137 - Arthur I. Miller [130]
Perhaps he also saw it as his chance to vindicate himself, to put behind him the fact that he had been the leader of the German atomic bomb project.
Together Pauli and Heisenberg wrote a joint paper that Pauli planned to lecture on during his forthcoming visit to the United States that January. Before leaving he wrote to Aniela Jaffé. He had been entirely engrossed in work with Heisenberg on a “new physical-mathematical theory of the smallest particles,” he said.
The pace of their work was so overwhelming that often letters were not fast enough. The phone line between Zürich and Munich, where Heisenberg was based, was continually buzzing. For Pauli their research was so fundamental that he saw Jungian significance in it. Although he and Heisenberg were very different, he wrote to Jaffé, they were “gripped by the same archetype”—by reflection symmetry, in the fullest sense of the CPT reflection. “Director Spiegler! [Reflector] dictates to me what I should write and calculate,” he declared.
He hoped that the “new year will see a beautiful theory that will light up the world.” He had even had a dream about it: Pauli enters a room and finds a boy and a girl there. He calls out, “Franca, here are two children!” He had seen Heisenberg just three days earlier and interpreted the children as the new ideas which he was confident would emerge from their work. From the fact that there were two children, he drew an analogy to his “mirror complex.”
The work could be taken as a realization of the unconscious and “more specifically: a realization of the ‘Self’ (in the Jungian sense).” It was what Pauli had sought for years—physics and the psychology of the unconscious as mirror images, a scenario that had been destroyed by the violation of mirror symmetry (parity violation), but restored by CPT symmetry, Pauli’s 1955 discovery about which he was still exultant.
On February 1, 1958, the lecture theater at the physics department at Columbia University was packed with over three hundred people. They were eager to see the great Pauli who was about to lecture on a theory formulated by the two giants of quantum theory. Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, T. D. Lee, and C. N. Yang, who had proposed the overthrow of parity, and C. S. Wu, the physicist who had performed the crucial experiment to prove it, all attended. The air was electric. But the distinguished audience had nothing but criticism for the new theory, though offered in a friendly manner. A key point in the theory was how newly discovered elementary particles decayed, how they transformed themselves into other particles. As Pauli was scribbling the equations on the blackboard, Abraham Pais, an eminent physicist and friend of Pauli’s, raised his hand and objected, “But Professor Pauli, this particle does not decay like that.” Pauli stopped midflow. There was a long silence. Then Pauli muttered, “I must get in touch with my friends in Göttingen about that,” by which he meant Heisenberg. At this point, T. D. Lee remembers, you “could almost feel the silence.” Others too pointed out loopholes in his mathematical proofs. Pauli continued his lecture but it was clear that the passion had gone.
At one point Bohr and Pauli chased each other around a long table at the front of the room. Whenever Bohr ended up at the front he declared, “It is not crazy enough.” Each time Pauli appeared he replied, “It is crazy enough.” This was repeated several times and the audience burst into applause.
“We were all polite, but Pauli was obviously discouraged…It was obvious that his heart was no longer in their work,” Yang recalled. He vividly remembered Pauli’s gloom as they were on their way in Lee’s car to a restaurant after the lecture. “Pauli oscillated back and forth in his seat and murmured some thing which I thought was, ‘As I talked more and more, I believed in it less and less.’ I was greatly saddened.” The physicist Freeman J. Dyson, of the Institute of Advanced Study,