137 - Arthur I. Miller [18]
Sommerfeld was impressed with Pauli’s youthful paper on general relativity, which by now had been accepted for publication. It established Pauli as an expert in the field. He gave lectures on it at Sommerfeld’s institute and the paper had even come to Einstein’s attention. Pauli quickly wrote two more papers on relativity based on Weyl’s research. Weyl now went so far as to speak of him as a colleague. “I find it impossible to understand how you, being so young, managed to acquire the means of knowing and freedom of thought [necessary to understand relativity theory in its entirety],” he wrote to the young man.
At the time Sommerfeld was writing an article on relativity theory for the Encyclopaedia of the Mathematical Sciences, of which he was editor. Pauli attended a series of lectures he gave on the subject and offered some critical comments that intrigued Sommerfeld. So Sommerfeld asked him to co-author the article. In the end Sommerfeld became so heavily involved in his work on atomic physics that he turned the entire project over to Pauli.
The article was published in 1921 and was a tour de force. It was also published in book form and continues to this day to be an invaluable description of relativity theory. Einstein himself was impressed. “No one studying this mature, grandly conceived work would believe that the author is a man of twenty-one. One wonders what to admire most, the psychological understanding for the development of ideas, the sureness of mathematical deduction, the profound physical insight, the complete treatment of subject matters [or] the sureness of critical appraisal,” he wrote in a review. Not long afterward, the precocious Pauli was addressing letters to giants such as the British scientist Arthur Eddington. Eddington was exploring a part of the mathematics of the general theory of relativity that needed some firming up: how to connect points on the curved surface of its four-dimensional geometry. Pauli informed him that his results were at “the moment meaningless for physics.”
Around this time Einstein was to give an important lecture on relativity theory at the University of Berlin. Professors sat in the front row with lecturers and assistants behind them and the students at the back. Pauli, who was certainly not a professor and most probably still a student, chose to sit right in the middle of the front row dressed, according to one version of the story, in Tyrolean leather shorts. At the end of the lecture there was a hushed silence as the bearded professors in their starched white shirts and black ties decided who should ask the first question and what the order of precedence should be. Pauli sprang up, turned to face the audience, and announced with breathtaking chutzpah, “What Professor Einstein has just said is not really as stupid as it may have sounded.”
Generally Pauli preferred to study on his own and attended classes only when necessary. One was the laboratory course that he was forced to attend with a friend whom he referred to as his “laboratory fellow sufferer.” But he took an active role in the institute and was always on hand to discuss new developments in physics—in the afternoons, that is, for by now he had discovered the nightlife of Munich.
In the evenings, instead of turning left on Theresienstrasse to go to the university, Pauli would turn right. The road took him to the bohemian Schwabing district teeming with cafés, bars, beer gardens, and a huge number of cheap apartments. It was like a fusion of the Latin Quarter in Paris, where debates over the latest trends in art, music, and politics took place, with Montmartre, populated by the creators of these movements who generally lived in squalid conditions. Like the avant-garde scene in Paris there were publishing houses turning out new-wave literary magazines and satiric journals. It was the locus of radical experiments in art, politics, and sex. In Schwabing, anything went.
The area assimilated a spectrum of people. Before