137 - Arthur I. Miller [59]
In the evenings, after work, they walked down Rämistrasse to Bellevue Square, at the intersection of the Limmatquai, which runs alongside the river Limmat, and the Utoquai, to their favorite restaurants. The most elegant was the Kronenhalle, usually reserved for after-concert dinners. The dining room still retains its old-world flavor with its high ceiling, tables covered with white tablecloths, and waiters gliding around in black trousers, white shirts, black ties, and long white aprons tied at the back. Across the street and around the corner on Limmatquai is the Café Odéon. A masterpiece of art deco design, it was the meeting place for artists, poets, and intellectuals of every persuasion, even the occasional anarchist such as Lenin, who brooded and plotted there until the Allies returned him to Russia in a sealed train in 1917, as if he were a plague bacillus.
Across the Limmatquai is the Café Terrasse where the physics department took its colloquium speakers for dinner. It had a more intellectual atmosphere than the Kronenhalle and the discussion often continued there. In those days the now-enclosed dining room was an outdoor garden. Another spot Pauli and his friends frequented with some regularity was the Bauschänzl beer garden, just across the river Limmat from the Café Terrasse, today a rather garish and pricey restaurant. Other bars and cafés where they spent time, such as the Café Voltaire, the headquarters for dadaism, are gone.
One warm summer’s night after a day of swimming in the lake, ice cream at Sprüngli’s, and dinner at Café Terrasse, the three friends sat in the Café Odéon, penning a postcard to Pauli’s friend and successor in Hamburg, Pascual Jordan, who had worked with Heisenberg to crack the puzzle of the anomalous Zeeman effect. In the three years between his appointment as Born’s assistant at Göttingen in 1924 and his arrival at Hamburg, Jordan had carried out ground-breaking work on the new quantum mechanics. Pauli addressed his postcard to “PQ–QP Jordan,” a joking reference to an important equation Jordan had helped establish. “We are about to study the Zürich night life and try to improve it following the new method due to Pauli: by comparison,” the three wrote exuberantly. “Many Greetings, Kronig,” wrote Kronig. “This method, however, may also be used to worsen matters!—Greetings, Pauli,” added Pauli. “I, too, have heard so many bad things about you that I would like to meet you. Scherrer.”
Shortly afterward Kronig left for a position at Utrecht in the Netherlands and was replaced by Felix Bloch who had been Heisenberg’s first PhD student. Tall, handsome, and urbane, Bloch fit in well with the crowd. Other soon-to-be-famous young physicists passed through the ETH, among them Rudolf Peierls, a student of Sommerfeld’s and Heisenberg’s, who succeeded Bloch as Pauli’s assistant. A young man with immaculately parted hair and round-rimmed glasses, he had to suffer the sting of Pauli’s famous biting remarks. One was particularly memorable: “[Peierls] talks so fast that by the time you understand what he is saying, he is already asserting the opposite.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer worked with Pauli during the first half of 1929. Pauli wrote of Oppenheimer that he treated “physics as an avocation and psychoanalysis as a vocation.” Perhaps Pauli sensed in Oppenheimer’s complex and tortured personality a reflection of himself.
Motivated by his new colleagues, brilliant assistants, and a coterie of exceptional postdoctoral students, Pauli re-entered the stalled collaboration with Heisenberg. By September 1929 they had completed their opus, which they published in two parts. Its eighty-four pages firmly established quantum electrodynamics as a field of research and combined Heisenberg’s intuitive approach and Pauli’s penchant for rigorous calculations to