a little physics.
