海森堡：我为什么选择物理而不是音乐
德国物理学家海森堡（1901年12月5日—1976年2月1日）。图源：维基百科
伟大的理论物理学家、量子力学的创立者海森堡，在其回忆录《Physics and beyond: encounters and conversions》，回顾了年轻时选择了物理而不是音乐作为自己的事业的思考以及与朋友的对话。从这些对话，可以看出年轻的海森堡和他的朋友们对于物理学如何发展、科学发展的真正动力以及音乐及其历史发展的深入理解，同时也可以看出海森堡当时所处的非常活跃的思想环境以及浓厚的科学与艺术氛围。
那年秋天，我经常见到那个在普鲁恩城堡如此出色地演奏巴赫的恰空舞曲的男孩。我们会在我们共同的朋友沃尔特的家里见面，沃尔特是一名优秀的大提琴手，我们一起为一个舒伯特B大调三重奏的私人演奏做练习。沃尔特的父亲很早就去世了，他的母亲照顾她的两个儿子，住在伊丽莎白大街上一所家具非常优雅的大房子里，离我父母在霍亨索伦大街的房子只有几分钟的步行路程。客厅里那架宏伟的贝希斯坦钢琴是我们经常去的另一个原因。演奏之后，我们常常聊到深夜。有一次，我们的话题转到了我的学习计划上。沃尔特的母亲想知道为什么我没有决定把音乐作为我的事业。
“从你演奏和谈论音乐的方式来看，我觉得你对艺术比对科学和技术更熟悉，你更喜欢音乐而不是科学仪器、公式和机械装置。如果我是对的，你为什么选择自然科学？毕竟，世界的未来将由你们年轻人决定。如果青年选择美，那么就会有更多的美；如果它选择效用，那么就会有更多有用的东西。每个人的决定不仅对他自己，而且对整个人类都很重要。”
“我真不敢相信我们会面临这样的选择，”我颇为辩解地说。“除了我可能不会成为一个很好的音乐家这一事实之外，问题仍然是在哪个领域我可以贡献最大。现在我有一个深刻的印象，近年来音乐已经失去了它早期的力量。在17世纪，音乐仍然深深浸淫在宗教生活方式中；在18世纪，个人情感的世界被征服了；在19世纪，浪漫主义音乐探索了人类灵魂的最深处。但在最近几年里，音乐似乎故意进入了一个奇怪的、混乱的、相当薄弱的实验阶段，在这个阶段，理论概念先于沿着既定道路前进的愿望。在科学领域，特别是在物理学领域，情况就大不相同了。在这里，沿着固定的道路追求明确的目标——在20年前导致人们理解某些电磁现象的同样的道路——自然而然地提出了一些问题，这些问题挑战了整个科学的哲学基础、空间和时间的结构，甚至是因果规律的有效性。我们处在一个未知的领域，可能需要几代物理学家才能发现最终的答案。我坦率地承认，我非常想在这一切中发挥一些作用。”
我的朋友小提琴家罗尔夫不同意我的观点。“据我所知，你对现代物理学的评论同样适用于现代音乐。在这一点上，道路似乎也被清晰地描绘了出来。旧的音调壁垒正在崩溃，我们发现自己处于充满希望的处女地，几乎完全自由地选择我们喜欢的声音和节奏。因此，音乐家完全有机会做出科学家一样多的发现。”
沃尔特现在提出了他自己的反对意见。“我真的不知道‘言论自由’和‘有前途的处女地’是否一定是一回事。乍一看，似乎更大的自由必然意味着更丰富、更广阔的可能性; 但我知道这在艺术中是不正确的，就这一点而言我对艺术比对科学更熟悉。我认为艺术的进步是这样发生的：首先，缓慢的历史进程会不由自主地改变人们的生活，从而产生新的思想。然后，一些有才华的艺术家试图使用他们的材料——色彩或乐器——获取新的表达方式，从而使这些思想具有可见或可听的形式。这种相互作用，或者，如果你喜欢，这种表现内容和表现媒介的局限性之间的斗争，我认为，是真正的艺术出现的关键条件。如果表现媒介的限制被消除——例如，在音乐中，我们可以产生任何我们喜欢的声音——那么斗争就会结束，艺术家的努力就会进入空虚。因此，我对过多的自由持怀疑态度。”
“在科学上，”沃尔特继续说，“新技术的不断出现使新实验的不断出现成为可能；有了新的经验，因此就可能产生新的内容。在这里，表达的手段是用来把握和阐明新思想的概念。例如，我读到过，让你很感兴趣的爱因斯坦的相对论是在某些实验失败后诞生的，这些实验旨在通过光线的干涉来演示地球在空间中的运动。当这种论证失败的时候，人们就清楚地认识到，新的结果或者说新的观念要求扩展表达的手段，即扩展物理学特有的概念体系。很有可能，没有人预料到这会要求空间和时间等基本概念发生根本性的变化。爱因斯坦的伟大成就在于，他比任何人都更早地认识到，空间和时间的概念不仅允许被改变，而且实际上必须被改变。”
“你所说的物理学的最新发展可以合理地与18世纪中期音乐的发展相比较。当时，一个渐进的历史过程导致了对个人情感世界的日益认识——正如我们从卢梭和后来的歌德的《维特》中所知道的那样——然后，伟大的古典主义者——海顿、莫扎特、贝多芬和舒伯特——成功地扩展了表达方式，从而发现了描绘这种情感世界所需的音乐语言。另一方面，在现代音乐中，新的内容似乎是高度模糊和不真实的，过剩的可能表达使我充满了深深的忧虑。现代音乐的道路似乎是由一个纯粹消极的假设所决定的：旧的调性必须被抛弃，因为我们相信它的力量已经耗尽，而不是因为有新的、更有力的思想是它所无法表达的。音乐家完全不知道下一步该怎么做；他们最多只能摸索着前进。在现代科学中，问题是明确提出来的，任务是找到正确的答案。然而，在现代艺术中，甚至这些问题都是不确定的。不过，也许你最好多告诉我们一些你打算在物理学领域探索的新领域。”
我试图传达我在生病期间收集到的一些知识，主要是来自原子物理学的普及书籍。
