137 - Arthur I. Miller [31]
Ten days later Pauli wrote to Bohr again, offering his own deeply critical assessment of the situation: “The atomic physicists in Germany can now be divided into two classes. Some work out a given problem first with half quantum numbers, and if it doesn’t agree with experiment, they do it again with integral ones. The others calculate first with integral values, and if it doesn’t work, do it again with halves.” In other words, they had all been reduced to desperate measures.
As far as he was concerned the problem of the anomalous Zeeman effect was far from solved. He was becoming convinced that “there is no [satisfactory] model for the anomalous Zeeman effect and that we have to create something fundamentally new.”
But he had no idea what this might be. The whole farrago was getting him down. “I myself have no taste at all for this sort of theoretical physics,” he wrote to Bohr, and wanted to withdraw from it. Atomic physics had all become “too difficult.”
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Physics was Pauli’s heart and soul. His physics research gave definition to his life and his fruitless attempts to solve the anomalous Zeeman effect, on top of what he regarded as his lack of success with the hydrogen-molecule ion and helium atom, began to take a heavy toll on his already fragile psyche. His early successes—his maiden papers on relativity theory—suddenly seemed in the distant past. He began drinking more and more heavily. “I have noticed that wine agrees very well with me,” he wrote to a friend. “After the second bottle of wine or champagne I usually adopt the manners of a good companion (which I never have in the sober state) and then may under these circumstances enormously impress the surroundings, particularly if they are women.”
By day he behaved like a staid Germanic professor. By night he roamed the Sankt Pauli, Hamburg’s notorious red-light district full of risqué cabarets and bars catering largely to a rough clientele. He described his life to a friend: “During the day, calming work, in the night, sexual excitement in the underworld—without feeling, without love, indeed without humanity.” Much later, writing to Jung, he recalled “the complete split between my day life and my night life in my relations with women.” He seemed to have split into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson’s celebrated novel had been published some forty years earlier. No doubt Pauli had read the story of the scientist who is taken over and destroyed by his darker impulses. Perhaps he saw a parallel between Dr. Jekyll and his own increasingly erratic behavior.
Hamburg was a vibrant city that welcomed all comers and in which one could savor the steamy side of postwar Germany. Munich banned the American cabaret performer Josephine Baker, who was famous for her nude dancing; Hamburg welcomed her with open arms.
The real action was on the side streets off the main Sankt Pauli avenue, particularly on a street called Grosse Freiheit. Even during the day it was difficult to see inside the bars there. The odor of spilled beer and the sticky unmopped floors made the interiors stifling. When Pauli walked in in his fine suit and went to the bar, no doubt in the early days at least conversation would grind to a halt and everyone would stare until he had finished his drink and left. But he soon became a regular. To make things worse, the more he drank, the more obnoxious he became.
Often he ended up getting beaten in a brawl. Once he was eating in one of his favorite restaurants in the area. A row broke out and Pauli found himself right in the middle of it. He only pulled himself together when someone threatened to throw him out of a second-floor window. Afterward, he said, he could not understand how he had gotten into such a situation.
He began to feel as if he were losing control. He was frightened of the person he was becoming. “[I] tended toward being a criminal, a thug (which could have degenerated into my becoming a murderer),” he later recalled. By day, immersed in his research, he felt “detached