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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abraham Pais | 1/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Pais | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:45:12.672173+00:00 | kb-cron |
Abraham Pais (; May 19, 1918 – July 28, 2000) was a Dutch-American physicist and science historian. Pais earned his Ph.D. from University of Utrecht just prior to a Nazi ban on Jewish participation in Dutch universities during World War II. When the Nazis began the forced relocation of Dutch Jews, he went into hiding, but was later arrested and saved only by the end of the war. He then served as an assistant to Niels Bohr in Denmark and was later a colleague of Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His Subtle is the Lord, considered by many to be the definitive biography of Einstein, won the Science Writing Award. He followed it with Inwaard Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, a history of modern physics, Niels Bohr's Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity and Einstein Lived Here: Essays for the Layman. He was a physics professor at Rockefeller University until his retirement. He won the 1995 Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing.
== Early life == Pais was born in Amsterdam, the first child of middle-class Dutch-Jewish parents. His father, Isaiah "Jacques" Pais, was the descendant of Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Portugal to the Low Countries around the beginning of the 17th century. His mother, Kaatje "Cato" van Kleeff, was the daughter of an Ashkenazi Jewish diamond cutter. His parents met while studying to become elementary-school teachers. They both taught school until his mother quit when they married on December 2, 1916. His only sibling, Annie, was born on November 1, 1920. During Pais's childhood his father was a principal of both a secular school and a Hebrew school. Pais was a bright student and a voracious reader during his early education and said he had a happy childhood and felt integrated in Dutch society. At age twelve he passed examinations to enter a Hogere Burgerschool and attended a school in Amsterdam with a five-year curriculum of basic subjects. He passed his final examinations as number one in his class. He graduated with a working knowledge of English, French, and German.