I made a discovery, perhaps known to others but new to me: I need not put myself center stage but can rather place myself at the side, like a Greek c… - Abraham Pais

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I made a discovery, perhaps known to others but new to me: I need not put myself center stage but can rather place myself at the side, like a Greek chorus. As the curtain rises, I can walk to the center and can speak as follows: I wish to tell you of happenings in the twentieth century, as I witnessed them and reflected upon them. You will see me return to center stage, but only occasionally. Once that imagery had gotten hold of me, I went back to Ida and said yes, I shall try.

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About Abraham Pais

Abraham Pais (May 19, 1918 – July 28, 2000) was a Dutch-born American physicist and science historian. He served as an assistant to Niels Bohr in Denmark and was later a colleague of Albert Einstein at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Pais wrote books documenting the lives of these two great physicists and the contributions they and others made to modern physics.

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Also Known As

Alternative Names: Bram Pais Abraham pais A. Pais B. Pais Pais, Abraham
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One of the things I learned, 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 wouldn't say that I particularly matured. The thinking was physics thinking. I was just short of twenty-two then. I was in hiding for two years and two months, something like that. In all that time I went out very, very little, just once in a great while, after dark. 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.

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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.

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