Horst Meyer’s letter in the June 2004 issue of Physics Today, (page 16) reminded me of an amusing incident involving Wolfgang Pauli that occurred two years after Horst had left Zürich. As part of a faculty exchange arrangement with the University of Rochester, I spent the academic year 1954–55 at the Physics Institute of the University of Basel in Switzerland. In May 1955 I traveled to Lausanne to deliver a paper at a meeting of the Swiss Physical Society, where two simultaneous sessions were held in adjacent lecture halls. Pauli, seated in the front row, presided over the session that I attended. When a speaker presenting a paper stated that one result of his work disagreed with a prediction made by Hans Bethe, Pauli stood up. After apologizing for interrupting the speaker, he said that he couldn’t help remarking that “it is always a sign of progress in physics when one of Bethe’s theories is disproved.” Then he sat down again, allowing the speaker to continue his talk. While listening, he resumed his habit of rocking his head back and forth, a habit that a Swiss colleague described as Pauli’s Eigenschwingungen (that is, “characteristic oscillations”).
After the session, many of the participants adjourned to a nearby park on a slope bordering Lake Geneva. Pauli lumbered uphill with some effort and settled on the stump of a recently felled tree while he conversed with several people. With his large girth in those days, I remember thinking that he reminded me of pictures of the old Aga Khan.
