Abraham Pais
May 19, 1918 — July 28, 2000
Abraham Pais was a Dutch-American theoretical physicist and science historian who made significant contributions to particle physics and became one of the great writers about science, authoring the definitive biography of Albert Einstein and a sweeping history of 20th-century physics.
Survival and Science
Born on May 19, 1918 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Pais came of age as a physicist under the shadow of Nazi persecution. He completed his PhD in physics from the University of Utrecht in 1941, the same year the Netherlands fell under German occupation. As a Jewish man, he was in mortal danger and spent time in hiding, including a period concealed in Niels Bohr's home in Copenhagen. He survived the occupation and moved to the United States in 1946, where he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, working alongside Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer. He eventually moved to Rockefeller University in New York, where he spent the bulk of his academic career, becoming a citizen in 1954.
Particle Physics and the Bohr Connection
Pais made substantial contributions to theoretical particle physics in the late 1940s and 1950s, most notably in developing the concept of associated production to explain the behavior of "strange particles" — particles whose properties seemed inconsistent with the theoretical models of the day. His work on kaon physics helped lay groundwork for what eventually became the quark model. He was part of the remarkable intellectual community at the Institute for Advanced Study during one of the golden decades of theoretical physics. He was personally close to both Einstein and Niels Bohr and appears frequently as a witness and participant in accounts of that era's scientific life.
Did You Know?
Pais was present at Einstein's deathbed in 1955, and the depth of his personal knowledge of Einstein over many years of close acquaintance was one of the foundations of Subtle is the Lord. He has described conversations with Einstein in which the elder physicist discussed his fundamental dissatisfaction with quantum mechanics, a position Einstein held to the end and which shaped Pais's nuanced account of one of the great intellectual disputes in modern science.
Biographies and Legacy
Pais's greatest legacy is as a historian of physics. His 1982 biography of Einstein, Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein , is widely considered the definitive scientific biography, praised both for the depth of its scientific exposition and for its intimate personal portrait drawn from Pais's own years as Einstein's colleague and friend. He followed it with Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (1986), a history of particle physics, and Niels Bohr's Times (1991), a biography of his other great mentor. He died on July 28, 2000 in Copenhagen — fittingly, in the city where Bohr had once hidden him from the Nazis.