Enrico Fermi of Scientific Research and Development, as the Advisory Committee on Uranium was now known, met on 18 December 1941, with the U.S. now engaged in World War II, making its work urgent. Most of the effort sponsored by the Committee had been directed at producing enriched uranium, but Committee member Arthur Compton determined that a feasible alternative was plutonium, which could be mass-produced in nuclear reactors by the end of 1944. He decided to concentrate the plutonium work at the University of Chicago. Fermi reluctantly moved, and his team became part of the new Metallurgical Laboratory there. The possible results
Enrico Fermi initiated into Freemasonry in the Masonic Lodge "Adriano Lemmi" of the Grand Orient of Italy. Fermi decided to travel abroad, and spent a semester studying under Max Born at the University of Göttingen, where he met Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan. Fermi then studied in Leiden with Paul Ehrenfest from September to December 1924 on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation obtained through the intercession of the mathematician Vito Volterra. Here Fermi met Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein, and became good friends with Samuel Goudsmit and Jan Tinbergen. From January 1925 to late 1926, Fermi taught mathematical physics and theoretical