137 - Arthur I. Miller [63]
Instead of returning to Zürich immediately, Pauli spent part of September in a small hotel in Manhattan. Much of the time he kept to himself, except for the occasional meeting with “second-order acquaintances”—friends of friends. (A second-order approximation to solving a problem is less exact than one of first order.) He frequented second-order bars—small speakeasies and out-of-the-way bars rather than the elegant ones that Scherrer had recommended.
Pauli enjoyed America, its people and food—excellent but for the Athenaeum Club at the California Institute of Technology, where he pronounced the food schlecht (wretched). He was less enthralled by its puritanical side; at one dinner there “was a prayer instead of coffee and cigars—not to speak at all of alcohol.” But on the whole he liked it “better than Europe which seems to me now often tiny and clumsy…. It is all very simple and very neat here,” he wrote to Wentzel.
That evening, he continued, he was looking forward to going to “a very good bar and drinking many whiskies.” For, despite his efforts to conceal it, he was falling deeper and deeper into depression. “With women and me things don’t work out at all, and probably never will succeed again,” he confessed to Wentzel. “This, I am afraid, I have to live with, but it is not always easy. I am somewhat afraid that in getting older I will feel increasingly lonely. The eternal soliloquy is so tiresome.” Alone in his hotel room he signed his letter, “Your old Pauli.”
Back in Zürich, he went on a binge of drinking and parties and resumed his life of barroom brawls, smoking, and womanizing. Eventually his bitter quarrels with his colleagues at the ETH came to the attention of the administration, who had to call him in and warn him that his position might be in jeopardy despite his brilliant work.
In front of his colleagues he spoke of his divorce from Käthe in witty, sardonic terms, but his behavior reflected his true desperation. Once again he was living a Jekyll and Hyde existence between two different worlds. To add to all this, his always vivid and dramatic dreams were beginning to seep into his waking life. By the beginning of 1932 he had plummeted to a frightening low point. Despite his hatred of his father, Pauli finally decided to heed his advice: to consult the celebrated psychoanalyst Carl Jung.
The Mephistopheles of Copenhagen
That year, Pauli’s neutrino hypothesis was the central topic at the annual Easter conference held at Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen. It was also the theme of the spoof that customarily concluded the conference, written that year by Max Delbrück, a twenty-five-year-old physicist who had studied with Born.
He and Pauli were close friends; Pauli addressed him in letters as “Max” and signed them “Wolfgang.” Pauli characterized their friendship as a mutual attraction between “two problematic temperaments.”
Years later, Pauli reminded Delbrück that “for me personally the history of the neutrino is inseparably connected with your—very unsuccessful—flirtation with Eve Curie at the party [at the Nuclear Physics Meeting in Rome, in 1931]. She had a sincere veneration of her old mother, whom she had accompanied to the Rome meeting, but otherwise this icy woman had nothing on her mind other than publicity, newspapers with her name in, etc. Why should she have any interest in you, if there was no chance for her to increase her publicity with your help?”
Delbrück entitled his spoof “Faust in Copenhagen,” and modeled it on Goethe’s Faust, with the luminaries of physics as its characters: God stood for Bohr, and Faust for Ehrenfest (who had said to Pauli, “I like your publications better than I like you”). Mephistopheles stood for the sharp-tongued Pauli, who was also the progenitor of the neutrino (Gretchen). In the spoof, Felix Bloch played God (Bohr) and Léon Rosenfeld, Bohr’s assistant at the time, played Mephistopheles (Pauli).
Mephistopheles/Pauli the troublemaker tries to tempt Faust/Ehrenfest by offering him the seductive