Half-Life is a biography of the two sides of Bruno Pontecorvo's life. One part is his work as a significant nuclear physicist of the 20th century. Trained as the youngest member of Enrico Fermi's pioneering research team in Rome, the “Via Panisperna Boys,” Pontecorvo was one of the authors of Fermi's ground-breaking paper on slow neutrons. He went on to work at the Joliot-Curies’ Radium Laboratory in Paris to design and build neutron-emitting apparatuses for the prospecting of oil and other minerals. He then helped to build the first uranium heavy water nuclear reactor at Chalk River in Canada, subsequently went to work for the United Kingdom's Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, and finally became a senior figure at the USSR's secret nuclear research center at Dubna north of Moscow.
Frank Close, a physicist himself, makes an impressive case for Pontecorvo's major contributions to nuclear physics as a creative...