July 28: Abraham Pais

Abraham Pais, a Dutch-born scientist who helped build the modern understanding of particle physics, died on this date in 2000. Pais was awarded his Ph.D. in physics in 1941, five days before a Nazi deadline banning Jews from receiving degrees. While in hiding to evade transfer to the concentration camp at Terezin, he worked out ideas in quantum electrodynamics; he was finally arrested by the Gestapo in 1945 but was saved by the Allied victory. In 1946 he served as assistant to Niels Bohr in Denmark before becoming a colleague of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Pais was also an historian of science who wrote Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, among other books. Pais died in Copenhagen in 2000.

“One of the things I learned [in hiding], one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn’t see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot. I learned, because there was no interruption. I had access to myself, to my thinking. . . . I was just short of twenty-two then.” —Abraham Pais