137 - Arthur I. Miller [87]
Pauli wins the Nobel Prize
For Pauli 1945 was a momentous year. At the suggestion of Einstein and the mathematician Hermann Weyl, he was offered a permanent position at the Institute for Advanced Study and also at Columbia University. Then came the greatest honor of all: He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the exclusion principle.
During a dinner in Princeton in his honor, Einstein gave an impromptu address in which he spoke of Pauli as his successor. Pauli was visibly moved. Panofsky also spoke highly of his friend’s knowledge of Kepler and his period.
He recalled their first meeting, in 1928 or 1929, in Hamburg, where they had been introduced by a mutual friend over lunch at an outdoor restaurant. For Panofsky it was an unforgettable occasion on many levels, one being that it provided him with a personal experience of the famous Pauli effect. After the meal, when the three stood up, Panofsky and the friend discovered that the two of them—but not Pauli—had been sitting in whipped cream for the whole three hours. He added two more stories of the Pauli effect. On one occasion “two dignified-looking ladies simultaneously and symmetrically collapsed with their chairs on either side of Pauli” as he took his seat in a lecture hall. On another, Pauli was on a train when, unknown to him, the rear cars decoupled and were left behind while he proceeded to his destination in one of the front cars.
The Pauli effect was surely, Panofsky concluded, based on the Pauli exclusion principle in that whenever Pauli appeared, catastrophes occurred to animate and inanimate objects in his vicinity—but always “excluding Pauli himself.”
In photographs Pauli is smiling and relaxed. His great discovery had finally been recognized.
In January 1946 Pauli was granted U.S. citizenship. With job offers at Columbia and the Institute for Advanced Study he could easily have stayed in the United States forever—as many scientists, such as Einstein, chose to do. But in fact he decided to return to Zürich and the ETH. It was not so much that he pined for Switzerland: “For me, of course, it is not possible to consider myself as belonging to a single country (that would contradict the whole course of my life). I feel, however, that I am European,” he wrote to Casimir. He went on, “I know how bad the material situation in Europe is, and it is true that the material side of life is very well and undisturbed here. I cannot say the same about the spiritual situation.”
He was more explicit about what he meant by the “spiritual situation” in a letter to his old friend from his earliest visits at Bohr’s Institute in Copenhagen, Oskar Klein, “I am a bit concerned (though not surprised) on this new instrument of murder, the ‘atomic bomb’. Although your first hope, that it will shorten the Japanese war, has been fulfilled, I am very skeptical about your other hope, that it will never more be used in any war! I feel that our profession will be discredited among decent feeling persons if the production of this new instrument of murder will not soon be brought under international control.”
Pauli never regretted not having taken part in the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. As he saw it, science in the United States was becoming nothing more than an arm of the military: “As in Austria during the First World War, in this year in the U.S.A. I suddenly had the feeling that I was placed in a ‘criminal’ atmosphere—and this at the time when those ‘A-bombs’ were dropped,” he wrote scathingly. It has even been said that he once referred to the American scientists who worked on the bomb as “gangsters.” So clearly he didn’t feel at home in the United States.
Friends say, however, that he simply missed his home in Zollikon, outside Zürich.
Thus it was that Pauli returned to Zürich and the ETH in July 1946. Meeting him again after six years, President Rohn found him totally different from the