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

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.

Frank Close is professor of physics at the University of Oxford. A longtime science writer, Close is a past recipient of the Kelvin Medal from the Institute of Physics for his contributions to the public understanding of physics. He is the author of many books, including Neutrino, Nothing, The Void, and The Cosmic Onion, and has written or presented for Nature, the BBC, and other media outlets.