Out of the Sun

Abstract

On September 2, 1950, Bruno Pontecorvo - a brilliant Italian-born physicist and a product of Enrico Fermi's famed nuclear research group in Rome during the 1930s, a veteran of the United Kingdom's wartime and post-war nuclear projects who had become a naturalized British citizen, and was soon to take up a handsome new professorship at the University of Liverpool - suddenly defected to the Soviet Union. He took his wife and three young sons with him but did not inform any of his extensive family or anyone else in the West of his whereabouts then or for the next five years. Amid the seemingly favourable circumstances of his life and work, Pontecorvo's sudden defection mystified observers at the time and has continued to do so.

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