at Harwell. He received many awards, including a knighthood in 1968, and wrote several books including Quantum Theory of Solids, The Laws of Nature (1955), Surprises in Theoretical Physics (1979), More Surprises in Theoretical Physics (1991) and an autobiography, Bird of Passage (1985). Concerned with the nuclear weapons he had helped to unleash, he worked on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was President of the Atomic Scientists' Association in the UK, and was involved in the Pugwash movement. Early life Rudolf Ernst Peierls was born in the Berlin suburb of Oberschöneweide, the youngest of three children of Heinrich Peierls an electrical engineer, from a family of Jewish merchants. His father was the managing director of a cable factory of Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), and his mother was his father's first wife, Elisabeth ( Weigert). Rudolf had an older brother, Alfred, and an older sister, Annie. His mother died from Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1921, and his father married Else Hermann, the sister-in-law of the playwright Ludwig Fulda. The family was Jewish, but assimilated, and Peierls and his siblings were baptised as Lutherans. When he came of age, Peierls left the church. Peierls commenced school a year late because he needed glasses, and his parents did not trust him not to lose them or break them. After two years at the local preparatory school, he entered his local gymnasium, the , where he spent the next nine years, passing his abitur examinations in 1925. He wanted to study engineering, but his parents, who doubted his practical abilities, suggested physics instead. He entered the University of Berlin, where he listened to lectures by Max Planck, Walther Bothe and Walther Nernst. Fellow students included Kurt Hirsch and Käte Sperling. The physics laboratory classes were overcrowded, so the first year students were encouraged to take theoretical physics courses instead. Peierls found that he liked the subject. In 1926 Peierls decided to transfer to the University of Munich where Arnold Sommerfeld, who was considered to be the greatest teacher of theoretical physics, was. Fellow students there included Hans Bethe, Hermann Brück and William V. Houston. At the time, the Bohr-Sommerfeld theory was being overturned by the new quantum mechanics of Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac. In 1928, Sommerfeld set off on a world tour. On his advice, Peierls moved to the University of Leipzig, where Heisenberg had been appointed to a chair in 1927. Heisenberg set