137 - Arthur I. Miller [14]
He was also famous for the excesses of his private life. While other physicists focused exclusively on their research, he’d spend his nights out on the town, hanging out in bars and cafés, getting drunk, carousing with singers and cabaret dancers, and getting into fights. He was never up before midday.
He didn’t look like a man who enjoyed the dark byways of life. In fact he always seemed rather staid. He was short and plump with a round, inscrutable face that colleagues said reminded them of a Buddha, and he had a famously sardonic sense of humor. But everyone agreed he was a wild character—though few people ever guessed that his life would fall so out of control that he would end up going into analysis with Carl Jung. Nor would anyone ever have imagined the effect this would have on his life and thinking.
Boyhood
Wolfgang Ernst Friedrich Pauli was born on April 25, 1900, in Vienna into a prestigious scientific family. His father, Wolfgang Josef Pauli, was a chemist at the University of Vienna and had an international reputation. Pauli’s godfather, from whom he took his middle name, was Ernst Mach, the famous physicist and philosopher.
On the occasion of Wolfgang’s baptism, Mach presented him with a goblet that he was to keep for the rest of his life. Many years later he wrote of the powerful influence that Mach exerted on him:
Among my books sits a somewhat dusty case containing an art nouveau silver goblet in which lies a card. Now there appears to me to rise from this goblet a serene, benevolent, and cheerful spirit [Mach] from the bearded age….
It so happened that my father, then intellectually completely under Mach’s influence, was very friendly with his family. Mach had affably expressed his willingness to play the role of my godfather. He was, no doubt, a stronger personality than was the Catholic priest. The result seems to be that, in this way, I was baptized as “Antimetaphysical” instead of Roman Catholic. In any case, the card rests in the goblet and, despite my greater spiritual transformations in later years, I still label myself as being of “Antimetaphysical ancestry.”
It is actually rather extraordinary that Pauli had a Catholic baptism, for his father came from a strongly Jewish family.
Pauli’s grandfather, Jacob Pascheles, had been a leading member of the Jewish community in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His house was a meeting place for a religious group who called themselves the Paulas. In his synagogue, he presided over many bar mitzvahs, including Franz Kafka’s. Pauli’s father studied medicine at Charles University in Prague and joined the staff of the University of Vienna at twenty-three, in 1892. He went on to establish himself as a renowned expert in the chemistry of proteins. Six years later the government granted him permission to change the family name to Pauli and a year after that he converted to Catholicism. This was not unusual for a Jewish-born academic; in the anti-Semitic environment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire it increased his chances of academic advancement considerably.
Soon after converting he married Bertha Camilla Schütz, who was also Catholic, though in fact her mother’s father was Jewish. She was highly intellectual. In the Vienna of the time, most women did not even attend high school. But Bertha was a correspondent for the influential liberal newspaper Neue Freie Presse for which she wrote theater reviews and historical essays.
Wolfgang was born a year after his parents’ marriage. His family called him “Wolfi.” His grandparents and aunts doted on him. He exhibited his love of precision from an early age. Once he was on a walk with his aunt, Erna. “See Wolfi,” she said, “we are on a bridge crossing the Danube Canal.” Four-year-old Wolfi set her straight: “No, Aunt Erna, this is the Vienna Canal which flows into the Danube Canal.”
Wolfi was seven