In the days before the war, Otto Frisch remembers, in Hamburg with Otto Stern, he used to run experiments by day and think intensely about physics well into the night. “I regularly came home,” Frisch told an interviewer once, “had dinner at seven, had a quarter of an hour’s nap after dinner, and then I sat down happily with a sheet of paper and a reading lamp and worked until about one o’clock at night—until I began to have hallucinations. . . . I began to see queer animals against the background of my room, and then I thought, Oh, well, better go to bed.’ ” The young Austrian’s hypnagogic
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