137 - Arthur I. Miller [32]
The women Pauli found in the bars there offered a way to forget his growing frustration and anger. Typical of his Sankt Pauli girlfriends was a beautiful blond woman some two years younger than he. They had a short and passionate affair that Pauli broke off when he discovered she was a morphine addict. Then one day she turned up at his office at the university. Somehow she had found him, despite his secrecy and desperate attempts to keep his night and day lives separate. Pauli was horrified. Poor, sick, and stick thin from her continuing morphine abuse, she stood like a specter, begging him for help. Pauli threw her out, and told her never to come back—and she disappeared back into the Sankt Pauli. He forgot about her, hoping she was gone forever. Little did he guess that in later years she would come back to haunt him.
Pauli always kept his visits to the Sankt Pauli secret, even from his closest friends and colleagues. These included the always upbeat Otto Stern, Emil Artin, Walter Baade, and Gregor Wentzel. Wilhelm Lenz, director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, joined them from time to time, particularly for departmental lunches, which were always held in top restaurants scouted out by Stern. Like Pauli they were all bachelors.
Lenz was a man of some means who lived in a fashionable area of Hamburg at 18 Armgartstrasse, on a beautiful canal with grassy banks and the city’s largest lake, the Aussenalster, glittering in the distance. When Pauli first arrived Lenz offered him a room in his house. Pauli later moved around the corner to 16 Papenhude, where he had an apartment on the second floor. Miraculously the area escaped damage in World War II and remains today much as it was then. Lenz was noted for his reserve.
Otto Stern, an unusually gifted experimental physicist, was another recent addition to Hamburg. Like Lenz, Stern was a rather wealthy man. But unlike Lenz he was outgoing—a bon vivant who sometimes flew to Vienna just for lunch. Artin was a mathematician who specialized in number theory, Baade an astronomer, and Wentzel a physicist. These last three were Pauli’s exact contemporaries.
Wentzel was Pauli’s closest friend. Not only did their research interests overlap but so did their idea of a good time. Wentzel frequently went to Paris on the slightest pretext. On one occasion he sent Pauli two of his papers to comment on and signed the letter giving his address simply as “Paris.” Pauli swiftly replied, “The question is this, whether indicating Paris at the end of your work suffices at least to justify all this psychologically and whether in the corrections you should not change it more specifically into Paris, Moulin-Rouge, or something analogous.”
Pauli enjoyed visiting Baade and the astronomers at their observatory in Bergedorf. On full-moon nights it was impossible to observe the stars and they would have a party instead. On one occasion Pauli was present at the observatory when it was discovered that a terrible accident had befallen the great refractor telescope. It was almost destroyed. Naturally everyone chalked it up to the Pauli effect.
Cases of the dreaded Pauli effect were beginning to pile up. Physicists at the university became convinced that Pauli’s presence in or even near a laboratory led to severe breakdowns in the equipment. Stern was reduced to desperate measures. He recalled that the only way he could protect his laboratory from the Pauli effect was that Pauli “was not allowed to enter.” The Hamburg scientists were surprisingly superstitious. One brought a flower and gave it to his apparatus every day. Stern kept a hammer lying next to his as a veiled threat to it not to break down. Pauli himself fervently believed in the Pauli effect and began to wonder whether he emanated powers.
Pauli’s exclusion principle: Four quantum numbers instead of three
Pauli had given up trying to solve the anomalous Zeeman effect,