Physicist Wolfgang Pauli counted 32 when he knocked on the door of psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. At the age of 25, he founded the Exclusion Principle, for which he won the Nobel Prize twenty years later. Europe’s most eminent physicists agreed that he was an unparalleled genius. But now he was completely down to earth. “When the committed rationalist … first came to see me for a talk, he was in such a panic that not only he but I felt the wind rush over me from the madhouse!” Later, Wolfgang Pauli called the breakdown to which the repression of his emotions had led him “a powerful neurosis”. His colleagues described the symptoms: binge drinking, visiting prostitutes, fighting in bars, quarreling and more.
He turned to Jung for help because he could not find his own way out of the abyss he had fallen into in 1927, when his mother drank poison and ended her life because her husband, who had cheated on her for all the years of their marriage, had left her for a much younger woman a little earlier. Although Pauli was then a professor of theoretical physics, at the age of 27 he experienced his father’s departure from the marriage as a personal betrayal, and he was not at all able to cope with his mother’s death.
The change of environment didn’t help much either, and in April 1928 he became a full professor at the Swiss Institute of Technology, even though he was a poor lecturer. He arrived in Zurich from Hamburg “dressed like a tourist with a rucksack on his back”, as he described himself, and was correspondingly completely uninterested in physics.
Full of anger, he wrote to his former colleague Niels Bohr that his problem was not a lack of time: ‘I’m just flat and lazy. I think I should have someone give me a daily haircut! But unfortunately, since nobody does, I have to find other ways to regain my interest in physics.” He had already discarded the idea of giving up physics and writing a utopian novel, but continued to cling to a life that gave him at least a little relaxation.
He swam in the surrounding lakes, ate in fine restaurants, drank with colleagues and socialised with prominent lawyers, writers and artists. After several months of “time off”, he managed to complete two important papers on the theory of quantum electrodynamics explaining the interaction of light and matter with his former classmate Werner Heisenberg, but privately he did not move a step forward.
And not a chemist!
Round-faced and unattractive from childhood, but above all cynical, parasitic and sensible to the point of coldness, he was not very popular with women. Prostitutes were an acceptable substitute for love, until he bumped into cabaret dancer Käthe Deppner, whom he had met a few years earlier in Berlin, at a friend’s party.
A complete illiterate in the emotional field, he did not turn on the red light when he found out that she was in love with another man, but rather married her immediately and then mocked with a sour face that he was married “loosely” when his wife refused to break off the relationship with the other man. Aware of her affair, he explained to his friends that if she ran off with her lover, he would inform them in writing.
They divorced less than a year after their marriage in December 1929. Even more despondent than before, he growled: “If only I were a bullfighter – I couldn’t compete with someone like that – but such a mediocre chemist!” It did not hurt him that he had lost his love; it touched him that she had mistaken him, a renowned physicist, for an ordinary chemist.
He was collapsing in on himself, and his interest in physics was rekindled. Just eight days after the divorce was final, in a letter to colleagues entitled Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen, he was the first person in the world to hypothesise the existence of neutrinos, the discovery of which had won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for Clyde Lorrain Cowan and Frederick Reines.
Although Pauli could have explained everything about neutrinos to his colleagues in person, he also explained in a letter why he could not attend the meeting of the best physicists in Europe, which took place in Tübingen in early December 1930: “The dance on the night of 6-7 December makes me indispensable here in Zurich.” The dance at the Baur au Lac, the hotel of choice, was the highlight of the social events in winter Zurich, but it was also Pauli’s attempt to swing back into the saddle as quickly as possible.
But he could run from his emotions, but he could not escape them. He spent the summer of 1931 in America. He complained about the puritanism of the Americans and the lousy food at the Caltech Club, but he enjoyed the lectures and the drinking. He had no problem with Prohibition and bought smuggled alcohol illegally.
“I recently fell down the stairs (in a slightly drunken state) so badly that I broke my shoulder and now have to lie in bed until my bones are whole again – very tiring,” he wrote in a letter, describing how a house party ended. In reality, he was lecturing with his arm resting in a metal brace.