“在相对论中，”我告诉沃尔特，“你提到的实验，连同其他实验，使爱因斯坦抛弃了流行的同时性概念。这本身就足够令人兴奋了。我们每个人都认为自己确切地知道“同时”这个词的含义，即使它指的是发生在很远的地方的事件。但是我们搞错了。因为如果我们问一个人如何确定两个这样的事件是否实际上是同时发生的，然后用验证结果来评价各种验证方法，自然本身告诉我们，答案根本不是明确的，而是取决于观察者的运动状态。因此，空间和时间并不像我们以前认为的那样是相互独立的。爱因斯坦能够使用一个简单而连贯的数学公式来表达空间和时间的‘新’结构。当我生病的时候，我试图探索这个数学世界。正如我从索末菲那里学到的那样，这个世界已经被相当广泛地揭开了，因此不再是一个未被探索的领域。”
“现在最有趣的问题出现在另一个领域，即原子物理学。在这里，我们将面对这样一个基本问题：为什么物质世界表现出不断重复出现的形式和性质——例如，为什么在冰的融化、蒸汽的凝结或氢的燃烧过程中，具有所有特征性质的水总是会再现出来。这在物理学中被认为是理所当然的，但从来没有得到充分的解释。让我们假设物质——在我们的例子中是水——是由原子组成的。化学早就成功地利用了这个想法。现在，我们在学校学到的牛顿定律不能告诉我们，为什么相关粒子的运动应该像它们实际上那样稳定。只有完全不同的自然法则才能帮助我们解释为什么原子总是要重新排列自己，并以这样一种方式运动，从而产生具有相同稳定性质的相同物质。20年前，在普朗克的量子理论中，我们第一次瞥见了这些定律。从那以后，丹麦物理学家尼尔斯·玻尔将普朗克的理论与卢瑟福勋爵的原子模型结合起来。在这样做的过程中，他第一个阐明了我刚才提到的原子的奇怪的稳定性。但索末菲认为，在这个领域，我们距离清晰地理解自然的运作方式还有很长的路要走。在这里，我们有一个广阔的未开发领域，在未来的几十年里，可能会发现新的关系。例如，通过适当地重新表述自然规律和使用正确的新概念，我们也许能够把整个化学归结为原子物理学。简而言之，我坚信，在原子物理学中，我们正在探索远比在音乐中重要得多的关系和结构。但我坦率地承认，150年前的情况正好相反。”
“换句话说，”沃尔特问道，“你认为任何关心文化进步的人都必须利用他所生活的时代的历史可能性吗？如果莫扎特出生在我们这个时代，他也会创作无调性和实验音乐吗？”
“是的，我就是这么想的。如果爱因斯坦生活在12世纪，他就不可能做出重要的科学发现。”
“也许一直培养莫扎特和爱因斯坦这样的伟人是错误的，”沃尔特的母亲说。“很少有人有机会扮演如此决定性的角色。我们大多数人必须满足于在一个小圈子里安静地工作，并且应该简单地问一下，演奏舒伯特的B大调三重奏是否比制作乐器或写下数学公式更令人满意。”
我承认我自己也有不少疑虑，并提到了索末菲引用席勒的话：“当国王大兴建造时，车夫就有更多的事要做。”
“我们对此都有同样的感受，”罗尔夫宣称。“我们这些想成为音乐家的人必须承受无限的痛苦来掌握他们的乐器，即使这样，也只能希望演奏出少量的、已有数百名更好的音乐家更精通的作品。而你自己将不得不花很长时间摆弄别人制造得比你强得多的仪器，或者追溯大师们的数学思想。的确，当这一切都完成后，我们中间的音乐驾驭者就会有一种很大的成就感：不断地与美妙的音乐交流，偶尔还能享受到特别成功的演绎带来的喜悦。同样，你们这些科学家偶尔也会设法比前人更好地解释一种关系，或者比前人更准确地确定一个特定的过程。但是我们谁也不应该指望他会做开创性的工作，他会做出决定性的发现。即使他在一块尚未开发的土地上工作，也不会这样。”
沃尔特的母亲一直在专心地听着，现在她说了些什么，与其说是对我们说，不如说是对她自己说，仿佛她在说话的时候试图把她的思想组织起来:
“国王和车夫的寓言可能有完全不同的含义。当然，从表面上看，似乎荣耀完全属于国王，似乎车夫的工作纯粹是辅助性的、不重要的。但事实可能恰恰相反。也许国王的荣耀依赖于车夫们的工作，依赖于车夫们付出了多年的辛勤努力并且收获了欢乐和成功。也许像巴赫或莫扎特这样的人之所以能成为音乐之王，只是因为在长达两个世纪的时间里他们使许多不那么优秀的音乐家有机会用爱和对细节的认真关注来重新诠释他们的思想。即使是观众，当他们聆听到伟大音乐家传递的信息时，也会参与到这个细心的诠释工作中。”
“如果你看看历史的发展——在艺术上不亚于在科学上——你会发现每一门学科都有很长一段时间的沉寂或缓慢增长。然而，即使在这些时期，重要的事情也是认真的工作和对细节的关注。没有全心全意去做的每件事都会被遗忘，事实上，也不值得被记住。然后，非常突然地，历史发展给特定学科带来了变化，开辟了新的可能性，开辟了意想不到的内容。有才华的人在这里可以感受到成长的过程，感受到一种近乎神奇的吸引力，因此，在几十年内，世界上一个相对较小的地区将产生重大的艺术作品或最重要的科学发现。例如，在18世纪晚期，古典音乐从维也纳大量涌现;在15和16世纪，绘画在荷兰达到了鼎盛时期。诚然，我们需要伟人来表达新的精神内容，创造可以塑造进一步发展的形式，但伟人实际上并不产生这些新内容。”
“很有可能，我们正处于一个硕果累累的科学时代的开端，在这种情况下，劝阻任何年轻人参与其中都是错误的。在一个以上的艺术或科学分支同时发生重要的发展似乎是不可能的; 如果它发生在任何一个领域，如果我们能以旁观者或积极参与者的身份分享它的荣耀，我们应该心存感激。期望更多是愚蠢的。这就是为什么我觉得大众对现代艺术——无论是绘画还是音乐——的攻击是如此不公正。一旦音乐和造型艺术解决了十八、十九世纪摆在它们面前的大问题，就必然会有一段更加宁静的时期，在这段时期里，许多古老的东西可以被保存下来，而新的东西则通过反复试错来检验。把现代作品与古典音乐伟大时代最杰出的成就相比，似乎是完全不公平的。也许我们应该用舒伯特B大调三重奏的慢乐章来结束这个晚上。让我们看看你们能演奏得多好。”
我们照做了。从罗尔夫在乐章第二部分演奏有些忧郁的C大调的方式，我可以感觉到他想到欧洲音乐的伟大时代可能永远消失时是多么悲伤。
