Physicists
Under Construction
Content will be added in the fall semester 2021 and the spring semester 2022.
UZH and ETH: Two Locations
to be added
The Stars: Albert Einstein & Erwin Schrödinger
Of all the phycisists who have worked in Zurich, Anglophone writers have clearly found Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger the most fascinating.
The Einstein corpus is small but varied. This seems to have to do not only with his status as a cultural icon, or with the general public's (relative) familiarity with the theory of relativity, but also with several fascets of his personal biography (e.g. his Jewishness, against the backdrop of the rise of National Socialism; the love story between him and Mileva Marić; or the fact that he emigrated to the U.S.).
In Schrödinger's case, by contrast, the corpus is not only small, but also dominated, perhaps unsurprisingly, by one single theme: Schrödinger's cat.
The Missing Third: Wolfgang Pauli
Unlike Einstein and Schrödinger, who are at the center of some Zurich texts, Wolfgang Pauli barely makes an appearance. This is especially surprising given that Pauli collaborated closely with C. G. Jung, one of the most prominent figures in the Anglophone Zurich corpus.
The only two novels in which Pauli in Zurich is referenced briefly are:
- Andrew Crumey, Mobius Dick (explicitly linked to C. G. Jung)
- Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy: A Novel in Clues
In addition, the following novel briefly references the ETH Zurich and then, only a little later, "Wolfgang Pauli's Synchronicity principle":
- Philip K. Dick, Our Friends from Frolix 8
