Wolfgang Pauli (redirected from Wolfgang Ernst Pauli)

Pauli, Wolfgang 

Born Apr. 25, 1900, in Vienna; died Dec. 15, 1958, in Zürich. Swiss theoretical physicist; author of classic works on quantum mechanics.

Pauli completed his university education in Munich in 1921. In 1921 and 1922 he was an assistant to M. Born in Göttingen, and in 1922 and 1923 an assistant to N. Bohr in Copenhagen. Pauli became a docent at the University of Hamburg in 1923 and a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich in 1928. From 1940 to 1946 he was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in the USA.

While still a student, Pauli published two works on the theory of gravitation, which were followed in 1921 by a monograph on the theory of relativity that has become a classic. His search for an explanation of the anomalous Zeeman effect led him to formulate in 1925 a very important principle of quantum mechanics —the Pauli exclusion principle. In subsequent works, Pauli generalized this principle. In 1927 he used it to explain the paramagnetism of alkali metals. In 1928 he showed how spin can be included in the general formalism of quantum mechanics. Later, in 1940, he proved that all particles with half-integral spin obey the exclusion principle.

Together with P. Jordan and W. Heisenberg, Pauli laid the foundations of relativistic quantum field theory in 1929; he subsequently took an active part in the development of the theory. While discussing the characteristics of β-decay, he posited the existence of the neutrino (1930–33). Pauli also wrote on the meson theory of nuclear forces. His other writings include a number of surveys on important problems of modern theoretical physics and articles on the history and philosophy of science. Pauli was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1945.

WORKS

Collected Scientific Papers, vols. 1–2. New York, 1964.
Aufsätze und Vorträge über Physik und Erkenntnistheorie. Braunschweig, 1961.
In Russian translation:
Teoriia otnositel’nosti Moscow-Leningrad, 1947.
Obshchie printsipy volnovoi mekhaniki. Moscow-Leningrad, 1947.
Mezonnaia teoriia iadernykh sil. Moscow, 1947.
Reliativistskaia teoriia elementarnykh chastits. Moscow, 1947.

REFERENCES

Fierz, M. “Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958).” Nuclear Physics, 1959, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–5.
Teoreticheskaia fizika 20 veka. Moscow, 1962. (A collection devoted to Pauli, with a list of his works.)
Landau, L. “Wol’fgang Pauli.” Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk, 1959, vol. 68, issue 3, pp. 557–59.

I. D. ROZHANSKII