Wolfgang Pauli Quotes

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

I do not mind if you think slowly, but I do object when you publish more quickly than you think.

It would be most satisfactory if physics and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality

Our friend Dirac has a creed; and the main tenet of that creed is: There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.

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.'}

A synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity is the mythos, spoken or unspoken, or our present day and age.

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.

Physicists are notoriously scornful of scientists from other fields. When the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s wife left him for a chemist, he was staggered with disbelief. ‘Had she taken a bullfighter13 I would have understood,’ he remarked in wonder to a friend. ‘But a chemist …

When I die, my first question to the devil will be: What is the meaning of the fine structure constant?

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

If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli's, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli's analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists.

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

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.

In 1952, through his collaboration with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung argued that there existed a principle of acausal orderedness that underlay such "meaningful coincidences," which he called synchronicity. He claimed that under certain circumstances, the constellation of an archetype led to a relativization of time and space, which explained how such events could happen. This was an attempt to expand scientific understanding to accommodate events such as his visions of 1913 and 1914.

Einstein was remarkable for his powers of concentration; he could work uninterruptedly for hours and even days on the same problem. Some of the topics that interested him remained on his mind for decades. For relaxation he turned to music and to sailing, but often his work would continue during these moments as well; he usually had a notebook in his pocket so that he could jot down any idea that came to him. Once, after the theory of relativity had been put forth, he confessed to his colleague Wolfgang Pauli, "For the rest of my life I want to reflect on what light is." It is perhaps not entirely an accident that a focus on light is also the first visual act of the newborn child.

.....what is the nature of the bridge between the sense perceptions and the concepts?

How can one look happy when he is contemplating the anomolous Zeeman effect? (Wolfgang Pauli)

As ordering operators and image formers in this world of symbolic images, the archetypes thus function as the sought-for bridge between the sense perceptions and the ideas and are, accordingly, a necessary presupposition even for evolving a scientific theory of nature. However, one must guard against transferring this a priori of knowledge into the conscious mind and relating it to definite ideas capable of rational formulation.

Physicists are notoriously scornful of scientists from other fields. When the wife of the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli left him for a chemist, he was staggered with disbelief. “Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood,” he remarked in wonder to a friend. “But a chemist …

Realizing its fundamental importance in understanding spectral lines, in atomic physics and in the theory of how light and electrons interact, quantum electrodynamics, Pauli and Heisenberg were determined to derive it from quantum theory rather than introducing it from the start. They believed that if they could find a version of quantum electrodynamics capable of producing the fine structure constant, it would not contain the infinities that marred their theories.

As I regard physics and psychology as complementary types of examination, I am certain that there is an equally valid way that must lead the psychologist 'from behind' (namely, through investigating the archetypes) into the world of physics. As an example of background physics, I shall discuss a motif that occurs regularly in my dreams - namely, fine structure, in particular doublet structure of spectral lines and the separation of a chemical element into two isotopes.

Einstein's life ended.....with a demand on us for synthesis.

Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch

When I die, my first question to the devil will be: What is the meaning of the fine structure constant

The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics.

One should no more rack one’s brain about the problem of whether something one cannot know anything about exists all the same, than about the ancient problem of how many angels are able to sit on the point of a needle.

As chairman of the physics department, Professor Max Born nurtured the work of Heisenberg, Eugene Wigner, Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi. It was Born who in 1924 coined the term “quantum mechanics,” and it was Born who suggested that the outcome of any interaction in the quantum world is determined by chance. In 1954 he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. A pacifist and a Jew, Born was regarded by his students as an unusually warm and patient teacher. He was the ideal mentor for a young student with Robert’s delicate temperament.

When Jung first advanced this idea, most physicists did not take it seriously (although one eminent physicist of the time, Wolfgang Pauli, felt it was important enough to coauthor a book with Jung on the subject entitled The Interpretation and Nature of the Psyche). But now that the existence of nonlocal connections has been established, some physicists are giving Jung's idea another look. * Physicist Paul Davies states, "These non-local quantum effects are indeed a form of synchronicity in the sense that they establish a connection—more precisely a correlation—between events for which any form of causal linkage is forbidden.

A good example of the archetypal ideas which the archetypes produce are natural numbers or integers. With the aid of the integers the shaping and ordering of our experiences becomes exact. Another example is mathematical group theory. ...important applications of group theory are symmetries which can be found in most different connections both in nature and among the 'artifacts' produced by human beings. Group theory also has important applications in mathematics and mathematical physics. For example, the theory of elementary particles and their interactions can in essential respects be reduced to abstract symmetries. [The Message of the Atoms: Essays on Wolfgang Pauli and the Unspeakable]

The process of understanding nature as well as the happiness that man feels in understanding- that is, in the conscious realization or new knowledge- seems thus to be based on a correspondence, a ''matching'' of inner images pre-existent in the human psyche with external objects and their behavior. This interpretation of scientific knowledge, of course, goes back to Plato and is, as we shall see, advocated very clearly by Kepler.

