Ehrenfest not only cherished their proximity but thought that all searchers of truth formed a community for lost souls, a refuge of sorts, the hearth, he said, of the home that we have lost due to reason’s destructive influence, which has ruined our capacity for living. Paul, who had placed all his faith in physics, now felt let down, cast out from a paradise that, due to the increasing influence of quantum mechanics and the unstoppable spread of the mathematical plague, was retreating into a darkness deeper than the abyss within atoms.