Half-Life : : the Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or spy

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Midway on life's journey -- First half. From Pisa to Rome ; Slow neutrons and fast reactions : 1934-1936 ; Paris and politics : 1936-1940 ; The first escape : 1940 ; Neutrons for oil and war : 1940-1941 ; East and West : 1941-1942 ; The pile at Chalk River : 1943-1945 ; Physics in the open : 1945-1948 ; Maneuvers : 1945-1950 -- Interlude. West to East -- Half time. chain reaction : 1949-1950 ; From Abingdon-- to where? : 1950 ; The dear departed : 1950 ; The MI5 letters -- Second half. In dark woods ; Exile ; Resurrection ; Mr. Neutrino ; Private Bruno -- Afterllife. The right road lost.
Bruno Pontecorvo dedicated his career to hunting for the Higgs boson of his day-- the neutrino, a nearly massless particle considered essential to the process of nuclear fission. His work on the Manhattan project under Enrico Fermi confirmed his reputation as a brilliant physicist and helped usher in the nuclear age. He should have won a Nobel Prize, but late in the summer of 1950 he vanished. At the height of the Cold War, Pontecorvo had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. In Half-Life, physicist and historian Frank Close offers a heretofore untold history of Pontecorvo's life, based on unprecedented access to his friends, family, and colleagues. With all the elements of a Cold War thriller-- classified atomic research, an infamous double agent, a kidnapping by Soviet operatives-- Half-Life is a history of particle physics at perhaps its most powerful: when it created the bomb.

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