Wolfgang Pauli QUOTES

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

― Wolfgang Pauli , Writings on Physics and Philosophy

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

― Wolfgang Pauli

3 " ... 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 , Theory of Relativity

4 " 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. "

― Wolfgang Pauli , Writings on Physics and Philosophy

5 " 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. "

― Wolfgang Pauli , Pauli Lectures on Physics: Volume 1, Electrodynamics (Lectures on Physics 1)

6 " 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. "

― Wolfgang Pauli

7 " 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.'} "

― Wolfgang Pauli

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

― Wolfgang Pauli

9 " 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. "

― Wolfgang Pauli

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

― Wolfgang Pauli

11 " 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. "

― Wolfgang Pauli

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

― Wolfgang Pauli

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

― Wolfgang Pauli , Writings on Physics and Philosophy

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

― Wolfgang Pauli

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

― Wolfgang Pauli

16 " 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. "

― Wolfgang Pauli , Writings on Physics and Philosophy

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

― Wolfgang Pauli

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

― Wolfgang Pauli

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

― Wolfgang Pauli

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

― Wolfgang Pauli , Writings on Physics and Philosophy

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