In 1950, Bruno Pontecorvo, an Italian physicist who had been working on British and Canadian nuclear projects, vanished while vacationing on the Mediterranean. As Frank Close writes in a new book about him, “Half-Life,” Pontecorvo wasn’t heard from again until 1955, when he resurfaced in Russia. There were many wild rumors about what he was working on for the Soviets, among them an “atomic fog.” But Freeman Dyson, reviewing the biography in The New York Review of Books, asks how much rogue physicists like Pontecorvo really mattered: “Perhaps the spies accelerated the production of the first Soviet bombs by two or three years, but those bombs soon became obsolete and were superseded by new designs invented without the help of spies.”
Dyson, as a physicist, must appreciate that the significance of…
You're reading a preview of
The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, Mar-16-15