272 Chapter 18
attending a youth meeting at a castle, where his anguish over the lack of any “ unifying
center ” to his life “ was brought home to me with increasingly painful intensity the longer
I listened. I was suffering almost physically, but I was quite unable to discover a way
toward the center through the thicket of conflicting opinions. ” As he felt more and more
upset and as the evening shadows grew,quite suddenly, a young violinist appeared on a balcony above the courtyard. There was a hush as,
high above us, he struck up the first great D minor chords of Bach ’ s Chaconne [ ♪ sound example
18.1]. All at once, and with utter certainty, I had found my link with the center. The moonlit Altm ü hl
Valley below would have been reason enough for a romantic transfiguration, but that was not it. The
clear phrases of the Chaconne touched me like a cool wind, breaking through the mist and revealing
the towering structures beyond. There had always been a path to the central order in the language
of music, in philosophy and in religion, today no less than in Plato ’ s day and in Bach ’ s. That I now
knew from my own experience.^3Plato ’ s Timaeus figured largely in Heisenberg ’ s subsequent reflections, which led from
this musical epiphany to his ultimate decision to study physics. The inner turmoil he
experienced on the way to finding a new quantum theory also reflected his acute sense of
the cognitive dissonances of that confusing period, felt as intensely as the tension of
musical dissonance. Yet his published papers show no recognizable trace of these musi-
cally toned inner experiences precisely because they were so thoroughly transformed and
embedded into the structure of matrix mechanics that they can no longer be distinctly
perceived.
For Einstein and Heisenberg, as for many others of their and the next generation, the
musical groundwork had now become part of the mathematical and theoretical structures
that they tended to take for granted as their point of departure. To revert to our earlier
metaphor, the instrument of theoretical physics had been built and its tuning already
worked out in the course of the episodes studied earlier in this book; the newer generations
played it in their several styles, more or less taking it for granted, often without reflecting
on that instrument ’ s origins. Even so, the seemingly stratified musical content sometimes
resurfaced in surprising cases, such as that of Erwin Schr ö dinger, who was distinctly
unmusical, if not antimusical. As his biographer observed, “ almost uniquely among theo-
retical physicists, Erwin not only did not play any instrument himself, but even displayed
an active dislike for most kinds of music, except the occasional love song. He once ascribed
this antipathy to the fact that his mother died from a cancer of the breast, which he thought
was caused by mechanical trauma from her violin. More likely he learned this distaste for
music as a child, echoing his father ’ s lack of response to his mother ’ s art. ”^4
On the other hand, Schr ö dinger was deeply interested in color theory.^5 In the 1920s, he
was recognized as the world authority in this field, the successor to Helmholtz, and was
asked to write the authoritative monograph on the subject. Schr ö dinger kept publishing
papers on aspects of color theory through 1925, on the eve of his famous work on the
quantum-mechanical wave equation that bears his name. Thus, we might compare