Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and a pioneer of quantum mechanics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle". The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter. To preserve the conservation of energy in beta decay, Pauli proposed the existence of a small neutral particle, dubbed the "neutrino" by Enrico Fermi, in 1930. Neutrinos were first detected in 1956.
Biography Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was born on 25 April 1900 in Vienna, the son of Wolfgang Josef Pauli (né Pascheles) and Bertha Camilla Schütz. His sister was Hertha Pauli, a writer and actress. His middle name was given in honor of his godfather, physicist Ernst Mach. His paternal grandparents were from prominent Jewish families of Prague; his great-grandfather was the Jewish publisher Wolf Pascheles. Bertha was raised in her mother's Roman Catholic faith; her father was Jewish writer Friedrich Schütz. Pauli was also raised as a Roman Catholic. Pauli attended the Döblinger-Gymnasium in Vienna, graduating with distinction in 1918. Two months later, he published his first paper, on Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. He studied under Arnold Sommerfeld at LMU Munich, where he received his Ph.D. in 1921 with a thesis on the quantum theory of ionized diatomic hydrogen (H+2). Sommerfeld asked Pauli to review the theory of relativity for the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences. Two months after receiving his doctorate, Pauli completed the article, which came to 237 pages. Einstein praised it and published it as a monograph. It remains a standard reference on the subject. Pauli spent a year at the University of Göttingen as an assistant to Max Born, and the following year at the University of Copenhagen.
From 1923 to 1928, Pauli was a lecturer at the University of Hamburg. During this period, he was instrumental in the development of the modern theory of quantum mechanics. In particular, he formulated the exclusion principle and the theory of nonrelativistic spin. In 1928, Pauli was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1930. He held visiting professorships at the University of Michigan in 1931 and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1935. The German annexation of Austria in 1938 made Pauli a German citizen, which became a problem for him in 1939 when World War II broke out. In 1940, he tried in vain to obtain Swiss citizenship, which would have allowed him to remain at the ETH. The same year, he moved to the United States and was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1946, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen and returned to Zurich, where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1949, he was granted Swiss citizenship.
Carl Jung At the end of 1930, immediately after his divorce and his mother's death, Pauli experienced a personal crisis. In January 1932, he consulted psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung, who also lived near Zurich. Jung immediately began interpreting Pauli's deeply archetypal dreams and Pauli became a collaborator of Jung's. He soon began to critique the epistemology of Jung's theory scientifically, and this contributed to a certain clarification of Jung's ideas, especially about synchronicity. A great many of these discussions are documented in the Pauli/Jung letters, today published as Atom and Archetype. Jung's elaborate analysis of more than 400 of Pauli's dreams is documented in Psychology and Alchemy. In 1933 Pauli published the second part of his book on physics, Handbuch der Physik, which was considered the definitive book on the new field of quantum physics. Robert Oppenheimer called it "the only adult introduction to quantum mechanics."
Research
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