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.

The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics. We believe that any regression to the ideas of classical physics (as, for instance, to the use of the classical field concept)cannot bring us nearer to this goal. To reach it, we shall, presumably, have to pay with further revolutionary changes of the fundamental concepts of physics with a still farther digression from the concepts of the classical theories.

Perhaps the most arresting of quantum improbabilities is the idea, arising from Wolfgang Pauli’s Exclusion Principle of 1925, that the subatomic particles in certain pairs, even when separated by the most considerable distances, can each instantly “know” what the other is doing. Particles have a quality known as spin and, according to quantum theory, the moment you determine the spin of one particle, its sister particle, no matter how distant away, will immediately begin spinning in the opposite direction and at the same rate. It is as if, in the words of the science writer Lawrence Joseph, you had two identical pool balls, one in Ohio and the other in Fiji, and the instant you sent one spinning the other would immediately spin in a contrary direction at precisely the same speed. Remarkably, the phenomenon was proved in 1997 when physicists at the University of Geneva sent photons seven miles in opposite directions and demonstrated that interfering with one provoked an instantaneous response in the other.

Perhaps the most arresting of quantum improbabilities is the idea, arising from Wolfgang Pauli’s Exclusion Principle of 1925, that certain pairs of subatomic particles, even when separated by the most considerable distances, can each instantly “know” what the other is doing. Particles have a quality known as spin and, according to quantum theory, the moment you determine the spin of one particle, its sister particle, no matter how distant away, will immediately begin spinning in the opposite direction and at the same rate. It is as if, in the words of the science writer Lawrence Joseph, you had two identical pool balls, one in Ohio and the other in Fiji, and that the instant you sent one spinning the other would immediately spin in a contrary direction at precisely the same speed. Remarkably, the phenomenon was proved in 1997 when physicists at the University of Geneva sent photons seven miles in opposite directions and demonstrated that interfering with one provoked an instantaneous response in the other. Things

Not only alchemy but also the heliocentric idea furnishes instructive examples of the problem as to how the process of knowing is connected with the religious experience of transmutation undergone by him who acquires knowledge [ Wandlungserlebnis dos Erkennenden ]; it transcends natural science and can be comprehended only through symbols, which both express the emotional, feeling aspect of the experience and stand in vital relationship to the sum total of contemporary knowledge and the actual process of cognition.

Present at the first, in October 1927, were the three grand masters who had helped launch the new era of physics but were now skeptical of the weird realm of quantum mechanics it had spawned: Hendrik Lorentz, 74, just a few months from death, the winner of the Nobel for his work on electromagnetic radiation; Max Planck, 69, winner of the Nobel for his theory of the quantum; and Albert Einstein, 48, winner of the Nobel for discovering the law of the photoelectric effect. Of the remaining twenty-six attendees, more than half had won or would win Nobel Prizes as well. The boy wonders of the new quantum mechanics were all there, hoping to convert or conquer Einstein: Werner Heisenberg, 25; Paul Dirac, 25; Wolfgang Pauli, 27; Louis de Broglie, 35; and from America, Arthur Compton, 35. Also there was Erwin Schrödinger, 40, caught between the young Turks and the older skeptics. And, of course, there was the old Turk, Niels Bohr, 42, who had helped spawn quantum mechanics with his model of the atom and become the staunch defender of its counterintuitive ramifications.

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli has pointed out that, due to new discoveries, our idea of the evolution of life requires a revision that might take into account an area of interrelation between the unconscious psycho and biological processes. Until recently it was assumed that the mutation of species happened at random and that a selection took place by means of which the "meaningful," well-adapted varieties survived, and the other disappeared. But modern evolutionists have pointed out that the selections of such mutations by pure chance would have taken much longer than the known age of our planet allows... Jung's concept of synchronicity may be helpful here, for it could throw light upon the occurrence of certain rare "border-phenomena," or exceptional events; thus it might explain how "meaningful" adaptations and mutations could happen in less time than that required by entirely random mutations. Today we know of many instances in which meaningful "chance" events have occurred when an archetype is activated. For example, the history of science contains many cases of simultaneous invention or discovery.

