What is the Fermi Paradox?
Fermi paradox
The Fermi paradox, or Fermi's paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence and high probability estimates[1] for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations.[2] The basic points of the argument, made by physicists Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) and Michael H. Hart (born 1932), are:
Fermi's interaction
Fermi first submitted his "tentative" theory of beta decay to the famous science journal "Nature", which rejected it "because it contained speculations too remote from reality to be of interest to the reader." "Nature" later admitted the rejection to be one of the great editorial blunders in its history. Fermi then submitted revised versions of the paper to Italian and German publications, which accepted and published them in those languages in 1933 and 1934. The paper did not appear at the time in a primary publication in English. An English translation of the seminal paper was published in the American Journal of Physics in 1968.