Mentally, he was in no better shape than before. “I can’t make it with women, I’ll probably never make it again,” he wrote to a friend from his New York hotel room. “I’m afraid I’ll have to live with it, and it’s not always easy. I’m kind of afraid I’ll get lonelier as the years go by. The eternal monologues are so tiring.”
He flew from America to Italy and then back to Zurich. Now he pursued women even more and as unsuccessfully as before. He sought solace in drugs. He spent most of his time in bars, getting into fights. He quarrelled with his colleagues, who had to put up with his constant mood swings. At the end of 1931, he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
His father advised him to turn to the then very modern psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. Pauli had attended his lectures before. He read his publications and wrote his comments in the margins of the pages. He arranged to meet him.
In February 1932, Jung accepted him, but referred him to his pupil Erna Rosenbaum. He was so impressed by the realisation that he had “an exceptional scientist and an exceptional intellectual potential” that he refused to be influenced by his knowledge. His pupil could not, because she did not know enough.
New wife, old problems
And they started. Pauli had to record his dreams and analyse them. Then he described them in a letter. He didn’t mind that he rarely saw his doctor. “Somehow everything is working smoothly by itself now – that’s how it seems to me – and I don’t need much enlightenment at the moment,” he wrote to her that they really didn’t need to see each other.
“He stayed with her for five months, then worked alone for three months, observing his subconscious in detail. In this respect he was supremely gifted,” Jung reported in 1935. All Pauli’s letters went to him, and when Rosenbaum moved to Berlin, Pauli came to stay with him.
For the next two years they “interpreted and analysed” his dreams, as Pauli explained. In the end, there were more than 15,000 of them. In 1935, Jung used 400 of Pauli’s dreams for his lecture on dream symbols in the process of individualisation, and many others found their way into other lectures and publications by Jung. At Pauli’s request, he concealed his identity and spoke of a “scientifically educated young man”, a “great scientist” or a “very famous man living today”.
They stopped the therapy, which some say was not therapy at all, in 1934. It is not entirely clear why. In that year, Pauli admitted that, especially in the emotional field, he still had some unresolved issues, but that he could only develop and mature in contact with real life, not just through the analysis of dreams. He also felt that he was now more stable and balanced within himself and that he was functioning better in interpersonal relationships.
In the same year, Jung found him “perfectly normal and sane”, and his colleague Marie-Louise von Franz retrospectively claimed that Pauli had started drinking again soon after stopping the therapies. His wife Franz did not confirm this.
A year before he broke up with Jung, Pauli met Franco Bertram, a year younger than him, at a party of a mutual friend. She was a polished, confident and capable German woman who travelled extensively for work, but was at the time working in Zurich as a manager of a Russian orchestra. She and Pauli just happened to live on the same street, and the host of the party suggested he give her a ride home.
“Actually, I could really take you with me,” Pauli remarked in his characteristic style. He didn’t charm her, but he started to win her over. Not long after, she had moved in with him and a year later she heard, “Now we’re going to get married.” Neither then nor since then did Pauli seem to have any feelings about marriage, but on 14 April 1934, in London, he got a second wife. He did not tell her that he already had one until after the wedding.
Jung described Franco as a man who has the same problem as he does, only the opposite. “She fell in love with my dark side, which secretly made a great impression on her.” Not long after the wedding, they had dinner together. Franca, who had only just found out that she was Pauli’s second wife, was dealt a new blow by Jung, who consistently ignored her.
She later claimed that Jung had interrupted the therapy because of Pauli’s marriage to her, but she was not exactly an objective reporter because Jung was stuck deep in her stomach. “Pauli, an extreme rational thinker, had become totally dependent on Jung’s magical personality,” she recalled bitterly. Some researchers now argue that it was Franca, who had truly enriched her and her husband’s life, who requested that the therapy be discontinued.
About seven months after they got married, they went skiing. Suddenly, Pauli cried out that the earth was shaking. Then he wanted to beat someone up. He found it difficult to calm down.
