He progressed so quickly, guided by an engineer who was a family friend, that his competition essay for university admission was judged worthy of a doctoral examination. By 1920 he was teaching his teachers at the University of Pisa; he worked out his first theory of permanent value to physics while still an undergraduate. His only setback was a period of postdoctoral study in Germany in 1923 among such talents as Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg, when his gifts went unrecognized. He disliked pretension, preferring simplicity and concreteness, and the philosophic German style may have repelled him. "Not a philosopher," the American theorist J. Robert Oppenheimer later sketched him. "Passion for clarity. He was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active." He won appointment as professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome at 25 and quickly assembled a small group of first-class young talents for his self-appointed task of reviving Italian physics. Judging him infallible, they nicknamed him "the Pope."

The Pope and his team almost found nuclear fission in 1934 in the course of experiments in which, looking for radioactive transformations, they systematically bombarded one element after another with the newly discovered neutron. They missed by the thickness of the sheet of foil in which they wrapped their uranium sample; the foil blocked the fission fragments that their instruments would otherwise have recorded. It was a blessing in disguise. If fission had come to light in the mid-1930s, while the democracies still slept, Nazi Germany would have won a long lead toward building an atom bomb. In compensation, Fermi made the most important discovery of his life, that slowing neutrons by passing them through a light-element "moderator" such as paraffin increased their effectiveness, a finding that would allow releasing nuclear energy in a reactor.

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