Wolfgang Pauli Quotes

It is always the older that emanates the new one.

The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.

Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato , interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato , looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.

It is not only not right, it is not even wrong.

Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.

One shouldn't work on semiconductors, that is a filthy mess; who knows whether any semiconductors exist.

A colleague who met me strolling rather aimlessly in the beautiful streets of Copenhagen said to me in a friendly manner, "You look very unhappy"; whereupon I answered fiercely, "How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?".

I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.

Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet. (There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet.)

{A remark made during the Fifth Solvay International Conference (October 1927), after a discussion of the religious views of various physicists, at which all the participants laughed, including Dirac, as quoted in Teil und das Ganze (1969), by Werner Heisenberg, p. 119; it is an ironic play on the Muslim statement of faith, the Shahada, often translated: 'There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.'}

Physics is very muddled again at the moment; it is much too hard for me anyway, and I wish I were a movie comedian or something like that and had never heard anything about physics!

That theory is worthless. It isn't even wrong!

Why did the chicken cross the road? there already was a chicken on this side of the road.

... it should be remembered that the atomicity of electric charge has already found its expression in the specific numerical value of the fine structure constant, a theoretical understanding of which is still missing today.

Wolfgang Pauli, in the months before Heisenberg's paper on matrix mechanics pointed the way to a new quantum theory, wrote to a friend, "At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it is too difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics." That testimony is particularly impressive if contrasted with Pauli's words less than five months later: "Heisenberg's type of mechanics has again given me hope and joy in life. To be sure it does not supply the solution to the riddle, but I believe it is again possible to march forward.

Later, however, I came to recognize the objective nature of these dreams or fantasies ... Thus it was that I gradually came to acknowledge that such fantasies or dreams are neither meaningless nor purely arbitrary but rather convey a sort of "second meaning" of the terms applied.

You know, what Einstein has just said isn't so stupid.

Aristotle was by far a less able thinker than Plato ... he was completely overwhelmed by Plato.

Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him.

This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian . [A big drawing of a rectangle] Only technical details are missing.

I refuse to believe that God is a weak left-hander.

That's not right. That's not even wrong.

There can never be two or more equivalent electrons in an atom, for which in a strong field the values of all the quantum numbers n, k1, k2 and m are the same. If an electron is present, for which these quantum numbers (in an external field) have definite values, then this state is 'occupied.'

The natural scientist is concerned with a particular kind of phenomena ... he has to confine himself to that which is reproducible ... I do not claim that the reproducible by itself is more important than the unique. But I do claim that the unique exceeds the treatment by scientific method. Indeed it is the aim of this method to find and test natural laws ...

It isn't right. It isn't even wrong.

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.

From the point of view of logic, my report on 'Exclusion principle and quantum mechanics' has no conclusion. I believe that it will only be possible to write the conclusion if a theory will be established which will determine the value of the fine structure constant and will thus explain the atomistic structure of electricity, which is such an essential quality of all atomic sources of electric fields actually occurring in nature.

God made the bulk; the surface was invented by the devil.

How can one avoid despondency if one thinks of the anomalous Zeeman effect?

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.

It seems significant that according to quantum physics the indestructibility of energy on one hand which expresses its timeless existence and the appearance of energy in space and time on the other hand correspond to two contradictory (complementary) aspects of reality. In fact, both are always present, but in individual cases the one or the other may be more pronounced.

When one analyzes the pre-conscious step to concepts, one always finds ideas which consist of 'symbolic images.' The first step to thinking is a painted vision of these inner pictures whose origin cannot be reduced only and firstly to the sensual perception but which are produced by an 'instinct to imagining' and which are re-produced by different individuals independently, i.e. collectively ... But the archaic image is also the necessary predisposition and the source of a scientific attitude. To a total recognition belong also those images out of which have grown the rational concepts.

For quite a while I have set for myself the rule if a theoretician says 'universal' it just means pure nonsense.