几天后，当我走进索末菲经常讲课的大厅时，我发现第三排坐着一个黑头发、脸有些神秘的学生。在我第一次拜访时，索末菲介绍了我们两认识，然后告诉我，他认为这个男孩是他最有才华的学生之一，我可以从他身上学到很多东西。他的名字叫沃尔夫冈·泡利，从此之后他一直是我的好朋友，尽管他经常是一个非常严厉的批评者。我在他旁边坐下，问他讲座结束后我是否可以向他咨询一下我的预备学习。这时，索末菲走进了大厅，他刚开始讲课，沃尔夫冈就在我耳边小声说：“他看起来是不是像典型的老轻骑兵军官?” 讲座结束后，我们回到理论物理研究所，我问了沃尔夫冈两个问题。我想知道，一个主要对理论感兴趣的人要做多少实验工作，以及他对相对论和原子理论各自的重要性有什么看法………
附录：英文翻译，取自《Physics and beyond: encounters and conversions》, Werner Heisenberg, Translated from the German by Arnold.Pomerans, Harper & Row Publishers, 1971。
The Decision to Study Physics (1920)
Werner Heisenberg
That autumn, I saw a great deal of the boy who had played Bach's Chaconne so magnificently in Prunn Castle. We would meet in the house of our mutual friend, Walter, himself a fine cellist, and practice for a private recital of Schubert's B Major Trio. Walter's father had died at an early age, and his mother had been left to care for her two sons in a large and very elegantly furnished house in Elisabeth Strasse, just a few minutes' walk from my parents' house in Hohenzollern Strasse. The magnificent Bechstein grand in the living room was an added reason for our frequent visits. After we had finished playing, we would often talk deep into the night, and it was on one such occasion that the conversation came round to my proposed studies. Walter's mother wondered why I had not decided to make music my career.
"From the way you play and speak about music, I get the impression that you are much more at home with art than with science and technology, that you prefer the muses to scientific instruments, formulae and machinery. If I am right, why ever have you chosen natural science? After all, the future of the world will be decided by you young people. If youth chooses beauty, then there will be more beauty; if it chooses utility, then there will be more useful things. The decision of each individual is of importance not only to himself but to the whole of man- kind."
"I can't really believe that we are faced with that sort of choice," I said rather defensively. "Quite apart from the fact that I probably wouldn't make a very good musician, the question remains in which field one can contribute most. Now I have the dear impression that in recent years music has lost much of its earlier force. In the seventeenth century music was still deeply steeped in the religious way of life; in the eighteenth century came the conquest of the world of individual emotions; in the nineteenth century romantic music plumbed the innermost depths of the human soul. But in