137 - Arthur I. Miller [62]
He announced his hypothesis in a letter to the audience at the radioactivity session of a physics meeting in Tübingen, Germany, in December 1930, a mere month after his divorce. Even as he pursued his scientific research he could not ignore the fact that his personal life was crumbling around him. The letter—beginning “Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen”—was to be read in his absence. Pauli had opted instead to attend Zürich’s major social event of the winter, a ball at the splendid Baur au Lac.
In 1930 it was unheard of to suggest a new particle. No one had ever before dared do so. Were the electron, proton (the nucleus of the hydrogen atom), and light quantum (a particle of light) not enough? At first the scientific community was shocked. But it did not take long before everyone acknowledged that Pauli was almost certainly right.
A few years later the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi dubbed Pauli’s new particle the neutrino. The neutrino was the centerpiece of Fermi’s 1934 theory of beta-decay. One of the implications was how weakly neutrinos interacted with matter. The neutrino was a loner, it passed through the earth as if it were not even there and could whiz through space alone, not interacting with anything for three trillion miles. Yet neutrinos also constituted an essential part of the universe, required by basic laws of nature.
Soon after Pauli’s hypothesis of the neutrino, experimental evidence on beta-decay suggested that if the neutrino existed, its mass would have to be zero. We now know it has a tiny mass—about one hundred thousand times less than that of the electron.
Finally, in 1956, twenty-six years after Pauli had suggested it, neutrinos were detected in the laboratory. The neutrino has turned out to be essential for understanding the structure of matter on the subatomic level as well as how massive stars end their lives as supernovas.
In the same period that he had to suffer the death of his mother and his own disastrous marriage and divorce, Pauli had managed to come up with a concept of enormous importance in one of those hunches that influence the whole of physics and our perception of the world. Perhaps it was his need to rescue the beauty of quantum mechanics that impelled him to take this imaginative leap. No matter what dramas occurred in his personal life, his mind was always focused on physics.
Pauli in the United States
Nevertheless, Pauli could not suppress his pain forever. He spent the following summer—1931—traveling across the United States, to Pasadena, Chicago, Ann Arbor, and New York, lecturing on his new particle. Oppenheimer and Sommerfeld were among his traveling companions. Prohibition was in force at the time, forbidding the sale of alcohol, which Pauli found exceedingly trying. Ann Arbor, however, was close to the Canadian border and there was plenty of opportunity for smuggling. He wrote to Peierls, “In spite of the opportunity for swimming here I suffer much from the great heat. But under ‘dryness’ I don’t suffer at all.”
Indeed he did not. By now he was drinking to excess. At a dinner party in Ann Arbor he fell down an entire flight of stairs. “I broke my shoulder and now must lie in bed until my bones are whole again—very tedious,” he wrote. As his shoulder was broken he could not write on the blackboard. Instead of his usual impenetrable lecture style, he was forced to face his audience, his injured arm supported by a metal rod attached to a ring around his expansive waist, while a colleague wrote up the equations. His audiences were enthralled by the brilliance and clarity of his explanations. He kept the real reason for his handicap a secret. The story that went around was that he had injured his shoulder while swimming. One participant at the physics sessions in Ann Arbor commented that he “now runs around with it stuck up in the air like a traffic cop signalling.” Sommerfeld called it an inverse Pauli effect. Later Pauli commented jokingly that it was the only