Another Visit with Wolfgang Pauli

AUG 01, 2001

Freeman Dyson

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 .