137 - Arthur I. Miller [132]
He seems to have been relieved that he was not associated too closely with Heisenberg’s mistaken schemes. To Wu he recalled his hopes, dreams, and aspirations of thirty years earlier when he and Heisenberg were young and Heisenberg depended on his friend’s criticism and inspiration. Now Pauli had had enough:
Heisenberg’s desire for publicity and “glory” seems to be insatiable, while I am in this respect completely saturated. I only need something in science which interests me sufficiently and with which I can play (without being a hero in the limelight of the “world.”) Heisenberg’s opposite attitude, with which he certainly wishes to compensate earlier failures, may have many reasons lying in the whole history of his life.
No doubt the last words were an oblique reference to the role Heisenberg played in the war.
Soon afterward Pauli withdrew from the collaboration. Heisenberg persisted in making promise after promise as to the wonders his theory would produce. “He believes that if he publishes with me, then it is 1930 again! I have found it embarrassing how he runs after me!” Pauli wrote to Fierz in May.
That July Pauli chaired a session at a conference at CERN at which Heisenberg was scheduled to speak. Pauli introduced Heisenberg with the words, “What you will hear today is only a substitute for fundamental ideas.” He went on to make a request of the audience: “don’t laugh in the wrong place, ha, ha, ha….” The audience was already in fits of laughter. Pauli let Heisenberg finish speaking, then mercilessly demolished his paper.
When Pauli and Heisenberg met again later that summer, Heisenberg noticed that Pauli looked dispirited. Pauli encouraged him to go on with his work and wished him well, but added, “For me, I have to drop out, I just haven’t the strength, and that’s that. Things have changed too much.”
Could it have been that the great criticizer had met his match in the lambasting he encountered in America? To be on the receiving end must have been shattering. Heisenberg had been afraid this would happen when Pauli “in his present mood of exultation [encountered] the sober American pragmatists.” Franca too had noticed this chink in Pauli’s armor which, up until then, he had concealed so successfully: “He was very easily hurt and therefore would let down a curtain. He tried to live without admitting reality. And his unworldliness stemmed precisely from his belief that that was possible.”
But there was something else that brought Pauli to the point of spiritual exhaustion. He had grown attached to his work with Heisenberg. Their new theory had all the trappings that he thought a theory should have: a high degree of mathematical symmetry and Jungian meaning too, taking it one step closer to not merely a unified theory of elementary particles from which the fine structure constant could one day be deduced, but to a theory of the mind as well.
As he always did, Pauli interpreted the failure of the theory as personal failure. Genius though he was, he had failed yet again. Those who saw him in the autumn of 1958 recalled that he seemed beaten.
That year Pauli told an interviewer, “When I was young I thought I was the best formalist of my time. I believed that I was a revolutionary. When the great problems would come, I would be the one to solve them and to write about them. Others solved them and wrote about them. I was but a classicist and no revolutionary.” He began writing letters as if saying farewell.
A different side of Pauli
It was not all gloom. During his visit to the United States that year, Pauli had visited Harvard. Among the delegation that greeted him was Roy Glauber.
Glauber had been a postdoctoral fellow at the ETH back in 1950, working under Pauli. “Pauli…had been a legendary figure since his early twenties. Some part of that legend, as Pauli well knew, was attached to his role as a critic, not always kindly, of the work of his colleagues.