PAULI, WOLFGANG

PAULI, WOLFGANG (1900–1958), Swiss physicist and Nobel laureate born in Vienna. His father was a physician born in Prague, who changed the family name from Pascheles to Pauli, and his mother, a writer, was born in Vienna. He was educated at the Doebling Gymnasium and received his doctorate in physics from the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich supervised by Arnold Sommerfeld (1921). After working for a year with Max Born at the University of Goettingen and a further year with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, he was a lecturer in physics at the University of Hamburg (1923–28). In 1928 he was appointed professor of theoretical physics at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (1928–40). In 1940 he held a German passport which classified him as 75% Jewish even though it was not stamped "Jewish." The Nazi threat and his failure to obtain Swiss naturalization at the time led him to move to Princeton University (1940–46). Further difficulties concerning his status at his former university were resolved following his receipt of the Nobel Prize and he returned to Zurich for the rest of his career. He served as head of the mathematics and physics section (1950–52). Pauli was one of the most influential theoretical physicists of the 20th century. He showed a precocious command of mathematics and physics while a schoolboy, and his life-long interest in quantum mechanics began at university. Early on he recognized the importance of particle spin in exploring the structure of the atom. He formulated the exclusion principle which states that no two fermions (defined as the elementary particles other than bosons) can have identical quantum numbers. This principle has profound implications for understanding the composition of the periodic table and cosmological issues. He was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in physics for this contribution which he was unable to receive personally because of political difficulties over his travel documents from the U.S. Later he predicted the existence of the neutrino, the elusive particle that accounts for the loss of energy in beta decay. He also elucidated the basis of the Zeeman effect whereby the spectral line is split into two or more components when the light source is placed in a magnetic field. This finding facilitated the adaptation of this observation to nuclear physics and astronomy. His work on spinors and the Pauli master equation also had important applications for studying particle spin. His other honors included foreign membership in the Royal Society of London (1953). Pauli was less successful as a teacher because his analytical, non-didactic style was often difficult to follow, and he could be abrasive in scientific discourse and criticism. Towards the end of his life Pauli became dissatisfied with science and his thoughts and writing incorporated much of his longstanding discourse with Carl Jung which had started for therapeutic reasons. He expressed no specific monotheistic belief but incorporated Jewish mysticism into his general mystical philosophy. (Michael Denman (2nd ed.)