137 - Arthur I. Miller [56]
The “connection between spin and statistics is one of the most important applications of special relativity theory,” he wrote. He had been trying for a long time to find a connection between spin, statistics, and relativity and at last he had done it. Compact yet rigorous in its mathematical presentation, the paper he wrote on the subject was Pauli at his best. Many physicists regard it as his most brilliant.
Finally, some sixteen years after Pauli had first come up with the exclusion principle and with the concept of spin—and had first realized that there were four, not three quantum numbers—he had managed to discover some of the key implications of his first great discovery. From the start everyone had realized that the exclusion principle explained the periodic table of elements. Now it was known that it could be used as a tool to explore the behavior of every particle with half a unit of spin and that it had no connection with any other sort of particle.
Mephistopheles
God’s whip
PAULI never failed to give full rein to his sardonic humor and caustic wit. He ruthlessly criticized people who he thought did not think clearly. In 1926 he was at a lecture given by the Dutch physicist Paul Ehrenfest. Ehrenfest, a senior figure whose circle included Einstein and Bohr, was famous for his profound understanding of physics and his excellence at explaining difficult concepts. A charismatic teacher, he had motivated a succession of brilliant young students, but he seemed never to make great discoveries to match those of his famous colleagues, and the comparison tortured him. To him Pauli was one of those young “smart alecks…. Always so clever they were! And nobody understood anything.”
After his lecture Pauli offered a string of critical comments. Finally Ehrenfest retorted, “I like your publications better than I like you.” “Strange. My feeling about you is just the opposite,” Pauli countered. The two later became good friends and Ehrenfest came to admire Pauli’s critical acumen. “There is in rebus physicus only ONE God’s whip (Thank God!!!),” Ehrenfest wrote to Pauli a couple of years later. Pauli was delighted with the title Ehrenfest had bestowed on him and there after often signed himself “God’s whip.”
Other acid quips have since become part of Pauli’s lore. When students or colleagues tried out a new theory on him, he would sometimes shout, “Why, that’s not even wrong,” meaning that it was so far from correct it wasn’t even possible to judge it by the normal standards of right and wrong. Other favorite one-liners of his included, “You’re no more interesting drunk than sober,” and “So young and already so unknown.” Colleagues remember that Pauli liked to dream up a cutting remark, keep it in mind, and then, at the appropriate time, use it.
Pauli even criticized Bohr, who sometimes took offense. To Einstein, “I will not provoke you to contradict me, in order not to delay the natural death of [your present] theory,” he wrote, about one of Einstein’s attempts at a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. Einstein, conversely, was quick to compliment the younger man on pointing out an error in another attempt at a unified theory. “So you were right, you rascal.”
The one person Pauli never criticized was his mentor Sommerfeld. Pauli once wrote of the “awe you instilled in me…not even accorded Bohr.” In his presence Pauli was a completely different person. Whenever Sommerfeld visited the Swiss Polytechnic Institute, later referred to as the ETH, in Zürich, where Pauli was working, Weisskopf