137 - Arthur I. Miller [58]
The president of the ETH went personally to Hamburg to assess Pauli’s performance. He decided that Pauli was young enough to improve and immediately offered him a position, starting on April 1, 1928, with a contract for ten years.
Zürich
“In April 1928 I arrived in Zürich as a new professor, dressed like a tourist with a rucksack on my back.” Pauli went straight to his office in the imposing physics building at number 35 Gloriastrasse, a broad street off the main avenue, Rämistrasse, on which sits the principal building of the ETH. There he met his new colleague Paul Scherrer, who had had the office spruced up for the new professor’s first day.
At twenty-eight, Scherrer, a debonair experimental physicist, was Pauli’s exact contemporary. He had carried out important research on the x-ray analysis of crystals with Debye before joining the ETH in 1920 and, by 1927, had been promoted to head of the physics department. Besides his brilliance in research Scherrer was a charismatic lecturer. Twice a week he gave lectures to explain difficult concepts in physics to both scientists and laypeople, backed up by an array of spectacular demonstrations. The auditorium was always packed for what became known as the “Scherrer circus.” On one occasion Scherrer tried out one of his simplified explanations on Pauli, who replied in his caustic way, “Ja, simple it is all right, but also wrong.”
Pauli rented a flat on Schmelzbergstrasse, 34, a steep, narrow, tree-lined road, in a pleasant three-story house set back amidst trees, a few minutes walk from the physics department.
He immediately hired Kronig, who had been the first to realize that Pauli’s fourth quantum number was the spin of the electron, as his assistant. “Every time I say something, contradict me with detailed arguments,” Pauli told him. Next Pauli convinced his closest friend, the physicist Gregor Wentzel, to take the position vacated by Schrödinger at the University of Zürich. Like Pauli, Wentzel had been a student of Sommerfeld’s in Munich. When Pauli was a student Wentzel had been Sommerfeld’s assistant and joined in their café conversations. Two years Pauli’s senior, he had already made important contributions to the new atomic physics. He had an easy-going manner, enhanced by his ever-present cigar and readiness for a good time. In letters Pauli addressed him as “Dear Gregor” and signed himself “Wolfgang”—in those days an extraordinary degree of informality.
Pauli had barely settled into the ETH when he was back at work with Heisenberg. But as the two resumed their research on quantum electrodynamics, they encountered such difficulties that Pauli began to lose heart. He lapsed into the state of mind he had had when previous problems proved intransigent—like in 1924, when his frustration over the anomalous Zeeman effect drove him to seek solace in the bars and whorehouses of the Sankt Pauli district, and again in 1925, when the Bohr theory of the atom collapsed and he daydreamed about giving it all up and becoming a film comedian. This time he played with the idea of dropping out to write a utopian novel. In reality he just needed a rest from physics.
He wrote to Bohr that he was having trouble concentrating. He wished he could say that he had no time for research or that he was tired, he added, but neither was true. “I am only stupid and lazy. I think that somebody ought to give me a daily thrashing! But since unfortunately there is no one around to do it, I must seek other means to reinvigorate my interest in physics.” On the weekends he often went to Leipzig, where regional meetings of the German Physical Society were held. Heisenberg, too, was there and he and Pauli had endless discussions about issues holding up their progress in quantum electrodynamics.
One problem was that Pauli was distracted by the entertainment Zürich offered. He also had just the right mix of colleagues to share it with—Kronig and Scherrer. On warm Sundays the three friends swam at the Strandbad, a beach on Lake Zürich, a ten-minute drive from the city.