Standing Together In Troubled Times: Unpublished Letters Of Pauli, Einstein, Franck And Others

Book excerpt: 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.