Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [82]
Pauli's mother, Bertha, was a well-known Viennese journalist and writer. Her circle of friends and acquaintances meant that Wolfgang and his sister Hertha, six years his junior, grew up accustomed to seeing leading figures from the arts as well as science and medicine at the family home. His mother, a pacifist and a socialist, exerted a strong influence on Pauli. The longer the First World War dragged on through his formative teenage years, 'the keener became his opposition against it and, generally, against the whole "establishment"', recalled a friend.5 When she died two weeks before her 49th birthday in November 1927, an obituary in the Neue Freie Presse described Bertha as 'one of the few truly strong personalities among Austrian women'.6
Pauli was academically gifted but far from a model pupil, finding school unchallenging. He began having private tuition in physics to compensate. Before long, when bored by a particularly tedious lesson at school, he began reading Einstein's papers on general relativity hidden under his desk. Physics had always loomed large in his young life in the form of the influential Austrian physicist and philosopher of science Ernst Mach, his godfather. For one who would later enjoy the company and friendship of the likes of Einstein and Bohr, Pauli said that contact with Mach, whom he last saw in the summer of 1914, was 'the most important event in my intellectual life'.7
In September 1918 Pauli left what he called the 'spiritual desert' that was Vienna.8 With the Austria-Hungarian empire on the verge of extinction and Vienna's past glories faded, it was the lack of top-flight physicists at the city's university that he was lamenting. He could have gone almost anywhere, but went to Munich to study with Arnold Sommerfeld. Having recently turned down a professorship in Vienna, Sommerfeld had already been in charge of theoretical physics at Munich University for a dozen years when Pauli arrived. From the beginning, in 1906, Sommerfeld set out to create an institute that would be 'a nursery of theoretical physics'.9 It was not as grand as the institute Bohr would soon create in Copenhagen, consisting as it did of only four rooms: Sommerfeld's office, a lecture theatre, a seminar room, and a small library. There was also a large laboratory in the basement where in 1912 Max von Laue's theory that X-rays were short-wavelength electromagnetic waves was tested and confirmed, bringing quick recognition to the 'nursery'.
Sommerfeld was an exceptional teacher with the uncanny knack of setting his students problems that tested, but did not exceed, their abilities. Having already supervised more than his fair share of talented young physicists, Sommerfeld soon recognised Pauli as someone of rare and exceptional promise. He was a man not easily impressed, but in January 1919 a paper on general relativity written by Pauli before leaving Vienna had just been published. In his 'nursery' he had a first-year student, not yet nineteen years old, who was already regarded by others as an expert in relativity.
Pauli quickly became known, and feared, for his sharp and incisive criticism of new and speculative ideas. Some would later call him the 'conscience of physics' for his uncompromising principles. Stout with bulging eyes, he was every inch the Buddha of physics, albeit one with a biting tongue. Whenever he was lost deep in thought, Pauli unconsciously rocked back and forth. It was acknowledged far and wide that his intuitive grasp of physics was unmatched among his contemporaries and probably not even surpassed by Einstein. He judged his own work even more harshly than that of others. At times Pauli understood physics and its problems too well, and that hampered the free exercise of his creative