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"""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 and author of the biography of Einstein, ""Subtle is the Lord"", near the beginning of this chronicle of his life on two continents. 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. His recollections of his years as a university student become sombre 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. In 1946 he 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 on Oppenheimer's ordeals during the McCarthy era and his own and his European colleagues' struggles during World War II."

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9780198501992

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The author of a highly regarded biography of Albert Einstein (Subtle Is the Lord, not reviewed; Einstein Lived Here, 1994) sums up his own life. Pals is clearly temperamentally unsuited to discuss intimate matters; what he does instead is to chronicle his passage through momentous times, describing his experiences as a privileged onlooker. Growing up in the blue-collar Jewish community of Amsterdam, Pals encountered no prejudice and, because of the exciting developments going on in quantum mechanics, determined upon a career as an experimental physicist. Then the Nazis invaded Holland, and Jews were slowly marginalized and then sent to labor camps. Some were able to flee the country and some, like Pals, went into hiding, Pals stayed underground nearly three years before being spotted by an SS officer and arrested. Luckily, his imprisonment began just as the war was ending, and Pals was spared the fate of Anne Frank, who had been concealed with her family nearby. While in hiding Pals had kept up his study of physics, and when the war ended, his career quickly flowered. He worked for some time with Niels Bohr and offers a lengthy portrait both of the man and his philosophy, particularly as it relates to the reconciliation of classical and quantum physics. He knew Robert Oppenheimer and describes his sufferings during the McCarthy hearings. He also offers stories of Einstein, Sakharov, Heisenberg, and, because his interests extended beyond the laboratory and the classroom, of such acquaintances as Pablo Casals and George Kennan. He chronicles the time he spent at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at Rockefeller University, and speaks usefully about his research and about the writing of the Einstein biography. Authoritative and valuable historically, though because of PaWs remoteness, not widely appealing as an autobiography. (Kirkus Reviews)

Pais is most widely known for his definitive scientific biography of Albert Einstein, Subtle is the Lord, and for his book Niels Bohr's Times. The great strength of those books is that Pais is a particle physicist himself, an exact contemporary of Richard Feynman, and worked with Bohr, Einstein and other physicists involved in the scientific revolution of the 20th century. Now he has written an autobiographical account of these developments in physics, beginning from his native Denmark during the war to life in America after the war. A first-hand account, free from any mathematical complications, of how physics changed during one man's lifetime. (Kirkus UK)

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