Half life
the divided life of Bruno Pontecorvo, physicist or spy
by F. E. Close
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One of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, Bruno Pontecorvo was privy to many secrets. Yet when he disappeared MI5 insisted he was not a threat. Now, based on unprecedented access to archives, letters, and surviving family members and scientists, Professor Frank Close pieces together an answer to whether Pontecorvo's defection to the USSR did indeed bring an end to a life of spycraft - and exposes the truth of a man irrevocably marked by the advent of the atomic age and the Cold War.
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Half life: the divided life of Bruno Pontecorvo, physicist or spy
2015, Oneworld
in /languages/eng
1780745818 9781780745817
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Half-life: the divided life of Bruno Pontecorvo, physicist or spy
2015, Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group
in /languages/eng
0465069983 9780465069989
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
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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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