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Well, there're certainly no Two Cultures in this exchange of letters. Two golden oldies, intellectual giants of the twentieth century, engage in a highly technical exploration of the relationships between spirit, psyche and matter. Pauli, of course, was one of the great architects of the quantum mechanical revolution of the 1920s. A precocious Wunderkind of physics, Pauli wrote his famous critical review of relativity for Sommerfeld's Encyklopaedie der mathematischen Wissenschaften in 1921 when he was still a student. Two years later, he discovered the fourth quantum number of the electron, now called its spin, and invented the Pauli matrices as its mathematical representation. In the process, he discovered the Pauli exclusion principle that unlocked the secret of Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements. And, in 1926, in a feat of mathematical virtuosity, he performed the decisive first calculation of the structure of the hydrogen atom using Heisenberg's unfamiliar matrix mechanics, a calculation that convinced Bohr and everyone else that the problem of creating a new dynamical theory of atomic processes had been solved. The excitement of the physics of this revolutionary period in its social surround is beautifully rendered by Michael Frayn in his fine play, Copenhagen.
These letters follow Frayn in evoking the past glories of Central European culture smashed to smithereens by National Socialism. We have Pauli in 1953 describing to Jung the personality of his godfather, Ernst Mach, Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna, his apartment ‘crammed full of prisms, spectroscopes, stroboscopes, electrostatic machines and the like’ (p. 60). Mach's criticism of classical mechanics inspired Einstein successfully to change one of the foundations of Newton's mechanics by making elapsed time a relative rather than absolute concept. Mach's ventures into the philosophy of physics inspired Lenin to write one of his most famous polemics Materialism and Empiriocriticism.