Weak, electromagnetic, and strong interactions have distinct intrinsic symmetry properties, but this hierarchy of symmetries is not well understood t… - Abraham Pais

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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'.

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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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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.

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.

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