Bruno Pontecorvo

The work and life of Bruno Pontecorvo.

Bruno Pontecorvo was born near Pisa, Italy. He studied physics at Sapienza University in Rome under Enrico Fermi. In 1934, as one of Fermi’s students, he participated in the famous experiment that eventually led to the discovery of nuclear fission.

Pontecorvo was a committed communist and joined the Italian Communist Party at the age of 23. In 1938, he fled Mussolini’s regime to Paris, and two years later, when the Germans occupied the city, he managed to escape and eventually made his way to the USA. In 1943, he joined the British Tube Alloys team in Montreal, a British version of the Manhattan Project, and participated thereby in the development of the atomic bomb.

In 1949, he moved to Britain, and the following year, being a communist, he fled with his family (via Sweden and Finland) to the communist country, the Soviet Union. Many years later, he wrote in his autobiographical notes,

“By the end of the war, I found the behavior of the West towards the country that played such an important role in the fight against Nazism and paid such a huge price in human lives to be immoral.”

In the USSR, Pontecorvo joined the institute in Dubna, and in 1954, he, along with other leading physicists and engineers at the institute, received the Stalin Prize for the successful launch of the synchrotron and for conducting physical experiments there.

💥 His most significant scientific achievements relate to the physics of neutrinos. In particular, he was the first to realize (back in 1957) that there are different types of neutrinos and that one type can convert into another. Later, neutrino oscillations were discovered in experiment, and the discoverers of this phenomenon were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2015, sixty years after Pontecorvo's prediction and twenty years after his passing.

As a young man, sometime in the eighties, I attended a talk by Pontecorvo. It was not a scientific lecture; he shared with us the story of the life and mysterious disappearance of Ettore Majorana, another brilliant Italian physicist whom Pontecorvo had known personally in his youth.

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