the last few years music seems to have quite deliberately entered a strange, disturbed and rather feeble stage of experimentation, in which theoretical notions take precedence over the desire for progress along established paths. In science, and particularly in physics, things are quite different. Here the pursuit of clear objectives along fixed paths--the same paths that led to the understanding of certain electromagnetic phenomena twenty years ago--has quite automatically thrown up problems that challenge the whole philosophical basis of science, the structure of space and time, and even the validity of causal laws. Here we are on terra incognita, and it will probably take several generations of physicists to discover the final answers. And I frankly confess that I am highly tempted to play some part in all this."
My friend Rolf, the violinist, demurred. "As far as I can see, your remarks about modern physics apply equally well to modern music. Here, too, the path seems to be dearly mapped. The old tonal barriers are collapsing and we find ourselves on promising virgin soil, with almost complete freedom to choose what sounds and rhythms we like. Hence the musician has every chance of discovering as many riches as the scientist."
Walter now raised several objections of his own. "I don't really know whether 'freedom of expression' and 'promising virgin soil' are necessarily the same thing. At first sight it admittedly looks as if greater freedom must necessarily mean enrichment, wider possibilities; but this I know to be untrue in art, with which I am more familiar than with science. I would think that progress in art takes place in the following way: First a slow historical process transforms the life of men in spite of themselves, and thereby throws up fresh ideas. A few talented artists then try to give these ideas a visible or audible form by wresting new possibilities of expression from the material with which they work-from colors or musical instruments. This interplay or, if you like, this struggle between the expressive content and the limitations of the expressive medium is, I think, a sine qua non of the emergence of real art. If the limitations of the expressive medium were taken away--if in music, for instance, we could produce any sounds we liked--then the struggle would be over, and the artist's effort would reach into a void. For that reason I am skeptical about too much freedom.
