137 - Arthur I. Miller [134]
The Pauli effect strikes again
That same year the physicist Engelbert Schucking visited Pauli in Zürich. Along with Pauli’s assistant Charles Enz and another colleague they took a tram from the ETH to Bellevue Square, where they planned to have a “wet after-session,” with plenty of drinking. Bellevue Square is a bustling intersection where several tram tracks cross each other in a seemingly random way. Just as they reached the square, two street cars collided right in front of them with an enormous bang. Schucking was standing with Pauli next to the driver of the street car. “Pauli’s face was flushed as he excitedly turned to me and exclaimed, ‘Pauli effect!’” Schucking recalled.
Enz told Schucking about a lecture Pauli had given to an audience of high-level government officials on an occasion honoring Einstein, the ETH’s most famous graduate. “Pauli read from his manuscript. Whenever he found an error in his text, he stopped in mid-sentence, drew out his fountain pen, corrected the text and went on, oblivious of the squirming audience.” It was a teaching style he had maintained throughout his career.
That November Pauli was in Hamburg. Schucking took a walk with him. As they walked along the Gojenbergsweg in the Bergdorf district, looking out over the marshland of the river Elbe, Pauli said several times how glad he was to have withdrawn his name from the paper with Heisenberg.
On Friday, December 5, 1958, as he was teaching his afternoon class, Pauli suddenly began to suffer excruciating stomach pains. Up until then he had been fine. The next day he was rushed to the Red Cross Hospital in Zürich. Charles Enz visited him the day after. Pauli was visibly agitated. Had Enz noticed the number of the room, he asked him?
“No,” replied Enz.
“It’s 137!” Pauli groaned. “I’m never getting out of here alive.”
When the doctors operated, they found a massive pancreatic carcinoma. Pauli died in Room 137 on December 15. His last request had been to speak to Carl Jung.
PAULI was cremated on December 20 and later that afternoon an official funeral ceremony was held at the Fraumünster Church in Zürich, which dates back to the Carolingian period. The ceremony was non-religious. Niels Bohr, Markus Fierz, the party-giver Adolf Guggenbühl, Pauli’s treacherous colleague Paul Scherrer, and his one-time assistant Victor Weisskopf all gave addresses. Franca arranged the funeral. Only physicists spoke. Among the many who attended were Pauli’s confidant Paul Rosbaud. Jung, now eighty-two, was relegated to a place at the back. Despite his long association and close friendship with Pauli, he was not invited to speak.
One notable absentee was Heisenberg. The ETH had sent Heisenberg’s invitation on the sixteenth, giving him plenty of time to travel from his home in Munich to Zürich to pay his last respects to the man who had been his lifelong friend and colleague and had sparked his greatest discoveries. Heisenberg did not even bother to write a letter of condolence to Franca but left it to his wife. He was, she wrote, reading Pauli’s philosophical writings, but due to the Christmas season they were too busy to attend.
It is extraordinary that Heisenberg would spurn his old friend in this way. Despite their recent falling out, one would have assumed that he would have put all that behind him and attended. The only possible explanation is to be found in Heisenberg’s autobiography, written over a decade after Pauli demolished the theory he was so proud of. “Wolfgang’s attitude to me was almost hostile,” he wrote of that episode. “He criticized many details of my analysis, some, I thought quite unreasonably.” Presumably Heisenberg never forgot what had happened. The intensity with which these men treated their passion—physics—went far beyond the grave.
Hertha also did not attend her brother’s funeral. Perhaps travel was difficult financially for her; perhaps she wanted to remember Wolfgang the way he was; or perhaps she felt uneasy around Franca. Hertha had married E. B. Ashton, an immigrant from Munich,