Yuri Danoyan

What Wolfgang Pauli does mean?

I meet book W..Heisenberg (Physics and Beyond, Harper and Row, New York (1974), where talking about some Christmascard send by Pauli to Heisenberg about some incomplete idea.Text was very enigmatic:

"Division and reduction of symmetry, this then is the kernel of the brute! The former is an ancient attribute of the devil."

I send letter to Professor Hans Primas,Professor for Theoretical Chemistry at ETH; Zuerich, Switzerland

a explorer legacy of Pauli for more detail and get next letter from him:

Dear Yuri Danoyan,

The original German quotation is: "Zweiteilung und Symmetrievemindeung, das ist des Pudels Kern. Zweiteilung ist ein sehr altes Attribut des Teufels. (Das Wort Zweifel soll urspЁ№nglichch Zweiteilung bedeutet haben)." It is in a letter by Pauli to Heisenberg, who quote it (without given the date of the letter) in: W. Heisenberg, Wolfgang Paulis philosophische Auffassungen, Die Naturwissenschaften, vol. 46 (1959), pp.661-663.

It is again quoted in W. Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze , Piper Verlag , Muenchen (1969), p.317. In the English translation of this book (Physics and Beyond, Harper and Row, New York (1974), p.234) it is translated as: "Division and reduction of symmetry, this then is the kernel of the brute! The former is an ancient attribute of the devil."

It is notoriously difficult to translate Pauli's striking and succinct German in another language. Here Pauli refers to Goethe's Faust, part 1, second scene "Faust's study".