137 - Arthur I. Miller [131]
So what had happened? How could Pauli have been so enthusiastic about this new approach and then so totally cast down? Presenting a lecture on a subject can shed an entirely new light on it. So perhaps that was what happened. Suddenly he realized that the theory was full of holes. He was beginning to have second thoughts about his work with Heisenberg.
The following day he lectured at the American Physical Society meeting in New York, at that time the biggest and most important annual gathering of physicists from around the world. There was standing room only. But the criticism meted out by a younger and brasher generation of American physicists was even harsher. Lee could not bring himself to attend.
From there Pauli went on to California—where Feynman, for one, had had no compunction about telling the great Bohr that he was an idiot. Audiences there too offered ruthless criticism. Pauli was beginning to conclude, as he wrote to Heisenberg later that year, that “something entirely new, in other words very ‘crazy,’ [was] needed” if he and Heisenberg were to crack the mystery of the masses of elementary particles, one of the key aims of their unified theory.
Disillusioned, Pauli attacked Heisenberg’s calculation of the fine structure constant as 1/250, which had seemed so promising and had played a part in his decision to join Heisenberg’s project. He wrote to Fierz bitterly, “I have never considered it as correct. It’s so totally stupid.”
Some time later, Heisenberg’s co-worker on that calculation, Renato Ascoli, recalled that he had originally deduced the fine structure constant as 8 on the basis of Heisenberg’s theory. “Only after Heisenberg had doctored it up, was the value reduced to 1/250.”
Later that month Heisenberg gave a lecture on his and Pauli’s work at Heisenberg’s Institute in Göttingen. The room was packed. The great Heisenberg was about to announce a theory that could explain the behavior of every elementary particle in the world with a single equation—a “world formula”—that would surely prove to be an abstruse and highly technical piece of mathematics.
A press release was circulated reading (most offensively to Pauli): “Professor Heisenberg and his assistant, W. Pauli, have discovered the basic equation of the cosmos.” The story was picked up by newspapers around the world. Pauli vented his anger in a letter to George Gamow, the physicist and prankster who had translated and illustrated the Mephistopheles spoof at Bohr’s Institute in 1932. Pauli lampooned it by drawing an empty box saying, “This is to show that I can paint like Titian: Only the technical details are missing”—a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Pauli requested Gamow not to publish his comment but, miffed at Heisenberg’s insulting press release, added, “please show it to other physicists and make it popular among them.” Gamow certainly did. A week later Weisskopf wrote to Pauli about the press release and added that he read it with Pauli’s comment about Titian well in mind.
Combining Pauli’s well-known obsession with 137 with Heisenberg’s for his new theory, a colleague wrote jokingly to Pauli, “Since the Heisenberg equation is supposed to describe everything (see, for instance, New-York Herald Tribune, volume 137, p. i/137), it has as one of its solutions Heisenberg himself.” Pauli replied, “Regarding Heisenberg I have the feeling, that the situation is slowly growing over his head; certainly he needs vacations.” The problem of how to describe the properties of elementary particles remained open. Pauli summed up the situation thus, “Many questions, no good answers.”
In fact, Pauli was furious. He wrote to C. S. Wu about Heisenberg’s “poor taste” as far as the press releases were concerned:
In some of these I had been, unfortunately, mentioned…but fortunately only in a “mild” form as a secondary (or tertiary) auxiliary person of the Super-Faust, Super-Einstein and Super-man Heisenberg. (He seems to have mentioned his dreams on gravitational fields—about which one