A square space with complicated ceremonies going on in it, the purpose of which is to transform animals into men. Two snakes, moving in opposite directions, have to be got rid of at once. Some animals are there, e.g. foxes and dogs. The people walk around the square and must let themselves be bitten by these animals in each of the four corners . If they run away all is lost. Now the higher animals come on to the scene-bulls and ibexes. Four snakes glide into the four corners. Then the congregation flies out. Two sacrificial priests carry in a huge reptile and with this they touch the forehead of a shapeless animal lump or life-mass. Out of it there instantly rises a human head, transfigured. A voice proclaims: "These are attempts at being.

THEORY OF ALMOST EVERYTHING After the war, Einstein, the towering figure who had unlocked the cosmic relationship between matter and energy and discovered the secret of the stars, found himself lonely and isolated. Almost all recent progress in physics had been made in the quantum theory, not in the unified field theory. In fact, Einstein lamented that he was viewed as a relic by other physicists. His goal of finding a unified field theory was considered too difficult by most physicists, especially when the nuclear force remained a total mystery. Einstein commented, “I am generally regarded as a sort of petrified object, rendered blind and deaf by the years. I find this role not too distasteful, as it corresponds fairly well with my temperament.” In the past, there was a fundamental principle that guided Einstein’s work. In special relativity, his theory had to remain the same when interchanging X, Y, Z, and T. In general relativity, it was the equivalence principle, that gravity and acceleration could be equivalent. But in his quest for the theory of everything, Einstein failed to find a guiding principle. Even today, when I go through Einstein’s notebooks and calculations, I find plenty of ideas but no guiding principle. He himself realized that this would doom his ultimate quest. He once observed sadly, “I believe that in order to make real progress, one must again ferret out some general principle from nature.” He never found it. Einstein once bravely said that “God is subtle, but not malicious.” In his later years, he became frustrated and concluded, “I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious.” Although the quest for a unified field theory was ignored by most physicists, every now and then, someone would try their hand at creating one. Even Erwin Schrödinger tried. He modestly wrote to Einstein, “You are on a lion hunt, while I am speaking of rabbits.” Nevertheless, in 1947 Schrödinger held a press conference to announce his version of the unified field theory. Even Ireland’s prime minister, Éamon de Valera, showed up. Schrödinger said, “I believe I am right. I shall look an awful fool if I am wrong.” Einstein would later tell Schrödinger that he had also considered this theory and found it to be incorrect. In addition, his theory could not explain the nature of electrons and the atom. Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli caught the bug too, and proposed their version of a unified field theory. Pauli was the biggest cynic in physics and a critic of Einstein’s program. He was famous for saying, “What God has torn asunder, let no man put together”—that is, if God had torn apart the forces in the universe, then who were we to try to put them back together?

In his first philosophical lecture on modern physics that Pauli gave in November 1934 to the Zurich Philosophical Society he said that only a formulation of quantum theory would be satisfactory which expresses the relation between the value of [the fine structure constant] and charge conservation in the same complementary was as that between the space-time description and energy-momentum conservation.

The prime number 137 had continuously occupied Pauli's mind. It is an approximate value for a constant appearing in the fine structure theory of atomic spectra which in its theoretical expression ties together electromagnetism, relativity and quantum theory. Pauli saw the fine structure theory of spectra as a key in understanding the deepest contemporary problems of theoretical physics. For that reason the number 137 possessed a mysterious attraction for him.

What happens to a billiard ball, say, if you shoot it through a wormhole at its slightly younger self, trying to deflect it off course? A physicist at the Russian Space Institute in Moscow named Igor Novikov worked out the math that would govern a trans-temporal, suicidal (or at least self-inhibiting) billiards game (a sort of cross between billiards and Russian roulette), and he discovered something remarkably reassuring: physical law would actually prevent the billiard ball from inhibiting its past self. In fact, a principle of self-consistency would govern a wormhole-riddled universe. Even if an object could enter a wormhole at some time point B and emerge earlier, at some time point A, it could never actually interfere with its own entry into the wormhole at that later time point B.7 Two of Thorne’s students checked and found that Novikov was right: a time-traveling billiard ball cannot take the place of its younger self.8 (According to physicist Nick Herbert, it is analogous to the exclusion principle discovered by Wolfgang Pauli, which prevents any two electrons from occupying the same states simultaneously—a principle that ultimately makes the world built of tiny probabilistic particles solid.9) More recently, the physicist Seth Lloyd designed and actually conducted such an experiment using a photon and what he called a quantum gun—essentially shooting the photon a few billionths of a second back in time to interfere with its past self. He discovered he couldn’t. “No matter how hard the time-traveler tries, she finds her grandfather is a tough guy to kill.”10 This does not mean that time travel is impossible. Quite the contrary. It means that the time-traveling object encounters and interacts with its earlier self in precisely such a way that its later entry into the wormhole is facilitated rather than impeded. In other words, all possible paths of a billiard ball entering a wormhole would, upon exiting the wormhole earlier, nudge itself into the mouth of the wormhole later, thus completing the causal tautology, or what physicists call the closed-timelike curve. These days, quantum physicists like Lloyd use the idiom of postselection, a kind of informational-causal Darwinism that ensures that the only information that survives its journey into the past is information that does not foreclose its origins in the future. It’s not like there’s a Causality Police stepping in now and again to prevent grandfather paradoxes from occurring, or that time travelers need to step gingerly in the past to avoid disturbing things (a common trope in time-travel stories)—although they may in fact find that funny paranormal experiences impede them in ways they hadn’t expected. Guns might misfire at a crucial moment, for instance. (There’s nothing keeping you from trying to kill your grandfather.) But mainly, it is that time travelers from the future who survive their journey into the past are the ones whose actions somehow lead to the identical future from which they will have been sent back. Time loops, in other words.

