137 - Arthur I. Miller [57]
At base, Pauli’s razor-edged criticism arose from his dislike of shoddy thinking. As a child he had been raised in a house in which everything from science to politics was pulled apart and criticized. “Obedience to authority was not sung to me in the cradle,” he once wrote. But he simply said what was on his mind. He did not mean his criticisms to be taken personally and he was hardest of all on himself. In a letter to Pauli asking his advice, Heisenberg referred to him as the “master of criticism,” and later recalled that “I have never published a work without having Pauli read it first.” He was often called the “conscience of physics.”
Fresh start
In professional terms, 1927 was a year of immense achievement for Pauli. He had been instrumental in helping Bohr and Heisenberg straighten out quantum theory and was engaged in working with Heisenberg in developing the field that Paul Dirac had initiated, quantum electrodynamics. Then came a shock.
Pauli’s father had always been a womanizer. It was a situation that his mother, the brilliant intellectual journalist, Bertha, had had no choice but to resign herself to. Late that autumn, Wolfgang Sr. finally left her. He had fallen in love with a woman Pauli’s age, a sculptor named Maria Rottler whom Pauli referred to caustically as his “wicked stepmother.” No doubt the younger woman with her artistic ambitions offered Pauli’s father a new lease on life, but to Pauli the desertion of his mother was an unforgivable act of treachery and betrayal.
It was more than Pauli’s poor mother could bear. Not long after her husband left, on November 15, 1927, she took poison and died. Clearly for Pauli it was an unbearable trauma. He closed up and said not a word about it to his friends or colleagues. The extent to which it affected his mental well-being only became clear much later, when he began analysis with Jung.
The same month that Pauli received news of his mother’s death, he also received another, more welcome, communication: the offer of a position at the prestigious ETH. The new job would mean leaving Hamburg for Zürich.
It happened that both the ETH and the University of Zürich were about to lose their most formidable theoretical physicists. Peter Debye, at the ETH, had accepted a position at the University of Leipzig while Schrödinger, at the university, had agreed to succeed Max Planck at the University of Berlin. Debye had been a student of Sommerfeld’s. His main interest was investigating the structure of molecules by studying how they behaved when struck by x-rays, work that was later to earn him a Nobel Prize. The ETH decided to offer the vacant post to one of the two rising stars of theoretical physics—Pauli and Heisenberg. First Heisenberg was offered a position at the ETH, one of several offers he had that year. In the end, however, Debye lured him to Leipzig where he became a professor.
Next the ETH turned to Pauli. The eccentricities of his teaching style were well known. Valentine Telegdi remembered them as “pedagogically maladroit, but full of gems of wisdom which one had to find (and polish) oneself.” Only the most brilliant students could understand anything—though for them it was a lesson not only in physics, but also in how to think critically about the subject. As Markus Fierz, later Pauli’s assistant and then close friend, described it:
His presentation was more like a soliloquy than a lecture. He spoke with an unclear twangy voice, and he wrote with small untidy letters on the blackboard. Sometimes he would lose the thread or, doubting the correctness of a derivation or a statement, shake his head or gaze noddingly into the air. He then continued, mumbling unintelligible words or saying “yes, yes, yes,” though nobody knew what had disturbed him in the first place. This seemed to me extremely mysterious, and it contributed to intensifying the demonic aura