Abraham Pais Quotes

Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane

The ultimate unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions has probably not yet been achieved, but a solid beach-head appears to have been established in terms of local non-Abelian gauge theories with spontaneous symmetry breakdown. As a result, it is now widely believed that weak interactions are mediated by massive vector mesons. Current expectations are that such mesons will be observed within the decade. It is widely believed that strong interactions are also mediated by local non-Abelian gauge fields. Their symmetry is supposed to be unbroken so that the corresponding vector mesons are massless. The dynamics of these 'non-Abelian photons' are supposed to prohibit their creation as single free particles. The technical exploration of this theory is in its early stages.

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.

The preceding collection of stories about Einstein the young boy demonstrates the remarkable extent to which his most characteristic personal traits were native rather than acquired.

On the day we were caught, Lion and I had been talking about writing a memorandum on the fate of the Jewish war children living in hiding or among Dutch families … we were the representatives of the Zionist youth organization. … Lion who had been taking notes of the discussion, put these papers in his jacket pocket when he took a break from lunch. When the Germans caught us they discovered his notes. If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of complete coincidences.

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?

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.

Promising steps have been made toward grand unification, the union of weak, electromagnetic, and strong interactions in one compact, non-Abelian gauge group. In most grand unifies theories the proton is unstable. News about the proton's fate is eagerly awaited at this time. Superunification, the union of all four forces, is the major goal. Some believe that it is near and that supergravity will provide the answer. Others are not so sure.

"I introduce the subject of fine structure with a mini-calendar of events. ...

Winter 1914-15. Sommerfeld computes relativistic orbits for hydrogen-like atoms. Pashcen, aware of these studies, carefully investigates fine structures, ....

January 6, 1916. Sommerfeld announces his fine structure formula, citing results to be published by Paschen in support of his answer.

February 1916. Einstein to Sommerfeld: "A revelation!"

March 1916. Bohr to Sommerfeld: "I do not believe ever to have read anything with more joy than your beautiful work."

September 1916. Paschen publishes his work, acknowledging Sommerfeld's "indefatigable efforts.

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.

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.

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were initially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was.

he described his own ideals, the desire for fulfillment not just as a theorist but also as an experimental physicist. (In the second respect, he, of course, never matched Newton.)

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.