The Message of the Atoms

When I meet a difficult problem, I begin to go around it, approaching it again and again from different directions. If I persistently continue these approaches, it can happen that no problem remains. (RolfNevanlinna, in a private discussion.) In 1976, after a mainly administrative period of some 15 years, I spent a couple of months at CERN, working in the Pauli Collection. When I found the Pauli-Fierz correspondence, I had the intuitive feeling that there was the key: that "it was an objective description, and that it was the only possible objective description" for the mysteries of quantum mechanics. Here I have cited Bohr in his 'last interview' (see Chap. 7), which I became acquainted with only later, but I was immediately convinced that Pauli's view was more profound than anything else I had read about in quantum mechanics. However, nowadays the investigation of the foundations of quantum theory is dominated by 'realism', which means that the influence of the psyche on our