Standing Together in Troubled Times

Unpublished Letters by Pauli, Einstein, Franck and Others

"This book is fascinating not only because through the various documents, readers get to know about the predicament and concerns of some of the (mostly) Germanic physicists of the time, but also because, for the first time, the work offers previously unpublished documentation. The presentation of these documents makes historical archives within reach for future historians."

CHOICE Connect

This captivating book is a story of the friendship between a genius physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Charlotte Houtermans whose career in physics was not as glamorous. They met in the late 1920s in Germany, at the very onset of the quantum era and personally knew all the major players in the emergent quantum world that was very much part of central Europe: Germany, Austria, Hungary, Denmark and Switzerland. And Charlotte was a student at Göttingen that was right at the heart.

Caught between two evils — Soviet Communism and German National Socialism — she would have probably perished if it were not for the brotherhood of physicists: Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Max Born, Robert Oppenheimer and many other noted scientists who tried to save friends and colleagues (either leftist sympathizers or Jews) who were in mortal danger of being entrapped in a simmering pre-WWII Europe.

Using newly discovered documents from the Houtermans family archive: twenty three Pauli's letters to Charlotte Houtermans, her correspondence with other great physicists, Charlotte's diaries, interviews with her children, almost all documents presented in this book are published for the first time.

Contents:

• Preface
• Pages of Wolfgang Pauli's Biography
• Ascent: Charlotte Houtermans' Life and Destiny
• Pauli's Letters
• Gardens and Friendships by Charlotte Houtermans
• Other Letters
• German Originals of Pauli's Letters

Readership: Students, researchers, academicians and historians of science.