It was at the height of the Cold War, in the summer of 1950, when Bruno
Pontecorvo mysteriously vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Who was he,
and what caused him to disappear? Was he simply a physicist, or also a
spy and communist radical? A protege of Enrico Fermi, Pontecorvo was one
of the most promising nuclear physicists in the world. He spent years
hunting for the Higgs boson of his day -- the neutrino -- a nearly
massless particle thought to be essential to the process of particle
decay. His work on the Manhattan Project helped to usher in the nuclear
age, and confirmed his reputation as a brilliant physicist. Why, then,
would he disappear as he stood on the cusp of true greatness, perhaps
even the Nobel Prize?
In Half-Life, physicist and historian Frank Close offers a heretofore
untold history of Pontecorvo's life, based on unprecedented access to
Pontecorvo's friends and family and the Russian scientists with whom he
would later work. Close takes a microscope to Pontecorvo's life,
combining a thorough biography of one of the most important scientists
of the twentieth century with the drama of Cold War espionage. With all
the elements of a Cold War thriller -- classified atomic research, an
infamous double agent, a possible kidnapping by Soviet operatives --
Half-Life is a history of nuclear physics at perhaps its most
powerful: when it created the bomb. Physics at perhaps its most
powerful: when it created the bomb.
