137 - Arthur I. Miller [23]
Pauli was deeply discouraged. But Sommerfeld praised his mathematical skill and thoroughness. Heisenberg considered Pauli’s result ominous. “In some way this was the first moment when really this confidence [in Bohr’s theory] was shaken,” he said.
Then Pauli received an invitation from Max Born. Born had done important work in electromagnetic theory, relativity, acoustics, crystallography, and most recently atomic physics. He was highly impressed with Pauli’s mathematical skills and invited him to spend six months at the institute. Pauli accepted.
“W. Pauli is now my assistant; he is amazingly intelligent and very able. At the same time he is very human and, for a 21-year-old, normal, gay, and childlike,” Born wrote to Einstein. By Pauli’s own account, he was actually rather miserable. Born and Pauli applied Pauli’s mathematical methods to the helium atom (He)—two electrons orbiting a nucleus. But Bohr’s theory failed here, too. It horrified Pauli that all his work seemed to result only in undermining this iconic theory. As far as he was concerned, it was he who had failed, not the theory. This failure loomed over him and grew into a general sense of gloom.
Despite Born’s presumption of his “gaiety,” he had also noted that Pauli “cannot bear life in a small city.” Nor was Pauli particularly enamored of working with Born. While Born was neat and well organized, Pauli was not. Born was an early riser, Pauli far from that, especially after late nights working. Born often had to send someone to Pauli’s apartment at 10:30 in the morning to awake him for his 11 o’clock lecture. Born recalled: “Although a place like Göttingen is accustomed to all kinds of strange people, Pauli’s neighbors were worried to watch him sitting at his desk, rocking slowly like a praying Buddha, until the small hours of the morning.”
Pauli also did not appreciate Born’s overly heavy mathematical style of physics. He felt that the time was not yet ripe for such a rigorous approach. For him adroit guesswork backed up by mathematics was the best way to proceed.
Three months after his arrival in Göttingen, Pauli was offered a position as assistant to Wilhelm Lenz, professor of physics at the newly established University of Hamburg. He immediately accepted.
When Pauli had first arrived in Göttingen, Born lamented to Einstein that, “Young Pauli is very stimulating—I shall never get another assistant as good.” In fact he did. Two years later Heisenberg appeared. Born wrote to Einstein, “He is easily as gifted as Pauli, but has a more pleasing personality. He also plays the piano very well.” The two tried again to tackle the helium atom using other mathematical approaches to solar system models and failed. “All existing He[lium]-models are false, as is the entire atomic physics,” was Heisenberg’s bleak assessment.
Pauli meets Bohr
In June 1922 Pauli returned to Göttingen to attend a Bohr-Festspiele (Bohr festival) Born had organized to launch his new Institute for Atomic Physics. Sommerfeld, too, was there along with Heisenberg.
“A new phase of my scientific life began when I met Niels Bohr personally for the first time,” Pauli later recalled. For both Pauli and Heisenberg it was hugely inspiring to meet this giant of physics.
Fifty years later Heisenberg still remembered the mesmerizing way in which Bohr presented his theory. He “chose his words much more carefully than Sommerfeld usually did. And each one of his carefully formulated