Another Visit with Wolfgang Pauli
DOI: 10.1063/1.1404835
Thanks for the Wolfgang Pauli article by Karl von Meyenn and Engelbert Schucking in the February issue of Physics Today (page 43 ). I read it with enormous pleasure. It is a masterpiece in six pages. A true portrait, with a wealth of good quotes that I had not seen before.
I was especially impressed by the section “Staying out of the potato race,” with the story of Pauli’s lost letters to Heisenberg. To this I would only add the following: I have a clear memory of Pauli saying to me, “If I had not wasted so much time trying to make sense of five-dimensional relativity (the Kaluza–Klein theory and similar attempts), I might have discovered quantum mechanics myself.” I believe he said that when he was in Princeton in 1954.
More about the authors
Freeman Dyson, (dyson@ias.edu) Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, US .
