The Paula Scale

Paris, 1967. Jacques Tati is sixty years old, his masterwork is finished, and he has just lost everything. Playtime is in the can. He shot it in seventy millimetre. He built an entire city for it -- Tativille, fifteen thousand square metres of glass and steel on the wasteland outside Paris, with movable façades and a working metro stop. It took three years. It bankrupted him. He has lost his house...

Chicago, September 1954. Enrico Fermi is fifty-three and has just returned from teaching the summer school at Varenna on the Italian lakes. He still walks to the office at the University of Chicago every morning. He derived the statistics of half-integer-spin particles in 1926, calculated the theory of beta decay in 1933, built the world's first nuclear reactor under the squash court at Stagg Fiel...

Berkeley, late 1989. Paul Feyerabend is sixty-five, retired from the philosophy department where he taught for thirty-six years, and has sat down to write Conquest of Abundance -- the book he believes is his real work, even though Against Method sold a hundred thousand copies and earned him the title of the worst enemy of science. He walks with a cane. He has walked with a cane since 1945, when a...

Stockholm, December 1954. Max Born is seventy-two and has just received the Nobel Prize. The committee has cited him for the Born rule: |psi|² is probability – the wave function does not tell you what will happen, it tells you what might happen, and how much each possibility weighs. He published this in July 1926 in a footnote in the proof of a paper. He had first written that the wave function it...

Dublin, 1954. Erwin Schroedinger is sixty-seven and has lived in Ireland for fourteen years. He is at the Institute for Advanced Studies, the one Eamon de Valera built around him. Two years from now he will return to Vienna, but he does not know that yet – these are the years he will later call the happiest of his life. The house holds his wife Anny, his companion Hilde March, and Hilde’s daughter...

Princeton, New Jersey. 1972. Kurt Gödel is sixty-six. He lives in a quiet house on Linden Lane with his wife Adele, who is the reason he is still alive. The food is not always safe. He is careful -- careful in a way that has tipped into something he calls prudence and others call paranoia, and the fact that the difference between the two is not always visible from the outside is itself a fact he h...

Königsberg, September 1930. David Hilbert is sixty-eight years old, the most influential mathematician of his generation, and in excellent spirits. The day before, he stepped in front of a microphone at the end of his retirement lecture and closed with eight words that will be carved on his tombstone: "Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen." We must know. We will know. After forty years he has hand...

Prague, 1888. Ernst Mach is fifty years old and has just finished developing eighty photographic plates. With his collaborator Peter Salcher firing rifle bullets through the field of an electric-spark schlieren rig, he has done something that has never been done: he has photographed a shock wave. You can see the bow wave preceding the projectile. You can see the angle change as the velocity increa...

Helsinki, 1913. Before Paula tells you about today's conversation she needs to tell you about a visit that will not become an episode. She went to see Karl Frithiof Sundman, a Finnish mathematician who had just been awarded the Pontecoulant Prize by the French Academy of Sciences. The Academy doubled the prize for him -- they had never done that before -- because he had solved the three-body probl...

Leiden, late October 1927. Paul Ehrenfest has just come home from the Fifth Solvay Conference in Brussels and has not slept properly in four days. Tatiana, his wife, is waiting at Witte Rozenstraat 57 with tea, a pencil, and questions. He is Austrian. She is Russian. They met at the University of Goettingen because he argued with the administration to let her into the mathematics club -- women wer...

Copenhagen, 1962. Niels Bohr is seventy-seven and living in the Carlsberg Honorary Residence – a mansion provided by the brewery, complete with a life annuity of beer, reserved for the Dane the country considered most worth keeping comfortable. He is in his last year. He is still pacing the long corridor and still relighting his pipe, the way he has relit it for sixty years, because his hands need...

Vevey, April 1972. Charlie Chaplin is eighty-three. He is sitting in his house above Lake Geneva. A few weeks ago he flew to Los Angeles for the first time in twenty years to receive an Honorary Oscar, and the Academy stood and applauded for twelve minutes. He has lived through the war, the camps becoming public knowledge, the FBI hounding him out of America, two decades of exile in Switzerland, a...

Pasadena, 1986. Richard Feynman is sixty-seven and has not slept. He has just finished serving on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger disaster, where he dunked a piece of O-ring rubber in a glass of ice water on live television and showed America that the rubber loses its resilience at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, and that this is the whole disaster. The appendix he wrote for the...

London, 1972. Arnold Toynbee is writing a narrative history of the entire world in a single volume. He suspects this cannot be done in a single volume, but he is too far in to stop. He has spent the morning on the Sumerians and is grateful for the interruption. Sixty years earlier, as a young classicist walking through the Greek countryside, Toynbee looked up from his copy of Thucydides and realis...

Munich, 1965. Werner Heisenberg is sixty-four. He directs the Max Planck Institute for Physics and spends his evenings playing late Beethoven sonatas. He is chasing a unified field theory – a single equation for everything – and his colleagues are quietly certain it will not work. Forty years earlier, on a night in June 1925, Heisenberg was twenty-three and nearly blind from hay fever. He had fled...

Goettingen, 1947. Max Planck is eighty-nine. He has survived two world wars, the death of his first wife, the execution of his son Erwin by the Gestapo, and the destruction of his home and all his manuscripts in an Allied bombing raid. He carries all of it. And he is still thinking. In October 1900, Planck – the most conservative physicist of his generation – wrote down an equation that broke phys...

Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. Autumn 1934. Emmy Noether is fifty-two, exiled from Goettingen, surrounded by students who adore her. Paula has visited before. In 1918, Hilbert had a problem -- energy seemed to vanish in general relativity. He asked Noether to help. She solved his problem and, in passing, proved something far deeper: every continuous symmetry in the universe corresponds to a cons...

This Episode In this episode Paula visits Albert Einstein in Princeton, 1947. Their conversation covers the EPR paradox, the Trennungsprinzip, the unified field theory, Gödel’s rotating universe, the Besso letter, and the question Einstein spent thirty years trying to answer: what is the real thing behind quantum mechanics — der wahre Jakob? Paula introduces the Paula Scale and Q-Level Three. Gues...