The Pontecorvo Affair PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Pontecorvo Affair PDF full book. Access full book title The Pontecorvo Affair by Simone Turchetti. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Simone Turchetti
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226816648
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family had mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday trip. Because Pontecorvo was known to be an expert working for the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, this raised immediate concern for the safety of atomic secrets, especially when it became known in the following months that he had defected to the Soviet Union. Was Pontecorvo a spy? Did he know and pass sensitive information about the bomb to Soviet experts? At the time, nuclear scientists, security personnel, Western government officials, and journalists assessed the case, but their efforts were inconclusive and speculations quickly turned to silence. In the years since, some have downplayed Pontecorvo’s knowledge of atomic weaponry, while others have claimed him as part of a spy ring that infiltrated the Manhattan Project. The Pontecorvo Affair draws from newly disclosed sources to challenge previous attempts to solve the case, offering a balanced and well-documented account of Pontecorvo, his activities, and his possible motivations for defecting. Along the way, Simone Turchetti reconsiders the place of nuclear physics and nuclear physicists in the twentieth century and reveals that as the discipline’s promise of military and industrial uses came to the fore, so did the enforcement of new secrecy provisions on the few experts in the world specializing in its application.
Author: Simone Turchetti
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226816648
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family had mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday trip. Because Pontecorvo was known to be an expert working for the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, this raised immediate concern for the safety of atomic secrets, especially when it became known in the following months that he had defected to the Soviet Union. Was Pontecorvo a spy? Did he know and pass sensitive information about the bomb to Soviet experts? At the time, nuclear scientists, security personnel, Western government officials, and journalists assessed the case, but their efforts were inconclusive and speculations quickly turned to silence. In the years since, some have downplayed Pontecorvo’s knowledge of atomic weaponry, while others have claimed him as part of a spy ring that infiltrated the Manhattan Project. The Pontecorvo Affair draws from newly disclosed sources to challenge previous attempts to solve the case, offering a balanced and well-documented account of Pontecorvo, his activities, and his possible motivations for defecting. Along the way, Simone Turchetti reconsiders the place of nuclear physics and nuclear physicists in the twentieth century and reveals that as the discipline’s promise of military and industrial uses came to the fore, so did the enforcement of new secrecy provisions on the few experts in the world specializing in its application.
Author: Simone Turchetti
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226816664
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family had mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday trip. Because Pontecorvo was known to be an expert working for the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, this raised immediate concern for the safety of atomic secrets, especially when it became known in the following months that he had defected to the Soviet Union. Was Pontecorvo a spy? Did he know and pass sensitive information about the bomb to Soviet experts? At the time, nuclear scientists, security personnel, Western government officials, and journalists assessed the case, but their efforts were inconclusive and speculations quickly turned to silence. In the years since, some have downplayed Pontecorvo’s knowledge of atomic weaponry, while others have claimed him as part of a spy ring that infiltrated the Manhattan Project. The Pontecorvo Affair draws from newly disclosed sources to challenge previous attempts to solve the case, offering a balanced and well-documented account of Pontecorvo, his activities, and his possible motivations for defecting. Along the way, Simone Turchetti reconsiders the place of nuclear physics and nuclear physicists in the twentieth century and reveals that as the discipline’s promise of military and industrial uses came to the fore, so did the enforcement of new secrecy provisions on the few experts in the world specializing in its application.
Author: Frank Close
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1780745826
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Frank Close
Publisher:
ISBN: 0465069983
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402
Get Book Here
Book Description
It was at the height of the Cold War, in the summer of 1950, when Bruno Pontecorvo mysteriously vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Who was he, and what caused him to disappear? Was he simply a physicist, or also a spy and communist radical? A protégé of Enrico Fermi, Pontecorvo was one of the most promising nuclear physicists in the world. He spent years hunting for the Higgs boson of his day—the neutrino—a nearly massless particle thought to be essential to the process of particle decay. His work on the Manhattan Project helped to usher in the nuclear age, and confirmed his reputation as a brilliant physicist. Why, then, would he disappear as he stood on the cusp of true greatness, perhaps even the Nobel Prize? In Half-Life, physicist and historian Frank Close offers a heretofore untold history of Pontecorvo’s life, based on unprecedented access to Pontecorvo’s friends and family and the Russian scientists with whom he would later work. Close takes a microscope to Pontecorvo’s life, combining a thorough biography of one of the most important scientsts of the twentieth century with the drama of Cold War espionage. With all the elements of a Cold War thriller—classified atomic research, an infamous double agent, a possible kidnapping by Soviet operatives—Half-Life is a history of nuclear physics at perhaps its most powerful: when it created the bomb.physics at perhaps its most powerful: when it created the bomb.
