137 - Arthur I. Miller [19]
Despite the upheavals in Munich, in October 1918 Schwabing was an island of calm. Café society was still bustling. Young Pauli, newly released from home, found it irresistibly attractive. He came to drink, to meet men and women, and perhaps to think about physics, while sitting at a table with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. He had found the rhythm of his life.
Pauli spent longer and longer in Schwabing, though he was always careful to stay sober enough to be able to spend the small hours of the night working. It soon became impossible for him to make it to Sommerfeld’s morning lecture, which began at 9.00 a.m. Instead Pauli took to dropping in at noon to check the blackboard to see what the topic had been so he could work it out for himself.
Sommerfeld reprimanded him. “In order for you to become a genius I have to educate you,” he told him. “You have to come at eight o’clock in the morning.” Unusually in the stiff world of the German Herr Professor Doktor, he was prepared to tolerate erratic behavior if the student was undoubtedly brilliant. Touched that Sommerfeld took such personal interest in his well-being, Pauli began to turn up at 8.00 a.m., at least for a while.
Pauli was particularly gripped by Sommerfeld’s course on cutting-edge atomic physics, which focused on problems that the master himself was still struggling with. Fortunately for Pauli, the seminar took place once a week for two hours—in the evening.
After class a group of students often went to the café Annast, now part of the Hofgarten-Café, in the southernmost part of Ludwigstrasse, a short walk from the university’s main entrance. For scientists the attraction of the Annast was its marble-topped tables, which provided excellent surfaces for scribbling equations during animated conversations. According to one story, Sommerfeld was once stuck on a particular equation. When he left the café he forgot to erase his attempts to solve it. The next evening he returned and found that another customer had solved it for him.
War zone in Munich
A short three months after Pauli arrived in Munich, this idyllic world of pondering the universe came to an abrupt end. Suddenly Munich was in the grip of anarchy. The moderate Soviet Republic formed just a few months earlier had lost the support of the populace. It was not surprising. Every day Pauli would have seen people standing hungry in the streets, lining up for food in the snows of one of the worst winters on record. A host of political factions sprang up and with great speed coalesced into two groups: a moderate to extreme right-wing group and a left-wing communist one. Both sides had no trouble recruiting an army. Central Europe was swarming with thousands of armed, disgruntled, and starving soldiers looking for a fight. The situation was ominous. News traveled fast around Munich that there had been a gun fight in the Bavarian diet, and that two representatives had been killed.
For sizable periods of time the university was shut down. Cafés became classrooms for Pauli and his fellow students and teachers. They also offered front-row seats for the street fighting carried on by uniformed soldiers as well as local citizens. Sometimes it was difficult to tell one side from another. By April there was a second Soviet Republic.
But this second Soviet regime also failed to contend with the food and fuel crisis and in April 1919 total chaos descended on Munich. Having suppressed