Physicist Victor Weisskopf and his wife were skiing nearby. They came to visit. Pauli did not say a word to Weisskopf. He was angry with him because he had made a mistake in a published scientific paper. Weisskopf asked Franco to intervene. She could not, and Pauli did not speak to her either. She scratched their car.
In Zurich, Pauli was already in a better condition and tried to make amends to Weisskopf. “Don’t take this too seriously. Many people have published articles with errors,” he consoled him. Immediately afterwards he added: “I never did!” He had never had a feeling for other people’s feelings, but he had developed a very good one for analysing dreams.
In September 1935, his physicist friend Ernst Heck complained in a letter to their mutual colleague Hermann Weyl that Pauli was so busy dreaming that he no longer even perceived people. He expressed his sympathy for France and the “tremendous burden” she had been given by a man like Pauli. He added that Franca was probably the best thing that had happened to Pauli in his life, especially because she had interrupted his preoccupation with Jungian psychology.
Even though he may have, Pauli has spent a lifetime writing down his dreams and analysing them. Alongside them, like Jung, he began to use the I Ching, or a kind of ancient Chinese oracle, researched numerology and became interested in the occult and alchemy. Before that, he had come to the conclusion that physics, biology and psychology could not explain consciousness.
But when it came to emotions, the famous scientist frankly admitted: “I’m not a star in this field. I am undeveloped, perhaps even infantile.” Around 1951, he collaborated with Jung’s colleague Marie-Louise von Franz on one of her scientific papers. They had a crush on each other, but they didn’t get anywhere. The relationship between two thinking people is like two people sitting in a car, but neither of them can drive, Pauli later described the situation.
It is not clear how the story developed, because Franca found the letters Marie-Louise had written to her husband in Pauli’s office at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich and burned them. Some people believe that the couple finally gave in to carnal love, but Marie-Louise strongly denied this.
Pauli effect
Pauli was no longer around to say anything, but during his lifetime he made no secret of his belief in his supernatural powers, which his scientific colleagues called the Pauli effect. When they compared their experiences with his, they noticed that he could cause misfortune by his mere presence.
For example, his assistant Rudolf Peierls reported that he had just turned up at the laboratory and already a machine had broken down. Due to Pauli’s destructive power, an explosion is said to have occurred in the Göttingen laboratory at the moment Pauli’s train just stopped at the Göttingen train station. When the Carl Gustav Jung Institute opened in Zürch in 1948, he entered the premises and a precious Chinese vase had already fallen to the floor.
On another occasion, “two elegant ladies collapsed simultaneously and symmetrically with their chairs, each on one side of the Pauli”, recalled art historian Erwin Panofsky. He also dredged up an incident from 1928, when he had dinner with Pauli and a friend in Hamburg. After three hours, they got up from the table. Panofsky and his friend realised that they had been unknowingly sitting on a smeared cream all evening, but not Pauli.
One of his colleagues wanted to treat himself. He was going to stage a chandelier fall in the hotel reception. Pauli entered the hotel, but the high-quality pulley suddenly jammed and the chandelier refused to fall to the floor.
“This is certainly an exclusionary principle”, Panofsky noted, because in Pauli’s presence the accidents happened only around him, “and he was excluded”. Nobel Prize winner Otto Stern did not want to take any chances with the Pauli effect: he banned his famous colleague from his laboratory.
But rarely has he been banned at home. Wolfgang Ernst Friedrich Pauli, the son of Wolfgang Joseph, a professor at the University of Vienna and an expert in physical chemistry, and Berthe Schütz, the daughter of an opera singer and a journalist who wrote theatre reviews, historical essays and political articles with a socialist flavour, was a child prodigy from an early age. He was not only brilliant at mathematics and physics, he was also good at history, but he did not excel in Greek and Latin.
Already in grammar school, he showed a talent for mockery: he called a short-tempered teacher who liked to appear unexpectedly among the pupils a U-boot or submarine, but it also became clear in grammar school that regular schooling was not tailor-made for him. He was bored to death.