"In science," Walter continued, "a continuous flow of new experiments is made possible by new techniques; there are new experiences and as a result new contents may be produced. Here the means of expression are the concepts by which the new ideas are grasped and made explicit. For instance, I have read that Einstein's relativity theory, which interests you so much, was born from the failure of certain experiments designed to demonstrate the motion of the earth through space by means of the interference of light rays. When this demonstration misfired, it became clear that the new results, or, what amounts to the same thing, the new ideas, called for an extension of the means of expression, i.e., of the conceptual system proper to physics. Quite likely, no one anticipated that this would demand radical changes in such fundamental concepts as space and time. It was Einstein's great achievement to appreciate before anyone else that the ideas of space and time were not only susceptible to change but, in fact, had to be changed.
"What you have said about recent developments in physics could reasonably be compared with developments in music in the middle of the eighteenth century. At that time, a gradual historical process had led to a growing awareness of the emotional world of the individual--as all of us know from Rousseau and later from Goethe's Werther--and it was then that the great classicists--Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert--succeeded in extending the means of expression and so discovered the musical language needed for depicting this emotional world. In modern music, on the other hand, the new contents appear to be highly obscure and implausible, and the plethora of possible expressions fills me with deep forebodings. The path of modern music seems to be determined by a purely negative postulate: the old tonality has to be discarded because we believe that its powers have been exhausted, and not because there are new and more forceful ideas which it is incapable of expressing. Musicians are entirely in the dark about the next step; at best they grope their way forward. In modern science the questions are clearly posed, and the task is to find the right answers. In modern art, however, even the questions are uncertain. But perhaps you had best tell us a bit more about the new fields you intend to explore in the world of physics."
I tried to convey what little bits of knowledge I had gleaned during my illness, mainly from popular books on atomic physics.
"In relativity theory," I told Walter, "the experiments you have mentioned, together with other experiments, caused Einstein to discard the prevailing concept of simultaneity. That in itself was exciting enough. Every one of us thinks that he knows precisely what the word 'simultaneous' means, even if it refers to events that take place at great distances. But we are mis- taken. For if we ask how one determines whether two such events are, in fact, simultaneous and then evaluates the various means of verification by their results, nature herself informs us that the answers are not at all clear-cut but depend on the observer's state of motion. Space and time are therefore not independent of each other, as we previously believed. Einstein was able to express the 'new' structure of space and time by means of a simple and coherent mathematical formula. While I was ill, I tried to probe into this mathematical world, which, as I have since learned from Sommerfeld, has already been opened up fairly extensively and has therefore ceased to be unexplored territory.
"The most interesting problems now lie in a different field, in atomic physics. Here we come face to face with the fundamental question why the material world manifests ever-recurring forms and qualities-why, for example, water with all its characteristic properties is invariably reproduced during the melting of ice, the condensation of steam or the combustion of hydrogen. This has been taken for granted in physics, but has never been fully explained. Let us suppose that material bodies--in our case, water--are composed of atoms. Chemistry has long made successful use of this idea. Now, the Newtonian laws we were taught at school cannot tell us why the motions of the particles involved should be as stable as they, in fact, are. Only quite different natural laws can help us to explain why atoms should invariably rearrange themselves and move in such a way as to produce the same substances with the same stable properties. We first caught a glimpse of these laws twenty years ago, in Planck's quantum theory. Since then, the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, has combined Planck's theory with Lord Rutherford's atomic model. In so doing, he was the first to throw light on the curious stability of atoms which I have just mentioned. But Sommerfeld believes that in this sphere we are still a long way from a clear understanding of the ways of nature. Here we have a vast unexplored field, in which new relationships may be discovered for decades to come. By the ap- propriate reformulation of natural laws and with correct new concepts we might, for instance, be able to reduce the whole of chemistry to atomic physics. In short, I firmly believe that in atomic physics we are on the track of far more important relations, far more important structures, than in music. But I freely admit that 150 years ago things were the other way round."
"In other words," Walter asked, "you believe that anyone concerned with cultural progress must necessarily make use of the historical possibilities of the age in which he lives? That, if Mozart had been born in our day, he, too, would be writing atonal and experimental music?"
"Yes, I suspect just that. If Einstein had lived in the twelfth century, he would not have been able to make important scientific discoveries."
