Wolfgang Pauli
Formulated the exclusion principle
Most quoted
"When I was young, I thought I was the best formalist of my time. I thought I was a revolutionary. When the big problems would come, I would be the one to solve them. But then the great revolution came, it was Heisenberg and Dirac who made it. I was only a classicist."
— from Self-reflection
"The layman always means, when he says 'reality,' that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality."
— from Letter to Markus Fierz, 1954
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
— from Attributed to Max Planck, but often quoted by Pauli in discussions of scientific change
All quotes by Wolfgang Pauli (673)
Scattering theory describes interactions.
S-matrix is unitary.
Dispersion relations connect amplitudes.
Regge poles explain resonances.
Bootstrap hypothesis is self-consistent.
QCD is the theory of strong force.
Asymptotic freedom allows perturbation.
Confinement is a puzzle.
Quarks are fundamental.
Color charge is SU(3).
Gluons mediate the force.
The standard model unifies forces.
Grand unification predicts proton decay.
Neutrino oscillations imply mass.
See-saw mechanism explains hierarchy.
Supersymmetry solves hierarchy problem.
Extra dimensions are compactified.
The landscape of string theory is vast.
M-theory unifies strings.
Loop quantum gravity quantizes space.
Contemporaries of Wolfgang Pauli
Other Physicss born within 50 years of Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958).