L'articolo di Ettore Majorana su "Il valore delle Leggi Statistiche nella Fisica e nelle Scienze Sociali" (Ettore Majorana's article on "The value of Statistical Laws in Physics and in Social Sciences")

The mentioned article was written by Ettore Majorana, in a partially educational way, for a journal of Sociology; but he gave up publishing it (and threw it away). It appeared posthumous, thanks to Giovanni Gentile Jr. (the inventor of "parastatistics") in "Scientia" 36 (1942) 58-66. It has not been re-published, in Italian, till the beginning of 2006, when we made known some abridgements of it by Italian newspapers and by the journal "Fisica in Medicina". We don't know when was it written: perhaps in 1930. However, its central theme was still alive in Majorana's mind in 1934: in fact, on July 27, 1934, he will write to G.Gentile Jr. to expect that <<soon it will be generally understood that science ceased to be a justification for the vulgar materialism>>. Here, in Part I, we present a suitable reduction, edited by us, of Majorana's article; while in Part II we add a complete transcription of it. [Since the paper which appeared in "Scientia" contains some errors in the interpretation of Majorana's handwriting, the present versions have been very slightly "corrected" by us]. For the translations into English of Majorana's paper, see Refs.[5,6] below. A more extended Summary (in English, besides in Italian) can be found at the beginning of the present e-print. The interested reader can found all the known biographical documents --apart from the ones discovered during the last two years-- in the book by E.Recami, "Il Caso Majorana: Epistolario, Testimonianze, Documenti" (Mondadori, Milan, 1987 and 1991; Di Renzo Editore, Rome, 2000 and 2002); and in the e-prints arXiv:physics/9810023v4 [physics.hist-ph]; arXiv:0708.2855v1 [physics.hist-ph]; and arXiv:0709.1183 [physics.hist-ph].