Physicist Phriday

Wolfgang Pauli

Born in Vienna in 1900, Pauli is best known for the exclusion principle that bears his name, but was also famous during his life for what was called the Pauli Effect, which referred to his ability to break scientific equipment simply by being in its vicinity. It is now an effect attributed to all theoretical physicists by their experimental counterparts.

When his first wife left him in 1929, he is said to have been completely shocked that she chose instead a chemist. "Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood, but a chemist?"

Pauli was known as 'the conscience of physics' for being a meticulous perfectionist. He is attributed of saying of a somewhat lacking paper written by a colleague, "This isn't right. It isn't even wrong!" He was good friend and correspondent to Carl Jung, and paved the way for Dirac to discover that equation of his. Einstein nominated him for the Nobel Prize, and he won it in 1945. He died in 1958 of pancreatic cancer.