Leibniz rejected the idea that fundamental reality was made up of material atoms; he posited instead that mind, particularly the Divine Mind, was the ground of reality manifest in all the infinite monads. In this theory, Leibniz actually presages many twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, including the theories of Wolfgang Pauli and psychiatrist Carl Jung regarding the continuity of the inner concepts of the psyche and the outer archetypes encountered in the world of physics. For Jung, psyche—or mind—bridged that gap, and Leibniz would agree, arguing that reality is, at base, conscious. I also see similarity between Maximus the Confessor and his logoi. For all these thinkers, reality was grounded in the mind of God, though they differ quite a bit in what that entails and how that is.

For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the fine-structure constant ... 1/137. This fundamental pure number had greatly fascinated Pauli, .... For Pauli the explanation of the number 137 was the test of a successful field theory, a test which no theory has passed up to now.

... 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, to seriously consider quitting in 1925. "For me," he wrote in exasperation to a colleague, "physics is too difficult and I wish that I were a film comedian or something similar and had never heard of physics.

To us the only acceptable point of view appears to be one that recognizes both sides of reality — the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical — as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously. It would be most satisfactory if physics and psyche (i.e., matter and mind) could be viewed as complementary aspects of the same reality.

According to Heisenberg, an attendee of Dirac’s own generation, it was these references to God that ultimately provoked an outburst from Dirac. One evening, during a conversation in the hotel lounge between the younger participants at the conference, the ordinarily silent Dirac surprised everyone by announcing, “Religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination.”130 In response, Wolfgang Pauli, another member of the younger set, quipped, “There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.” Even Dirac laughed.

Cuanto más pienso en la parte física de la ecuación de Schrödinger, más asquerosa la encuentro. Lo que escribe apenas tiene sentido, en otras palabras, ¡es una mierda! carta de WERNER HEISENBERG a WOLFGANG PAULI

[The double-slit experiment] has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. —Richard Feynman296 The mystery Feynman was referring to in the preceding quote is the curious fact that a quantum object behaves like a particle when it is observed, but it behaves like a wave when it’s not observed. This can be easily demonstrated in a double-slit interferometer, which is a simple device in which one sends particles of light (or electrons, or any elementary particle) through two tiny slits and then records the pattern of light that emerges onto a screen, or a camera. One might expect that if particles of light (called photons) behaved like separate hunks of stuff, like tiny marbles, then the pattern of light emerging from two slits would always be two bright bands of light. And indeed, if you track each photon as it passes through the slits, then that is what you will see on the screen. However, if you do not trace the photons’ paths, then you will see an alternating sequence of light and dark bands, called an “interference pattern.” This then is the mystery of the dual nature of light—whether you see a wavelike or particle pattern on the screen depends on how you’re looking at it. It’s as though all matter—photons, electrons, molecules, and so on297—“knows” that it is being watched. This exquisitely sensitive bashfulness, known in physics jargon as wave-particle complementarity, lies at the heart of quantum mechanics. It is also known as the quantum measurement problem, or QMP. It’s a problem because it violates the commonsense assumption that we live in an objective reality that is completely independent of observers. The founders of quantum theory, including Neils Bohr, Max Planck, Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein, knew that introducing the notion of the observer into quantum theory was a radical change in how physics had been practiced, and they all wrote about the consequences of this change. A few physicists, like Wolfgang Pauli, Pascual Jordan, and Eugene Wigner, believed that consciousness was not merely important but was fundamentally responsible for the formation of reality. Jordan wrote, “Observations not only disturb what has to be measured, they produce it.… We compel [the electron] to assume a definite position.… We ourselves produce the results of measurement