My Life as a Physicist

Abstract

“But you were going to be an architect”. Those were the first words Ehrenfest^l) spoke to me when I went to see him before the summer holidays in 1926. I had recently passed my final school-examination, intended to study theoretical physics and wanted some advice. Since I have no gift for drawing and since my faculties for visualizing and remembering complicated structures in space are no more than average, this struck me as a curious remark. But Ehrenfest was firmly convinced that any kind of talent should manifest itself at an early age. He has occasionally visited our home and had apparently been impressed by the zeal and concentration with which I built towers and castles with wooden blocks. (If all kids that play with wooden blocks were to become architects there would be a surplus of architects, I’m afraid). He next asked me how I had fared at school and what I had read and studied beyond the school curriculum. That was next to nothing. I had had a very good physics teacher, a former student of H.A. Lorentz, and what he taught us had impressed me, that was all. On the whole I had been rather lazy, working just hard enough to get high marks in all subjects, which was not very hard.