Author: Neelam Srivastava
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137465840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book provides an innovative cultural history of Italian colonialism and its impact on twentieth-century ideas of empire and anti-colonialism. In October 1935, Mussoliniʼs army attacked Ethiopia, defying the League of Nations and other European imperial powers. The book explores the widespread political and literary responses to the invasion, highlighting how Pan-Africanism drew its sustenance from opposition to Italy’s late empire-building, and reading the work of George Padmore, Claude McKay, and CLR James alongside the feminist and socialist anti-colonial campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst’s broadsheet, New Times and Ethiopia News. Extending into the postwar period, the book examines the fertile connections between anti-colonialism and anti-fascism in Italian literature and art, tracing the emergence of a “resistance aesthetics” in works such as The Battle of Algiers and Giovanni Pirelli’s harrowing books of testimony about Algeria’s war of independence, both inspired by Frantz Fanon. This book will interest readers passionate about postcolonial studies, the history of Italian imperialism, Pan-Africanism, print cultures, and Italian postwar culture.
Author: Frank Close
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782833099
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Get Book Here
Book Description
Physicist Frank Close takes the reader to the frontiers of science in a vividly told investigation of revolutionary science and enterprise from the seventeenth century to the present. He looks at what has been meant by theories of everything, explores the scientific breakthroughs they have allowed, and shows the far-reaching effects they have had on crucial aspects of life and belief. Theories of everything, he argues, can be described as those which draw on all relevant branches of knowledge to explain everything known about the universe. Such accounts may reign supreme for centuries. Then, often as a result of the advances they themselves have enabled, a new discovery is made which the current theory cannot explain. A new theory is needed which inspiration, sometimes, supplies. Moving from Isaac Newton's work on gravity and motion in the seventeenth century to thermodynamics and James Clerk Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism in the nineteenth to Max Planck's and Paul Dirac's quantum physics in the twentieth, Professor Close turns finally to contemporary physics and the power and limitations of the current theory of everything. The cycle in which one theory of everything is first challenged and then replaced by another is continuing right now.
Author: Haidee Wasson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520291506
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Get Book Here
Book Description
The vast, and vastly influential, American military machine has been aided and abetted by cinema since the earliest days of the medium. The US military realized very quickly that film could be used in myriad ways: training, testing, surveying and mapping, surveillance, medical and psychological management of soldiers, and of course, propaganda. Bringing together a collection of new essays, based on archival research, Wasson and Grieveson seek to cover the complex history of how the military deployed cinema for varied purposes across the the long twentieth century, from the incipient wars of US imperialism in the late nineteenth century to the ongoing War on Terror. This engagement includes cinema created and used by and for the military itself (such as training films), the codevelopment of technologies (chemical, mechanical, and digital), and the use of film (and related mass media) as a key aspect of American "soft power," at home and around the world. A rich and timely set of essays, this volume will become a go-to for scholars interested in all aspects of how the military creates and uses moving-image media.
Author: Zohra Drif
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781682570753
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
This gripping insider's account chronicles how and why a young woman in 1950s Algiers joined the armed wing of Algeria's national liberation movement to combat her country's French occupiers. When the movement's leaders turned to Drif and her female colleagues to conduct attacks in retaliation for French aggression against the local population, they leapt at the chance. Their actions were later portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo's famed film The Battle of Algiers. When first published in French in 2013, this intimate memoir was met with great acclaim and no small amount of controversy. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only the anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century and their relevance today, but also the specific challenges that women often confronted (and overcame) in those movements.
Author: Atomic Energy of Canada Limited
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773516014
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Get Book Here
Book Description
The nuclear energy company has overseen the production of its own history, focusing on programs at its laboratories in Chalk River, Ontario, and Whiteshell, Manitoba between 1943 and 1985. The 16 scientists who wrote the narrative discuss the organization and operations of the laboratories, nuclear safety and radiation protection, radioisotopes, basic research, developing the CANDU reactor, managing the radioactive wastes, business development, and revenue generation. Canadian card order number: C97-900188-9. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Fabrizio Cilento
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319926810
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book traces the development of investigative cinema, whose main characteristic lies in reconstructing actual events, political crises, and conspiracies. These documentary-like films refrain from a simplistic reconstruction of historical events and are mainly concerned with what does not immediately appear on the surface of events. Consequently, they raise questions about the nature of the “truth” promoted by institutions, newspapers, and media reports. By highlighting unanswered questions, they leave us with a lack of clarity, and the questioning of documentation becomes the actual narrative. Investigative cinema is examined in relation to the historical conjunctures of the “economic miracle” in Italy, the simultaneous decolonization and reordering of culture in France, the waves of globalization and neoliberalism in post-dictatorial Latin America, and the post-Watergate, post-9/11 climate in US society. Investigative cinema is exemplified by the films Salvatore Giuliano, The Battle of Algiers, The Parallax View, Gomorrah, Zero Dark Thirty, and Citizenfour.
