Abraham Pais

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Abraham Pais.

Abraham "Bram" Pais (born May 19, 1918 in Amsterdam ; † July 28, 2000 in Copenhagen ) was a Dutch physicist and quantum field theorist. As an expert on 20th century physics and its development, he enjoyed an international reputation; as a colleague, former employee and friend of Albert Einstein , he was one of the leading Einstein biographers.

life and work

Pai's parents were school teachers (his father's ancestors were Sephardic Jews) and he grew up in Amsterdam, where he attended school with Max Dresden . From 1935 he studied physics, chemistry and mathematics at the University of Amsterdam and then specialized in physics with George Uhlenbeck at the University of Utrecht . At the end of the 1930s, however, this was mostly in the USA and Pais heard u. a. with Hendrik Casimir (from Leiden), Leonard Ornstein and Hendrik Anthony Kramers (also in Leiden). He graduated in 1940 and was then the assistant to Léon Rosenfeld , who came to Leiden from Liège as Uhlenbeck's successor. After the occupation of the Netherlands by German troops in May 1940, Jews were gradually driven out of academic life. First, in November 1940, employment in the public sector was banned - but Pais secretly remained an assistant to Rosenfeld's successor. As of June 1941, Jews should no longer be able to do a doctorate, but Pais managed to submit his doctorate a few days beforehand ( Projective theory of meson fields and electromagnetic properties of atomic nuclei ).

His work attracted the attention of Niels Bohr , who wanted to bring him to Copenhagen. When Jews with university positions were also to be deported in the spring of 1943, Pais went into hiding and lived underground in the Netherlands for about two and a half years, supported by his girlfriend Tineke Buchter. Shortly before the end of the war, he was arrested by the Gestapo in March 1945, at a time when deportation was no longer possible due to the Allied military advances. A few days before the end of the war, he was released after a month in prison. Kramers, who maintained contact with Pais while he went into hiding , had written to Werner Heisenberg for help, and although he declared himself powerless, Pais 'friend Buchter was able to obtain Pais' release with Heisenberg's letter of reply. His parents were also able to go into hiding, but his sister Annie was deported with her husband to Sobibor, where she perished. Likewise, his fellow student and friend Lion Nordheim, with whom he was last in hiding and who was arrested with him, was shot ten days before the end of the war. Documents of the Zionist youth movement, to which Pais and Nordheim had belonged since student days, had been found on him.

Abraham Pais, 1963 in Copenhagen

After the war he worked first at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen and for one year 1946 as personal assistant to Niels Bohr. In 1947 he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , where he worked under Robert Oppenheimer and met Albert Einstein. In 1956 he became a US citizen. From 1963 he was a professor of theoretical physics at Rockefeller University , which was previously mainly a medical college. In 1981 he became "Detlev W. Bronk Professor" there. After his retirement in 1988 he lived with his second wife, the anthropologist Ida Nicolaisen , granddaughter of the inspector of Greenland Ole Bendixen , partly in Denmark, where he worked at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and died in 2000 of a heart attack. His son Josh Pais is an actor.

His own most important professional contributions concern particle physics. In the 1930s he also worked on the meson theory of nuclear forces. Both the name Lepton and Baryon (1953) come from Pais . In 1952 he clarified the relative stability of some hadrons and the fact that in some processes only pairs of certain hadrons are generated (associated production) by introducing the strangeness quantum number, simultaneously with Murray Gell-Mann . Together with Gell-Mann, he also developed the theory of kaon decay in 1955, which predicted the existence of the “long-lived” neutral K meson system and explained the short-lived component as the mixed states of the neutral kaons and their antiparticles, the first example of such quantum mechanical oscillating two-state systems (mixed states ) of elementary particles. A few years later , the physicists Val Fitch and James Cronin used the findings described there as the basis for experiments on CP violation , for which they received the Nobel Prize. From the 1970s onwards, Pais became increasingly concerned with the history of physics. In 1962 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences , 1972 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 1983 to the American Philosophical Society .

In a 1950 work with Uhlenbeck, he showed that Lagrange field theories with higher derivatives cannot eliminate the problem with divergences in quantum field theory. In 1952, with Res Jost, he introduced G parity and the associated selection rules in the theory of mesons. In the 1960s he worked a. a. on SU (6) models of hadrons in the context of the quark model.

For his first Einstein biography "Subtle Is the Lord ... The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein" (German: "Refined is the Lord") he received the Science Writing Award of the American Institute of Physics in 1983 , the book was published by The New York Times Book Review voted one of the best books of the year. It is considered the standard scientific biography, but only marginally deals with Einstein's private life. Pais published more on this in Einstein lived here . In contrast to previous biographers, Pais was also able to fully evaluate the Einstein estate (at that time still in Princeton). His book "Inward Bound" is a scientific history of elementary particle physics.

In his honor, the American Physical Society donated the Abraham Pais Prize for the History of Physics in 2005 .

Works

  • Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein . Oxford University Press, New York 1982.
    • German edition: The Lord God is refined, Albert Einstein. A scientific biography . Spectrum, Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-8274-0529-7 .
  • Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World . Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986.
  • Niels Bohr's Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity . Oxford University Press, New York 1991.
  • Einstein lived here . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994.
    • German edition: I trust in intuition, the other Albert Einstein . Spectrum, Heidelberg 1998, ISBN 3-8274-0394-4 .
  • with Laurie Brown, Brian Pippard (Eds.): Twentieth Century Physics . 2nd Edition. Institute of Physics Publishing, 1995. In Volume 1, the section Introducing atoms and their nuclei .
  • A Tale of two continents: A Physicist's Life in a Turbulent World . Autobiography. Princeton University Press, 1997.
  • with Maurice Jacob , David Olive , Michael Atiyah : Paul Dirac: The Man and His Work . Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  • The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery of 20th-Century Physicists . Oxford University Press, 2000.
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer . Oxford University Press. Published posthumously in 2006 with the assistance of Robert P. Crease.
  • Theory of the Electron 1897-1947 . In Wigner, Salam (Ed.): Aspects of Quantum Theory . 1972.
  • Einstein and the quantum theory . In: Reviews of Modern Physics . Volume 51, 1979.
  • Theoretical particle physics . In: Reviews of Modern Physics . Volume 71, 1999.

literature

  • Obituary by Martinus Veltman in the yearbook of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences 2002, Dutch.

Web links

References

  1. ^ Georgi, obituary in Biographical Memoirs National Academy of Sciences
  2. ^ History of Hadron Physics. Wally Melnitchouk, Jefferson Lab , archived from the original on July 5, 2008 ; accessed on February 20, 2010 (English).
  3. ↑ Explicitly by Gell-Mann, but it was implicit in Pai's "associated production" rules
  4. ^ Pais: In Physical Review . Volume 86, 1952, p. 663.
  5. ^ Gell-Mann, Pais: In: Physical Review . Volume 97, 1955, p. 1387.
  6. ↑ von Feynman in his book Theory of Fundamental Processes from 1962 as one of the greatest achievements in theoretical physics
  7. ↑ Member History: Abraham Pais. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 3, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Jost, Pais: In Physical Review . Volume 87, 1952, p. 871.
  9. ^ Karl von Meyenn, Der neue Einstein , Physikalische Blätter, Volume 50, 1994, No. 12, pp. 1163–1164
personal data
SURNAME Pais, Abraham
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pais, Bram (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch physicist and quantum field theorist
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam
DATE OF DEATH July 28, 2000
Place of death Copenhagen