Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy

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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 02/03/2015
ISBN: 9780465069989
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.50d

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2014
Publishers Weekly 12/08/2014
Library Journal 01/01/2015 pg. 127
Chronicle of Higher Education 02/06/2015 pg. 18
New York Review of Books 03/05/2015 pg. 18
New York Times Book Review 04/26/2015 pg. 30
Choice 08/01/2015