His father hired an advanced physics instructor, who introduced him to Einstein’s theory of relativity, written only a few years earlier. It was so elegant and radical that few physicists understood it. Wolfgang had no problem with it. Just two months after graduating from high school, he published his paper on relativity, and it was so good that it stunned even the famous mathematician and relativist Hermann Weyl.
Paul didn’t have to think too hard about what he wanted to do in life. At the age of 18, he went to the University of Munich to study physics with Arnold Sommerfeld, a renowned professor of theoretical physics.
“Short and stout, he had a very sharp expression with his military moustache, but his very first sentence conveyed good-naturedness,” Pauli’s classmate Werner Heisenberg later recalled of the professor – who himself, a few years later, triggered the revolution that led to quantum mechanics.
He met Pauli when he came to a Sommerfeld lecture one day and noticed “a dark-haired student with a rather mysterious face”. He became a close friend, although he was often a “very harsh critic” and they used to make fun of Sommerfeld together during their student years. “Isn’t he like a typical Hussar soldier?” mocked Pauli.
But Sommerfeld was and remains one of the few whom Pauli respected. “Years later, Sommerfeld visited him. It was astonishing to observe the awe in his attitude towards his former teacher. For a man who was not naturally inclined to timidity, it was even more striking,” recalled his assistant Peierls.
Sommerfeld also admired his pupil. He was so fascinated by his mathematical knowledge, his understanding of physics and his familiarity with the most subtle proofs of relativity that he entrusted him with writing a paper on relativity for the Encyclopaedia of Mathematics in 1921, or immediately after Pauli had completed his PhD, which of course he had done in only three years of study. The paper was 240 pages long. It was later published as a monograph, and at the time Sommerfeld thought it “simply masterly”.
In the same year, the renowned physicist Max Born wrote to Albert Einstein: “This boy is not only clever, he is also hard-working.” Einstein also read the article: “Anyone who reads this mature and brilliant work cannot believe that its author is only 21 years old. One does not know what to admire more: the psychological understanding of the development of an idea, the precision of mathematical deduction, the depth of insight into physics, the ability to present it in an intelligible systematic way, the familiarity with the literature, the consistency of the facts, or the infallible criticality.”
Soon afterwards, the 21-year-old Pauli was corresponding with the leading physicists of Europe. Although he and Einstein almost never agreed afterwards, because Pauli didn’t agree with anyone, Einstein nominated him for the Nobel Prize in 1945, and said at the time that Pauli was his soulmate.
But Pauli found it hard to stay in one place. He moved from Munich to Göttingen and became an assistant to Max Born, who turned the University of Göttingen into a research centre for theoretical physics. Born found the young man “very stimulating”, but also difficult. Pauli liked to “sleep in a little” and did not always turn up at the university when Born needed him, for example at eleven in the morning when he gave a lecture.
“At half past eleven, I sent our maid to make sure he got up,” recalled the renowned professor as he ushered his assistant into the lecture room. His whimsicality was tolerated with a good deal of humour. He did not fail to note that Pauli was “undoubtedly a genius of the highest order”.
Nevertheless, he preferred his classmate Heisenberg, who succeeded Pauli when Pauli moved to Copenhagen after only one year at the Niels Bohr Institute: ‘I had Heisenberg with me during the winter (Sommerfeld was in America). He is as talented as Pauli, but with a more pleasant character. He also plays the piano very well.”
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The inveterate critic
Pauli was never a very nice person, not even in Copenhagen, although his collaboration with Niels Bohr was one of the most fruitful and lasting in modern physics. Although the two men never published a single joint paper, probably because they never agreed on anything, they needed each other for critical dialogue.
Niels Bohr did not first come up with his ideas in his head, but developed them in conversation, as if he were thinking out loud. He discussed with students, assistants and colleagues, but with no one more than with Pauli. Their arguments were literally endless. They could not agree on anything, but they kept coming to new insights and slowly moving forward because of their disagreements.
