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)
The unity of knowledge requires a bridge between the natural sciences and the humanities.
The search for symmetry principles is the most profound activity in theoretical physics.
I cannot believe God plays dice with the universe—but it seems He does.
The history of physics is a history of increasingly precise concepts and increasingly abstract mathematics.
The positivist only sees what is measurable, but the most important things are often not measurable.
The Copenhagen interpretation is not a philosophy, it is a warning not to philosophize beyond what the formalism allows.
The 'inner' and the 'outer' world are complementary aspects of one reality.
The goal of science is not to open a door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
A theory that is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific.
The discovery of the exclusion principle was for me a matter of pure logic, not of physical intuition.
The mathematical framework of quantum mechanics is complete; the interpretation is the philosophical problem.
The so-called 'Pauli Effect' is merely the manifestation of my unconscious opposition to imperfect apparatus.
We must remember that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
Contemporaries of Wolfgang Pauli
Other Physicss born within 50 years of Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958).