The Contributions of Ettore Majorana to the Science of the Twentieth Century (and Even Beyond)

The name of Ettore Majorana appears today in various branches of science, not limited to physics. All these contributions come from only ten articles published in about a decade, starting from the late 1920s, but in recent years a careful study has brought to light unpublished contributions by the Sicilian physicist, which reveal an even deeper genius than that detectable in the published works alone. At the same time, real or alleged revelations—all directly or indirectly linked to his mysterious disappearance in 1938—have instead increasingly catalyzed the interests of a large public (including scholars), in which very little space is left to the scientific aspects of the complex personality of one of the most authoritative members of the Roman group of Enrico Fermi. In the present contribution we will take stock of the situation on this interesting case study of the history of contemporary physics.