Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [83]
The only person towards whom he was, and remained, diffident was Sommerfeld. Even as a celebrated physicist, whenever Pauli found himself in the presence of his former professor, those who had been on the receiving end of his sharp judgements were always amazed to see the 'Wrath of God' responding with 'Ja, Herr Professor', 'Nein, Herr Professor'. They hardly recognised the man who had once ticked off a colleague: 'I do not mind if you think slowly, but I do object when you publish more quickly than you think.'10 Or on another occasion saying of a paper he had just read: 'It is not even wrong.'11 He spared no one. 'You know, what Mr Einstein said is not so stupid', he told a packed lecture theatre while still a student.12 Sommerfeld, sitting in the front row, would not have tolerated such a remark coming from any of his other students. But then he knew none of them would have uttered it. When it came to evaluating physics, Pauli was self-confident and uninhibited even in the presence of Einstein.
In a clear sign of the high regard in which he held Pauli, Sommerfeld asked him to help write a major article on relativity for the Encyklopädie der Mathematischen Wissenschaffen. Sommerfeld had accepted the task of editing the fifth volume of the Encyklopädie that dealt with physics. After Einstein declined, Sommerfeld decided to write on relativity himself but found he had little time to do so. He needed help and turned to Pauli. When Sommerfeld saw the first draft, 'it proved to be so masterly that I renounced all collaboration'.13 It was not only a brilliant exposition of the special and general theories of relativity, but an unrivalled review of the existing literature. It remained for decades the definitive work in the field and drew Einstein's wholehearted praise. The article appeared in 1921, two months after Pauli received his doctorate.
As a student, Pauli preferred to spend his evenings enjoying the Munich nightlife in some café or other, returning to his lodgings to work through much of the night. He rarely attended lectures the following morning, turning up only around noon. But he attended enough to be drawn to the mysteries of quantum physics by Sommerfeld. 'I was not spared the shock which every physicist accustomed to the classical way of thinking experienced when he came to know Bohr's basic postulate of quantum theory for the first time', Pauli said more than 30 years later.14 But he quickly got over it as he set about tackling his doctoral thesis.
Sommerfeld had set Pauli the task of applying the quantum rules of Bohr and his own modifications to the ionised hydrogen molecule, in which one of the two hydrogen atoms that make up the molecule has had its electron ripped off. As expected, Pauli produced a theoretically impeccable analysis. The only problem was that his results did not agree with the experimental data. Used to one success after another, Pauli was despondent at this lack of agreement between theory and experiment. However, his thesis was regarded as the first strong evidence that the outer limits of the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantum atom had been reached. The ad hoc way in which quantum physics was bolted onto classical physics had always been unsatisfactory, and now Pauli had shown that the Bohr-Sommerfeld model could not even deal with the ionised hydrogen molecule, let alone more complex atoms. In October 1921, armed with his doctorate, Pauli left Munich for Göttingen to take up the post of assistant to the professor of theoretical physics.
Max Born, 38, a key figure in the future development of quantum physics, had arrived in the small university town from Frankfurt just six months before Pauli. Growing up in Breslau, capital of the then Prussian province of Silesia, it was mathematics, not physics, that attracted Born. His father, like Pauli's, was a highly cultured medical man and academic. A professor of embryology, Gustav Born