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The first thing Bohr said to me was that it would only then be profitable to work with him if I understood that he was a dilettante. The only way I k… - Abraham Pais
" "The first thing Bohr said to me was that it would only then be profitable to work with him if I understood that he was a dilettante. The only way I knew to react to this unexpected statement was with a polite smile of disbelief. But evidently Bohr was serious. He explained how he had to approach every new question from a starting point of total ignorance. It is perhaps better to say that Bohr's strength lay in his formidable intuition and insight rather than erudition.
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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
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Abraham pais
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A. Pais
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B. Pais
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Pais, Abraham
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Additional quotes by Abraham Pais
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.
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Special relativity killed the classical dream of using the energy-momentum-velocity relations of a particle as a means of probing the dynamic origins of its mass. The relations are purely kinematic. The classical picture of a particle as a finite little sphere is also gone for good. Quantum field theory has taught us that particles nevertheless have structure, arising from quantum fluctuations. Recently, unified field theories have taught us that the mass of the electron is certainly not purely electromagnetic in nature. But we still do not know what causes the electron to weigh.
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