Bohr slowly became dependent on their disagreements. Léon Rosenfeld, another of Pauli’s assistants, reported that Pauli wrote letters to Bohr when he was away. Each of Pauli’s letters was an event. “Bohr took it with him when he went out on business and never missed an opportunity to look at it again or to show it to those who might be interested in the problem under discussion. He pretended to be writing a reply, but in reality he spent days and days discussing it with his absent friend, as animatedly as if Pauli were sitting next to him, listening to his parasitic laughter.”
But Pauli didn’t stay long in Copenhagen either. In 1924, he moved to Hamburg and a year later founded the Pauli exclusion principle, also called Pauli’s prohibition or Pauli principle. Because it is crucial for understanding fermions, which include protons, neutrons and electrons, and for understanding a wide range of physical phenomena, he won the Nobel Prize for it in 1945.
Of course, they didn’t keep him in Hamburg for long either. At the age of 28, he became a professor of physics at the Swiss Technical University in Zurich and stayed there. He was not the most popular, neither among students nor among colleagues.
“It was absolutely wonderful to work for Wolfgang Pauli. You could ask him anything. You didn’t have to worry that he would think a certain question was stupid, because he thought all questions were stupid,” Victor Weisskopf jokingly recalled, but it was quite true: Pauli, with his penetrating mind and his caustic tongue, became the critic on duty in the world of physics.
He started his career as a critic during his student years. After an Einstein lecture, his older colleagues wisely remained silent, waiting for another of them to ask the first question. From the back row of the lecture the silence was broken by Pauli: “What Professor Einstein has just said is not really as butch as it may have sounded.”
For the second time, he attended a lecture by Paul Ehrenfest, a Dutch physicist twenty years his senior. When he did not stop criticising his presentation, Ehrenfest said, “I think I like your publications better than you do.” Pauli hissed back, “Strange, I have the opposite experience of you.” The pair became friends and competed in barbed observations.
After a long argument with the Russian theoretician Lev Landau, whose work was brilliant but did not present it as well as Pauli’s, Pauli replied to Landau’s objection that everything he said was not nonsense: “Ah, no, far from it. What you said was so confusing that one cannot tell whether it is nonsensical or not.”
Slowly, Pauli became more famous for his vicious observations and criticisms than for his scientific achievements. He himself, in long letters, always tested his ideas on his colleagues before publishing them, and it was a source of great annoyance to him if he found an error in a published scientific paper. He told one colleague, without mercy: “I don’t mind you thinking slowly, but I object to you publishing faster than you think.”
His favourite phrase was ganz falsch, or completely wrong, although he was also very fond of saying nicht einmal falsch, or even not wrong. When he felt like it, he would say the whole sentence: “Not only is it not right, it is not even wrong.” He sometimes signed his letters with der fürchterliche Pauli or the terrible Pauli and sometimes with die Geissel Gottes or the whip of God.
In the 1920s and 1930s, which were crucial for the development and flowering of modern quantum physics, many quantum physicists were so confident that they did not finish their work until they were confronted with Pauli’s relentless criticism. It could be extremely painful, but even those who disliked him had to admit that he was always honest, direct, insightful and professional.
“Sometimes I’ve thought something right was wrong, but I’ve never thought anything wrong was right,” Pauli once explained. Even his opponents had to admit that he was really only stumbling over superficial and hair-brained evidence. So, when he was not around, they asked themselves, “What would Pauli say?”
As a critic, he also had a reputation for being completely insensitive to the feelings of others. “Some people have some very sensitive feelings. The only way to live with them is to walk on those blisters until they get used to it,” he explained why he was like a pit bull that won’t let go of its victim once it has bitten.
He had a reputation for arrogance, although he could also be a showman. In 1958, he visited America. At Columbia University, he presented the general theory of particle physics of his friend Werner Heisenberg to a class including Niels Bohr.
After the lecture, he mentioned that the theory might seem “a little crazy”. Bohr remarked that it was “not crazy enough”. Then they started to show off in front of a full auditorium. First Pauli stood in front of the large lecture table and said that the theory was crazy enough, then Bohr stood in front of her and said that it was not. The two giants of physics went on like that for quite a while as teenagers.
