“His ideas are always very interesting,” Pauli said, “but his calculations are always wrong.” After listening to Robert lecture one day, and hearing him pause, groping for words and murmuring little “nim-nim-nim” sounds, Pauli took to calling him the “nim-nim-nim man.” Yet Pauli was fascinated by this complicated young American. “His strength,” Pauli soon wrote Ehrenfest, “is that he has many and good ideas, and has much imagination. His weakness is that he is much too quickly satisfied with poorly based statements, that he does not answer his own often quite interesting questions for lack of
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