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)
Bell's inequality tests locality.
Hidden variables are ruled out.
The measurement problem persists.
Decoherence explains collapse.
Many worlds are parallel.
Objective collapse is ad hoc.
Quantum Darwinism selects realities.
The cat is both alive and dead.
Superposition is the essence.
Wave function evolves unitarily.
Born rule gives probabilities.
The density matrix describes mixtures.
Von Neumann's no-go theorem is profound.
Measurement disturbs the system.
The correspondence principle guides quantization.
Old quantum theory is semi-classical.
Adiabatic invariants are conserved.
Action-angle variables simplify Hamiltonians.
Perturbation theory approximates solutions.
The WKB approximation is semi-classical.
Contemporaries of Wolfgang Pauli
Other Physicss born within 50 years of Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958).