137 - Arthur I. Miller [64]
The spoof was wonderfully translated by the physicist, prankster, and frequent visitor to the institute, George Gamow, who had provided delightful cartoons of the characters, including a wickedly accurate depiction of the plump Pauli as Mephistopheles with an infuriating grin and a long tail.
The play opens with Mephistopheles leaping into the midst of a group of archangels, headed by God, all busy discussing astrophysical matters and how stars shine. “To me the theory’s full of sound and fury,” he declares. The Lord/Bohr demands,
Pauli as Mephistopheles in George Gamow’s caricature.
But must you interrupt these revels
Just to complain, you Prince of Devils?
Does Modern Physics never strike you right?
Mephistopheles replies,
No, Lord! I pity Physics only for its plight,
And in my doleful days it pains and sorely grieves me.
No wonder I complain—but who believes me?
Delbrück perfectly captured the rivalry between Bohr and Pauli, who kept each other at arm’s length. Pauli had initially proposed the neutrino specifically to counter Bohr’s suggestion that the laws of conservation of energy and momentum held only on average in the case of beta-decay.
The Lord dismisses the neutrino hypothesis in Bohr’s much-feared words, saying that it “is very in-ter-est-ing”—incorrect, in other words. Mephistopheles fires back, “What rot you talk today! Be quiet!”
Ehrenfest doubted more than Pauli’s neutrino. He also questioned the work on quantum electrodynamics in which Pauli and Heisenberg had been immersed for five years, plagued by the infinite values for the electron’s mass and charge, which they could not eliminate no matter how hard they tried. Gamow portrayed the oblong-headed Heisenberg and devilish Pauli as Siamese twins.
Mephistopheles, transformed into a bowler-hatted traveling salesman, tries to sell Faust quantum electrodynamics, the theory formulated “By Heisenberg-Pauli.” “No sale!” Faust shouts. Then Mephistopheles offers Faust “something unique”—his neutrino theory. Says Faust,
You’ll not seduce me, softly though you speak.
If ever to a theory I should say:
“You are so beautiful!” and “Stay! Oh, stay!”
Then you may chain me up and say goodbye—
Then I’ll be glad to crawl away and die.
Ehrenfest famously believed that beauty was for tailors, not scientists.
Finally Gretchen herself, the neutrino, enters singing:
My mass is zero,
My Charge is the same.
You are my hero,
Neutrino’s my name….
I am your fate,
And I’m your key.
Closed is the gate
For lack of me.
But Ehrenfest remains unconvinced.
Pauli was not present to see himself lampooned, but he later received a copy of the text complete with Gamow’s drawings of him as the mischievous troublemaker of physics. He proudly showed it to visitors. He was obviously delighted to be cast in this role.
In fact he was in Zürich, and his life was about to change.
The Dark Hunting Ground of the Mind
PAULI ALWAYS liked to be well informed and, in preparation for his first meeting with Jung, had no doubt studied several of Jung’s books which he kept in his library. Over the course of their work together he read most of the collection. He marked them in pencil: a vertical line for an important passage, two for very important, three for extremely important.
He paid particular attention to Psychological Types, the book in which Jung laid out the vocabulary and framework for his analytical psychology. In this he identified two poles of personality—extravert and introvert—and four “functions,” thinking versus feeling and intuition versus sensation. Psychological Types contains by far the most markings of any of Jung’s books in his library. No doubt Pauli was struck by the similarity between Jung’s tug-of-war between pairs of complementary functions and Bohr’s complementarity