The Physicist Who Bought a Ticket and Never Arrived: The Vanishing of Ettore Majorana

2026-08-02 · True Mysteries Editorial Desk · Vanished Without a Trace · 8 min read

Ettore Majorana was born in Catania, Sicily, on 5 August 1906, into a prominent and highly educated family. His uncle Quirino Majorana was himself a physicist of standing. As a child Ettore was known for prodigious mental arithmetic, and in 1923 he enrolled in engineering at the university in Rome. In 1928, persuaded by his fellow student Emilio Segre, he transferred to physics.

He joined the group that Enrico Fermi had gathered at the Institute of Physics in Via Panisperna, the young researchers remembered ever since as the Via Panisperna boys. Majorana took his degree in 1929 with a thesis on the quantum theory of radioactive nuclei. Colleagues described a man who did his hardest work in his head, scribbled the result on the back of a cigarette packet, and threw the packet away once the answer satisfied him. Fermi, who was not given to flattery, is reported to have said that scientists fall into several categories, and that beyond the very good ones there are the geniuses, like Galileo and Newton, and that Majorana was one of these.

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