Articles 1, 2, 3, 4c, 10 from The Collected Papers of Enrico Fermi.
Originals available at
http://www.archive.org/details/collectedpapersn007155mb
Some of these documents still require some cosmetic editing which will never be
done.
These and much more to appear in:
Einstein, Heisenberg, Fermi and Relativistic Astrophysics
R. Ruffini
World Scientific, Singapore, 2015->2021?
[this project started in 2002 as "Fermi and Astrophysics," so the end date is
very uncertain]
Commentary on article 3 on Fermi coordinates and Fermi-Walker transport:
The historical origins of Fermi-Walker transport and Fermi coordinates and the construction of Fermi-Walker transported frames in black hole spacetimes are reviewed. For geodesics this reduces to parallel transport and these frames can be explicitly constructed using Killing-Yano tensors as shown by Marck. For accelerated or geodesic circular orbits in such spacetimes, both parallel and Fermi-Walker transported frames can be given, and allow one to study circular holonomy and related clock and spin transport effects. In particular the total angle of rotation that a spin vector undergoes around a closed loop can be expressed in a factored form, where each factor is due to a different relativistic effect, in contrast with the usual sum of terms decomposition. Finally the Thomas precession frequency is shown to be a special case of the simple relationship between the parallel transport and Fermi-Walker transport frequencies for stationary circular orbits.
Commentary
On Fermi's resolution of the ``4/3 problem'' in the classical theory of the electron: hidden in plain sight
We discuss the solution proposed by Fermi to the so called ``4/3 problem'' in the classical theory of the electron, a problem which puzzled the physics community for many decades before and after his contribution to the discussion. Unfortunately his early resolution of the problem in 1922--1923 published in three articles in Italian and German journals went largely unnoticed, and even recent texts devoted to classical electron theory still do not present his argument or acknowledge the actual content of those articles.
Fermi's analysis of the contribution of the electromagnetic field to the inertial mass of the classical electron within special relativity is brought to its logical conclusion, leading to the conservation of the total 4-momentum of the field plus mechanical mass system as seen by the sequence of inertial observers in terms of which the accelerated electron is momentarily at rest.