Chapter 7
HOW CAN ONE BE HAPPY?
D
uring the summer of 1922, Germany enjoyed a momentary calm. Food was scarce, but few starved. Money was tight, but the hyperinflation that obliged people to cart around billions of marks’ worth of scruffy notes in wheelbarrows to buy bread and milk had not yet caught fire. In Göttingen, the weather was gorgeous, and it was there that theorists gathered in June to listen to a series of lectures on quantum theory from the subject’s acknowledged guide and master, Niels Bohr. Sommerfeld naturally went, and he insisted that his precocious and already controversial pupil Heisenberg come too. Even in the relatively well-to-do Heisenberg family there was little spare money to go around, so Sommerfeld paid for Werner’s trip to Göttingen out of his own pocket. Heisenberg slept on
