He persuaded Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Hideki Yukawa, George Uhlenbeck, George Placzek, Sinitiro Tomonaga and several other young physicists to spend occasional summers or sabbaticals at the Institute. In 1949, he recruited Chen Ning Yang, a brilliant twenty-seven-year-old who would win the 1957 Nobel in physics with T. D. Lee, another Chinese-born physicist Oppenheimer brought to the Institute. “This is an unreal place,” Pais wrote in his diary in February 1948. “Bohr comes into my office to talk, I look out of the window and see Einstein walking home with his assistant. Two
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