"Perhaps it is wrong to keep bringing up such great men as Mozart and Einstein," Walter's mother said. "Few individuals get the chance to play such decisive roles. Most of us must con- tent ourselves with working quietly in a small circle, and ought to ask simply whether playing Schubert's B Major Trio is not more satisfactory than building instruments or writing mathematical formulae."
I agreed that I myself had quite a few qualms and mentioned Sommerfeld's quotation from Schiller: "When kings go a-building, wagoners have more work."
"We all feel the same way about it," Rolf declared. "Those of us who want to become musicians have to take infinite pains to master their instruments, and even then can only hope to play pieces that hundreds of better musicians have played much more proficiently. And you yourself will have to spend long hours with instruments that others have built much more competently, or retrace the mathematical thoughts of the masters. True, when all this has been done, the musical wagoners among us are left with no small sense of achievement: constant intercourse with glorious music and the occasional delight of a particularly successful interpretation. Likewise, you scientists will occasionally manage to interpret a relationship just that little bit better than anyone before you, or determine a particular process more accurately than your predecessors. But none of us ought to count on the fact that he will be doing trail-blazing work, that he will make decisive discoveries. Not even when he works in a field where a great deal of territory has still to be opened up."
Walter's mother, who had been listening attentively, now said something, more to herself than to us, as if she were trying to formulate her thoughts as she spoke:
"The parable of the kings and the wagoners may have quite a different import. Of course, superficially it looks as if the glory is entirely the kings', as if the wagoners' work were purely subsidiary and unimportant. But perhaps the very opposite is true. Perhaps the kings' glory rests on the work of the wagoners, on the fact that the wagoners have put in many years of laborious effort, reaping joy and success. Perhaps men like Bach or Mozart are kings of music only because, for two long centuries, they have offered so many lesser musicians the chance of reinterpreting their thoughts with love and conscientious attention to detail. And even the audience participates in this careful work as it hears the message of the great musicians.
"If you look at historical developments--in the arts no less than in the sciences--you will find that every discipline has long periods of quiescence or of slow growth. Even during these periods, however, the important thing is careful work, attention to detail. Everything that is not done with utter devotion falls into oblivion and, in fact, does not deserve to be remembered. And then, quite suddenly, this slow process, in which general historical developments introduce changes in the contents of a particular discipline, opens up new possibilities, quite unexpected contents. Talented men feel an almost magical attraction for the process of growth they can sense at work here, and so it happens that, within a few decades, a relatively small region of the world will produce major works of art or scientific discoveries of the greatest importance. In the late eighteenth century, for instance, classical music poured forth from Vienna; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries painting had its heyday in the Netherlands. True, great men are needed to express the new spiritual contents, to create the forms in which further developments can be molded, but they do not actually produce these new contents.
"Of course, it is quite possible that we are on the threshold of an exceptionally fruitful scientific epoch, in which case it would be wrong to dissuade any young man from participating in it. It seems unlikely that important developments will take place in more than one branch of art or science at one time; we ought to be grateful enough if it happens in any one area, if we can share in its glory either as bystanders or as active participants. It would be foolish to expect more. That is precisely why I find popular attacks on modern art--be it painting or music--so unjust. Once music and the plastic arts had solved the great problems posed to them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there just had to be a more restful period, in which much of the old could be preserved and new things were tested by trial and error. To compare modern compositions with the finest achievements of the great epoch of classical music seems utterly unfair. Perhaps we ought to finish the evening with the slow movement of Schubert's B Major Trio. Let's see how well you can play it."
We did as we were asked, and from the way in which Rolf played the somewhat melancholic C major figures in the second part of the movement, I could sense how sad he was at the thought that the great epoch of European music might be gone forever.
A few days later, when I walked into the hall where Sommerfeld usually gave his lectures, I spotted a dark-haired student with a somewhat secretive face in the third row. Sommerfeld had introduced us during my first visit and had then told me that he considered this boy to be one of his most talented students, one from whom I could learn a great deal. His name was Wolfgang Pauli, and for the rest of his life he was to be a good friend, though often a very severe critic.I sat down beside him and asked him if, after the lecture, I might consult him about my preparatory studies. Sommerfeld now entered the hall, and as soon as he started to address us Wolfgang whispered in my ear: "Doesn't he look the typical old Hussar officer?" After the lecture, we went back to the Institute of Theoretical Physics, where I asked Wolfgang two questions. I wanted to know how much experimental work had to be done by someone interested chiefly in theory, and what he thought of the respective importance of relativity and atomic theory…
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