Linus Pauling: I was very fortunate, you know I had come from Corvallis, Oregon Agricultural College.
During my first year there I studied all of the mathematics that was taught. And from
then on, for four years, since I stayed on teaching for a year, for four years I had
no more formal training in mathematics. I was eager to know more about mathematics
and my background and circumstances were such that it didn't occur to me that I could
study by myself and learn more about mathematics in that way. Then I came to Pasadena
and for the first time began to hear from the people there about the tremendous strides
that physics especially, physics and chemistry were making in just those years. It
was very exciting. I realized that it was possible to learn something more about nature.
Harold Urey, who you know discovered deuterium, later on received the Nobel Prize
and is now retired living in La Jolla, told me perhaps 20 years ago that perhaps he
was lucky to have gone to a similar college in Montana, while I was going, shortly
before I was going to Oregon Agricultural College, a place where the intellectual
level wasn't very high but where our curiosity became stimulated more and more because
we couldn't find the answers to our questions. And then he went to University of California
and I went to California Institute of Technology and there were people who knew the
answers to a lot of these questions and also knew that there were a great many questions
to which the answers had not yet been obtained. And in addition, they knew that there
were techniques available by means of which, if you worked hard enough, you might
be able to get the answer to the question. This was really a great experience and
I think that Harold may well be right that in a sense we were fortunate that our curiosity
about the world kept building up, not being satisfied until we reached a certain degree
of maturity.
I can't say that I'm sure about that, you have examples on the other side. When Pauli,
whose father was a university professor of chemistry in Vienna, was 17 years old he
attended the seminar in Berlin on the theory of relativity given by Einstein. And
this stripling, at the end of the seminar when the chairman asked if anyone had any
comment, got up and said that he thought there was an error in one of the conclusions
that Professor Einstein had reached. Well that isn't the end of the story. He was
asked to write the definitive article on the great Encyclopedia of Mathematical Knowledge on the theory of relativity. And at age 18 he wrote this definitive article. So he,
he, his experience was different. He had available to him at an early age the literature
and the teachers that enabled him to move along fast. He said that his father made
him go to bed at eleven o'clock at night during term time so that he wouldn't work
too hard and he was always glad when term time came because he was so tired-out from
working so hard all night during vacation that he needed the rest.
