137 - Arthur I. Miller [133]
Not long after young Glauber arrived in Zürich, he and the rest of Pauli’s students went on a hike in the hills. They took a cable car and then followed a series of steep trails around the Vierwaldstätter See, a scenic lake. “Pauli, notwithstanding his ample girth,” kept up a vigorous pace. Expecting a picnic, Glauber had brought a camera, a hefty Speed Graphic—made famous in the 1940s and 1950s by press photographers—which hung by a strap over his shoulder. He had not even brought much film. Pauli began teasing him. “Always you carry that awful camera,” he kept saying, “but you are taking no pictures.” Then he laughed uproariously.
At the end of the day, some of the group swam in the lake while others played soccer. Pauli kicked the ball into the lake so that someone had to swim out and fetch it. He roared with laughter as he kicked the ball further and further into the water.
A photograph of Pauli kicking the ball was too good to miss—but Glauber had only one exposure left. Trying not to draw Pauli’s attention, he set up his camera, peered into the rangefinder and as inconspicuously as possible signaled a friend to kick the ball toward Pauli. Suddenly the camera smacked him square in the face. Instead of the lake, Pauli had decided to make Glauber’s camera his next target. Glauber recalled hearing his bellowing laugh.
Pauli kicking a soccer ball, 1950.
He had, however, managed to snap the shutter. “Pauli,” he concluded, “never discounted the element of luck in his practical jokes.”
When Glauber was still at the ETH, his mother once wrote and complained to Pauli that her son never sent letters home. Thereafter, whenever Pauli saw Glauber, he always insisted on asking loudly, “And how is your dear mother?”
In 1958, when Pauli visited Harvard, Glauber was apprehensive. To his relief Pauli greeted him warmly and said nothing the entire time about his mother. “Thank God he has forgotten my mother,” Glauber said after he had left. Pauli went with Weisskopf back to his lodging in Cambridge. The first thing he said once they were out of earshot was, “This time I fooled Glauber. I said nothing about his mother.”
A nearly perfect sphere
That same year Pauli attended the Solvay Conference in Brussels as that venerable meeting’s vice president. There he and Franca invited the cosmologist Fred Hoyle and his wife to lunch. Honored, Hoyle happily accepted. He was eager to substantiate a story about Pauli that had been on his mind for some years, of how, in the 1920s, after a lecture by Einstein on relativity, Pauli had had the temerity to say to the audience that what Professor Einstein said “was not so stupid.”
But Pauli had his own agenda. “Aha,” he cackled, “I just read your novel The Black Cloud. I thought it much better than your astronomical work.” Hoyle had recently proposed a theory asserting that the universe around us has always existed exactly as we see it. He called it the “steady-state theory” to distinguish it from what he dubbed the “big bang theory”—that is, that the universe came into being at a specific moment in time and evolved into what we see today. Pauli was far from impressed with Hoyle’s theory.
He told Hoyle that both he and Jung had read Hoyle’s novel carefully and that he was writing a critical essay on it. Hoyle was mystified. After all, it was only a story—about how an intelligent life-form learns to communicate with earthlings. He had never felt it merited such deep analysis.
Finally Hoyle had the chance to ask Pauli about the Einstein story. “My abiding memories of Pauli,” he wrote, “are of his helpless laughter as the youthful remark about Einstein came back to him and his rolling back and forth, a nearly perfect sphere.” But Pauli said no more, “so I never quite had it from Pauli personally that the story was true, but those who knew him well assure me it was.” Another lasting memory that Hoyle carried away from the lunch was the four