mock of the laws of the ‘ordinary’ world. Theoreticians like Pais sought to bring some order into this domain, and he made himself a great name by doing so. True, he never got the Nobel Prize, but he must have come close to it. And other honours he had in plenty.
Much as Pais owed to Princeton, there came a time when he began to fret at the limitations of that small town, entirely dominated as it was by the Institute and the University. The Institute must have been a hugely competitive environment, with everyone watching everyone else; it drove some people to actual breakdowns. To judge from his autobiography, Pais himself wasn't much bothered by this. He gives the impression that his career developed so favourably almost of itself, with little effort on his part. He had Oppenheimer's backing, got on well with Einstein and had retained Bohr's constant support from his six months in Copenhagen. Unconsciously perhaps, he presents himself as a Sunday's child of physics. Yet he must have felt the oppressive atmosphere of such an institution. His mother, who visited him at Princeton several times after the war, was immediately aware of it and described Princeton bluntly as a ‘glittering prison’ (limbo). Pais' first wife Lila, whom he married in 1957, was in a sense its victim. What is a woman whose husband who lives on top of his work, who is completely absorbed by physics, to do with herself in a dump like Princeton? And so the marriage, which produced a son, came unstuck. In 1961 they divorced.
In 1963 Pais decided to move. By now he had seen enough of Princeton, and he was also in danger of becoming too contented with his life. But where was he to go? A man of his reputation could pick and choose, and he chose the Rockefeller Institute (again, a postgraduate research institute) in New York. His old mentor Uhlenbeck worked there, it was a peaceful complex in a tiring city, and for years he had kept a pied à terre in New York; socially, the change would not be so great. In New York he was able to build up his own team, with which he could continue his research into the interaction of subatomic particles. And later he found a new wife there, Sara, to whom he was married from 1976 to 1985. He remained active in the field of particle physics until the end of the seventies; and since by the early eighties the heyday of that speciality was more or less over his active career as a physicist virtually coincided with it.
But Pais did not achieve fame only as a physicist. Towards 1980, when he was beginning to realise that he was unlikely to produce any new breakthrough in particle physics, he switched to a different field: the history of modern physics. The first book he wrote was a biography of Einstein. At Princeton he had for years been in close contact with the legendary physicist, and he treasured many memories of him. As a mark of this special bond with Einstein, after the latter's death his faithful secretary gave Pais his last pipe, a gift which Pais has cherished ever since. Subtle is the Lord, as the book was called, appeared in 1982 and was very successful. This inspired Pais to go further down this new road. After a book about turn-of-the-century physics (Inward Bound, 1988) he wrote another major biography of his real teacher, Niels Bohr (1991).
This biography of one of the last great European physicists turned Pais - who had long ago taken American citizenship - into a semi-European again. After moving to the United States he had of course paid frequent visits to Europe, to see his family or attend conferences, but on these occasions he usually behaved as a tourist. But just when, inspired by some Bohr commemoration, he was thinking of writing a biography of the Danish physicist and wondering how to handle the practical problems of researching Danish archives - just then he met a Danish anthropologist whom he eventually married and who provided him with a second home in Denmark. As a result, in this last phase of his life Pais spent half of each year in America, the other half in Denmark. Up to this moment his life remains, as the title of his autobiography says, ‘a tale of two continents’.
One episode in this autobiography which has stuck in my mind more than most is Pais' naturalisation as an American citizen. He had felt few qualms at leaving Europe in 1946, and the decision to seek naturalisation had not been hard. Although his parents still lived in Amsterdam, although he visited Europe regularly for conferences, he had never shown any sign of nostalgia for his native continent. But when the time for the formal ceremony came in 1954 Pais experienced an unexpected surge of emotion. When he got up that morning he felt nauseous and totally confused. Only with the greatest difficulty was he able to get to the building in Trenton where he was to take the oath of allegiance. The thought of giving up his identity as a Dutchman, something he had done long ago on a rational level, cast him into an emotional void which made him physically ill; subconsciously he saw it as a betrayal of a country that was still dear to him. The judge who administered the oath recognised that. ‘The grass will never be greener than in the country where you were born,’ he said, meaning that naturalisation need not be seen as a betrayal of one's country of birth. Pais drew strength from this, and he has never regretted his decision.
It is a pity, though, that Pais did not make use of this story to reflect more generally on the difference between America and Europe and on the experiences of Europeans who made their careers in the States. He describes his own departure for the us as if it were a natural development, something that just happened that way. We are told virtually nothing of the post-war state of Dutch physics, and nothing at all about others who took the same step and, sometimes to their own surprise, remained in America. The transatlantic brain drain, which could have been one of the best reasons for writing the book, simply has no place in it. Pais' autobiography could have provided a mirror of his era; but, sadly, not much has come of this.
As a ‘document humain’, too, the book is a disappointment. An autobiography is an exercise in honesty. The task confronting the writer is to reveal sufficient of his inner motivations and emotions to explain his
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