Abraham Pais Quotes

He understood that the sources of the gravitational field were not just ponderable matter but also field energy. He realized that gravitational field energy is to be included as a source and that the gravitational field equations were therefore bound to be nonlinear.

All modern work on unification may be said to represent a program of geometrization that resembles Einstein's earlier attempts, although the manifold subject to geometrization is larger than he anticipated and the quantum framework of the program would not have been to his liking.

Today we live in the midst of upheaval and crisis. We do not know where we are going, nor even where we ought to be going. Awareness is spreading that our future cannot be a straight extension of the past or the present … The century now approaching its end has been one of indiscriminate violence, it has been perhaps the most murderous one in Western history of which we have record. Yet I would think that what will strike people most when, hundreds of years from now, they will look back on our days is that this was the age when the exploration of space began, the microchip was invented, revolutions in transport and communication virtually annihilated time and distance, transforming the world into a "global village," and relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and the structure of the atom were discovered, in brief that this has been the century of science and technology.

For several months I was incapable of feeling anything, completely inaccessible to my feelings — I did not laugh, I did not cry. The second thing was this amazing trauma, where I forgot the names of everyone I knew. That was very strange. I knew who everyone was: this was a friend from high school, this was my cousin, but I had to relearn every name. It was quite striking, that very strong reaction that I had. They have a name for it, I think: posttraumatic stress syndrome. I don't sit here conquering great resistance to talk. It is not my way. I don't suffer the reliving of these memories with tremendous pain. It's very odd, but it's finished for me. That, of course, is never quite true. It isn't finished. I am like all of my generation; we are marked people. But I don't suffer; I can talk to you about it. Most of my family was killed. All of my father's and mother's sisters and brothers and their children, my sister and my old grandfather, they're all gone. Four out of five Jews in Holland never came back after the war — 80 percent.

One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don't know anything you don't need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out of you.

I was lucky because the same week that I went to prison the Americans crossed the Rhine and cut off the northern part of Holland, so there was no longer any possibility of being shipped out to a concentration camp. The rail lines were cut. So I was in prison in Amsterdam during the very last days of the war. We were sent to the men's prison and the girls were sent to a women's prison in a different place.

Weak, electromagnetic, and strong interactions have distinct intrinsic symmetry properties, but this hierarchy of symmetries is not well understood theoretically. Perhaps the most puzzling are the small effects of noninvariance under space reflection and the even smaller effects of noninvariance under space reflection and the even smaller effects of noninvariance under time reversal. It adds to the puzzlement that the latter phenomenon has been observed so far only in a single instance, namely, in the K° - K^-^ system. (These phenomena were first observed after Einstein's death. I have often wondered what might have been his reactions to these discoveries, given his 'conviction' that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover tbe concepts and the laws connectin them'.

Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes - even in a scientific text.

I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself killed.

Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes — even in a scientific text.

Progress leads to confusion leads to progress and on and on without respite. Every one of the many major advances … created sooner or later, more often sooner, new problems. These confusions, never twice the same, are not to be deplored. Rather, those who participate experience them as a privilege.

Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?

A new man appears abruptly, the ‘suddenly famous Doctor Einstein.’ He carries the message of a new order in the universe. He is a new Moses come down from the mountain to bring the law and a new Joshua controlling the motion of heavenly bodies...

I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself killed. I was going to get out of it.

He had no need to push the everyday world away from him. He just stepped out of it whenever he wished.