"People like myself, who truly feel at home in several
countries, are not strictly at home anywhere," writes Abraham Pais,
one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, near the
beginning of this engrossing chronicle of his life on two
continents. The author of an immensely popular biography of
Einstein, "Subtle Is the Lord," Pais writes engagingly for a
general audience. His "tale" describes his period of hiding in
Nazi-occupied Holland (he ended the war in a Gestapo prison) and
his life in America, particularly at the newly organized Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, then directed by the brilliant and
controversial physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Pais tells fascinating
stories about Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr, Sakharov, Dirac,
Heisenberg, and von Neumann, as well as about nonscientists like
Chaim Weizmann, George Kennan, Erwin Panofsky, and Pablo Casals.
His enthusiasm about science and life in general pervades a book
that is partly a memoir, partly a travel commentary, and partly a
history of science.
Pais's charming recollections of his years as a university
student become somber with the German invasion of the Netherlands
in 1940. He was presented with an unusual deadline for his graduate
work: a German decree that July 14, 1941, would be the final date
on which Dutch Jews could be granted a doctoral degree. Pais
received the degree, only to be forced into hiding from the Nazis
in 1943, practically next door to Anne Frank. After the war, he
went to the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen to work
with Niels Bohr. 1946 began his years at the Institute for Advanced
Study, where he worked first as a Fellow and then as a Professor
until his move to Rockefeller University in 1963. Combining his
understanding of disparate social and political worlds, Pais
comments just as insightfully on Oppenheimer's ordeals during the
McCarthy era as he does on his own and his European colleagues'
struggles during World War II.
Originally published in 1997.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books
from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press.
These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these
important books while presenting them in durable paperback
editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly
increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the
thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since
its founding in 1905.
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