Half Life

Resumen del libro

The memo landed on Kim Philby's desk in Washington, DC, in July 1950. Three months later, Bruno Pontecorvo, a physicist at Harwell, Britain's atomic energy lab, disappeared without a trace. When he re-surfaced six years later, he was on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

One of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, Pontecorvo was privy to many secrets: he had worked on the Anglo-Canadian arm of the Manhattan Project, and quietly discovered a way to find the uranium coveted by nuclear powers. Yet when he disappeared MI5 insisted he was not a threat. Now, based on unprecedented access to archives, letters, surviving family members and scientists, award-winning writer and physics professor Frank Close exposes the truth about a man irrevocably marked by the advent of the atomic age and the Cold War.

Biografía del autor

Frank Close (Gran Bretaña, 1945) es físico de partículas e investigador en el Centro de Física Teórica Rudolf Peierls de la Universidad de Oxford. Ha sido vicepresidente de la Sociedad Británica para el Avance de la Ciencia y jefe de la división de física teórica del Laboratorio Rutherford Appleton, así como jefe de comunicación y educación pública de la Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear (CERN). Es autor de diversos libros de divulgación científica, entre los que cabe destacar: Fin. La catástrofe cósmica y el destino del universo (1994), Lucifer's Legacy (2001) Nothing, a very short introduction (2007) y Antimatter (2009).