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out his own experiments with electron beams as Davisson and Germer were busy conducting theirs. He too had attended the BAAS conference in Oxford where de Broglie's work had been widely discussed. Thomson, who had a very personal interest in the nature of the electron, immediately began experiments to detect electron diffraction. But instead of crystals, he used specially prepared thin films that gave a diffraction pattern whose features were exactly as de Broglie predicted. Sometimes matter behaves like a wave, smeared over an extended region of space, and at others like a particle, located at a single position in space.

In a remarkable twist of fate, the dual nature of matter was embodied in the Thomson family. George Thomson was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1937, together with Davisson, for discovering that the electron was a wave. His father, Sir J.J. Thomson, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1906 for discovering that the electron was a particle.

Over a quarter of a century, the developments in quantum physics – from Planck's blackbody radiation law to Einstein's quantum of light, from Bohr's quantum atom to de Broglie's wave-particle duality of matter – were the product of an unhappy marriage of quantum concepts and classical physics. It was a union that by 1925 was increasingly under strain. 'The more successes the quantum theory enjoys, the more stupid it looks', Einstein had written as early as May 1912.22 What was needed was a new theory, a new mechanics of the quantum world.

'The discovery of quantum mechanics in the mid-1920s,' said the American Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, 'was the most profound revolution in physical theory since the birth of modern physics in the seventeenth century.'23 Given the pivotal role of young physicists in making the revolution that shaped the modern world, these were the years of knabenphysik – 'boy physics'.

PART II

BOY PHYSICS

'Physics at the moment is again very muddled; in any case, for me it is too complicated, and I wish I were a film comedian or something of that sort and had never heard anything about physics.'

—WOLFGANG PAULI

'The more I think about the physical portion of the Schrödinger theory, the more repulsive I find it. What Schrödinger writes about the visualizability of his theory "is probably not quite right", in other words it's crap.'

—WERNER HEISENBERG

'If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay, I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.'

—ERWIN SCHRÖDIGNER

Chapter 7

SPIN DOCTORS

'One wonders what to admire most, the psychological understanding for the development of ideas, the sureness of mathematical deduction, the profound physical insight, the capacity for lucid, systematic presentation, the knowledge of the literature, the complete treatment of the subject matter, or the sureness of critical appraisal.'1 Einstein was certainly impressed by the 'mature, grandly conceived work' he had just reviewed. It was difficult for him to believe that the 237-page article, with 394 footnotes, on relativity was the work of a 21-year-old physicist who had been a student, and just nineteen, when asked to write it. Wolfgang Pauli, later nicknamed 'The Wrath of God', was acerbic and regarded as 'a genius comparable only with Einstein'.2 'Indeed from the point of view of pure science,' said Max Born, his one-time boss, 'he was possibly even greater than Einstein.'3

Wolfgang Pauli was born on 25 April 1900 in Vienna, a city still in the grip of fin de siècle anxiety while enjoying the good times. His father, also called Wolfgang, had been a physician, but abandoned medicine for science and in the process changed his family name from Pascheles to Pauli. The transformation was complete as he converted to Catholicism amid fears that the rising tide of anti-Semitism threatened his academic ambitions. His son grew up knowing nothing of the family's Jewish ancestry. At university, when another student said that he must be Jewish, Wolfgang junior was astonished: 'I? No. Nobody