Abraham Pais

Abraham Pais 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 Inward 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.