In 1932, six months before Heisenberg, the 25-year-old Ettore Majorana presented his atomic nucleus theory at the Physics Institute of the University of Rome. He refused to publish it. He later commented on Werner Heisenberg's publication by saying that everything on the subject had been said, "probably already too much." Sciascia dedicates his book to this fear of one's own discovery: the story of a genius from Sicily, highly sensitive and with fantastic abilities, who earned his doctorate at the age of 23 and then continued his education in Germany and Italy. In 1938, a year before the war, Majorana decides to disappear. His trail goes cold. Nevertheless, the atomic bomb is built.