To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were intially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was.
ABRAHAM PAIS
Anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.’ I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.
More Abraham Pais Quotes
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To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were intially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was.
ABRAHAM PAIS -
Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: ‘As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month,
ABRAHAM PAIS -
One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn’t see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot.
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Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?
ABRAHAM PAIS -
I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter. I went to bed. Eight o’clock the next morning I was up writing again.
ABRAHAM PAIS -
There is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages …
ABRAHAM PAIS -
A number of current theoretical explorations will turn out to be passing fancies…
ABRAHAM PAIS -
Anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.’ I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.
ABRAHAM PAIS -
Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes – even in a scientific text.
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![Abraham Pais Quote - [Heisenberg’s seminal 1925 paper initiating quantum mechanics marked] one of the great jumps-perhaps the greatest-in the development of twentieth century physics.](https://minimalistquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/heisenbergs-seminal-1925-paper-initiating-quantum-.jpg)
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The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture. If Mr. X, who knew where I was, was caught for some reason, I should move.
ABRAHAM PAIS -
One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don’t know anything you don’t need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out of you.
ABRAHAM PAIS -
Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane.
ABRAHAM PAIS -
To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.
ABRAHAM PAIS