Your own worst enemy
Wolfgang Pauli had the best understanding of physics among his contemporaries. Max Born later recalled, “Ever since he was my assistant in Göttingen, I was aware that he was a genius comparable to Einstein himself. In fact, from the point of view of pure science, he was even greater than Einstein.”
Yet Pauli never became as great as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr or Victor Heisenberg. His unrelenting criticism may have been inspiring for others, but it was fatal for him. Because he sometimes understood physics too well, he became so hard on himself that he stifled all the creativity, imagination and intuition that helped his colleagues to make new discoveries.
Heisenberg, for example, blithely departed from the principles of classical physics, but this is why he soon became a spectacular success. At the time, Pauli said, “Perhaps one can find one’s way more easily if one is not too familiar with the grandeur of classical physics. Here lies a decisive advantage.” To this neutral observation, he immediately added: “Lack of knowledge is no guarantee of success.”
Because of his excessive self-criticism, Pauli also published relatively little. He preferred to write down his ideas in long letters to friends. They were copied and passed from hand to hand. Many of his colleagues came to new insights as a result of Pauli’s observations, but he took the credit for his success himself.
Pauli seemed not to care, but reacted quickly when World War II broke out. His father came from a prominent Jewish family in Prague called the Pascheles. He changed his surname to Paula only after he became a professor at the Vienna University of Religious Studies, at which time he also converted to Christianity. His son was thus born a Christian in Vienna on 25 April 1900, but now lived in Switzerland with a German passport.
At the urging of Arthur Rohn, President of the Swiss Technical University, he applied for Swiss citizenship in December 1939, but received no reply until May 1940, when the Germans surrounded Switzerland. He instructed Rohn to find out what was going on.
It turns out that the police have a dossier on him in which “his colleagues” object to his citizenship. Officially, they never found out who was plotting against him, but unofficially they concluded that it was probably an anti-Semitic colleague, Paul Scherrer, who also could not stand Pauli personally.
In the meantime, Pauli has already obtained an American visa for himself and his wife. By chance, he was invited by the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton to lecture there in 1940 and 1941. Arthur Rohn tried to explain to the officials that Pauli was too important a scholar to be left to the Americans, but he was obviously too famous a Jew to be granted Swiss citizenship at a moment when Nazism was spreading like a plague.
And that’s how Pauli and Franco ended up in America. By then, they were getting on well: Franco took over all the day-to-day responsibilities and tolerated his cynicism without being noticed. She gave him a safe home and a settled life so he could work in peace. Even if they had no children, this marriage suited them both.
In America, they cruised around in a car, visiting Pauli’s colleagues, but after a year, they found themselves in trouble. Because of his German passport, Pauli was unable to find a university to finance his extended stay in America, and the Swiss Technical University also had problems.
In 1942, they wanted him to return, saying he had escaped, that he was just having fun in America and that he would be fired. Colleagues who had ever been annoyed by him, and who were also anti-Semites, gave him a hard time, but Arthur Rohn took him back under his protection. He extended his sabbatical until 1948, perhaps because Pauli threatened to sue.
Pauli returned to Switzerland after the war, although he was granted American citizenship in January 1946 and was offered a job by American universities. In October 1946, he renewed his contacts with Carl Gustav Jung. Although he corresponded with many people from America, no letters were ever found that he might have exchanged with Jung.
But now their relationship has intensified and become almost hot in 1950, 1953 and 1957, although no one really knows what it was like. The letters do express mutual respect and sympathy, and some even consider that the relationship with Pauli was the most important relationship in Jung’s mature period. Pauli is said to have been his only friend at the time who could have enriched his thinking and broadened his world view.
And so Wolfgang Pauli lived to see his 58th birthday and the award of the Max Planck Medal for outstanding achievements in theoretical physics. At the end of that year, he suddenly developed a severe stomach ache. He was admitted to hospital. He told a friend that he probably would not leave it again. He really didn’t. On the fifteenth of December 1958, he died of pancreatic cancer in hospital room 137, a number which, coincidentally, haunted him scientifically all his life.
