Abraham Pais

He died of heart failure in 2000 at Copenhagen. In his last days he was working on a biography of Robert Oppenheimer.

Pais was the eldest child born to his Jewish parents Isaiah Jacques Pais and Kaatje Cato van Kleeff in Amsterdam on May 19, 1918. Isaiah and Kleeff had met each other during their training for teaching in elementary-school. Kleeff left her job after their marriage.

The young Abraham, a sharp witted student, loved reading and completed elementary education to enrol in a burgher school at the age of 12. He passed his exams with stellar grades to top the school.

He started pursuing his higher studies from the ‘University of Amsterdam’ in 1935. His rendezvous with Professor George Uhlenbeck during some guest lectures at the university marked the beginning of Pais’s tryst with particle physics.

He graduated from the university with two B.S. degrees in mathematics and science in 1938. Maintaining correspondence with Uhlenbeck, he enrolled to the ‘University of Utrecht’ in the same year to pursue graduate studies.

While at the university, Pais got involved in research on various topics related to experimental physics. He also came in close contact with eminent researchers like Hendrik Casimir who was researching on quantum physics.

In 1939, he was guided and mentored by physicists Leonard Salomon Ornstein and Hendrik Anthony Kramers. Through Leon Rosenfeld, who was visiting Utrecht to deliver a seminar, he came to know about the ‘Meson theory’ of nuclear forces.

For his doctoral degree, he worked under Rosenfeld, who was appointed Uhlenbeck’s successor at the ‘University of Utrecht’ in 1940, after clearing his examinations for the master’s degree.

As an assistant professor, he based his thesis on the works of Rosenfeld and Moller, who studied the probability of disintegration of the highly stable nucleus of deuterium upon being bombarded by energetic photons.

In 1940, only days before the Germans imposed a ban on awarding doctorates to Jewish fellows, Pais completed his thesis, and even received his degree.

Pais is known for his works on particle physics. The theory on ‘associated production’ and composition of Kaon particles are his major contribution to the field of nuclear physics.

His biography on Albert Einstein ‘Lord is Subtle’ is acclaimed as one of the finest biographies of a scientist ever written. The book even won the ‘US National Book Award’.