Book Review: (1) No Time to be Brief - A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli

With reference to a particularly difficult proof in QED that he and Werner Heisenberg had published in 1929, Wolfgang Pauli used to say "I warn the curious!" The same deterrent could be applied to this book.

The title says it all. With 573 pages, it is certainly not brief, and it definitely is a scientific biography. Do not embark upon reading this book if you are not interested in Pauli's science, and approach it warily if you derive little enjoyment from quantum mechanics. A smattering of German will also be helpful, as the early chapters are irritatingly peppered (gespickt) with German terms (deutschen Ausdrücken) from which the English has been translated (übersetzt), these being useful only insofar as they reveal occasional mistranslations. Another annoying habit of the author's is to keep breaking the flow of the narrative with incidental remarks, details and directions to the reader (e.g. see page 159) which by right belong in a footnote or in the notes at the end of each chapter. The text reads rather like a Ph.D. thesis, and in common with young Wolfgang's first publication - "it puts some strain on the reader's goodwill."

However, it cannot be denied that this is a monumental opus. Appearing in print two years after the centenary of his birth, it is the first biography of this Nobel Prize winner to be published, and it is written by someone who knew him personally and worked with him. Charles Enz was Pauli's last assistant, at the ETH Zürich. He has analysed a vast body of source material to produce a comprehensive and detailed account of Pauli's life and work, which places the man and his science into the historical context of twentieth century physics. The contents are arranged chronologically, beginning with Pauli's ancestry, moving through his life and career in Europe, in the USA during World War II and then back in Europe again, and ending with the management of his scientific estate on his demise. The reader is spared no detail of his theoretical physics, so brush up on your spinor calculus. Also included are interesting brief biographies of Pauli's colleagues, acquaintances and contemporary scientists.

Pauli's contributions to physics are well known, but less famous is his contribution to psychology. Pauli first went to see Carl Jung in 1932 during a personal crisis. Part of his therapy was for him to record his dreams. Pauli went on to send Jung detailed accounts of some 1,300 of his dreams, from which both his mental health and the science of psychology benefited. For a quarter of a century, Pauli and Jung corresponded and exchanged ideas, and even jointly published essays. No doubt it was this contact which led to the development of Pauli's interest in the philosophy of science, the history of ideas, and the relationship between natural science and religion.

Most people reading this review will be familiar with Pauli's Exclusion Principle, but fewer, I imagine, will have heard of the "Pauli Effect". Examples of this pop up from time to in the book and explain why colleagues were anxious to keep Pauli out of their labs and well away from their experiments. It is known that Wolfgang Pauli's contemporaries admired his wit, but this aspect of his character does not come across very well in Charles Enz's account of his life. The often clumsy translation of Pauli's German does not help.

It will interest the crystallographer to learn that in 1933 Pauli posed Heisenberg the "arbitrarily stupid question": Why should the nucleus be built in analogy to the liquid drop and not to the crystalline state? Heisenberg's reason why is given on page 324. However, the subsequent discovery of quarks and neutron stars has since led to an FCC lattice model of the nucleus being proposed (see e.g. Cook, N. & Dallacasa, V., New Scientist 117 no.1606, 31 March 1988, 44-46). Maybe Pauli's question was not so stupid after all - and there are crystals in atoms as well as atoms in crystals.

Stephen Clackson