Wolfgang Pauli Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

I cannot believe God is a weak left-hander.

Wolfgang Pauli
When shown a paper by a young theoretician:
That is not even wrong.
In German: "nicht einmal falsch"

Wolfgang Pauli
The fact that XY thinks slowly is not serious, but that he publishes faster than he thinks is inexcusable.

Wolfgang Pauli
I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.

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

Wolfgang Pauli
When I was young, I thought I was the best formalist of my time. I thought I was a revolutionary. When the big problems would come, I would solve them and write about them. The big problems came and passed by, others solved them and wrote about them. I was a classicist and not a revolutionary.

Wolfgang Pauli
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.

Wolfgang Pauli
The fact of the existence of two theories [causal and acausal] that contradict each other in Jung … corresponds psychologically to the vascillation between 3 and 4.

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

Wolfgang Pauli
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.

Wolfgang Pauli
I know a great deal. I know too much. I am a quantum ancient.

Wolfgang Pauli
Physics is a blind alley again. In any case, it has become too difficult for me, and I would prefer to be a comedian in the cinema, or something like that, and hear no more about physics.

Wolfgang Pauli
Let no man join together what God hath put asunder.

Wolfgang Pauli
I have committed the ultimate sin, I have predicted the existence of a particle that can never be observed.

Wolfgang Pauli
Never work too closely with experimenters. Allow the results to settle.

Wolfgang Pauli
The whole thing [quantum leap] seems a myth... but this is not supposed to happen with the electron: instead the frequency of vibration of the emitted light is said to lie somewhere between the orbital frequency before the mysterious jump and the orbital frequency after the jump. All this is sheer madness.

Wolfgang Pauli
Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen, As the bearer of these lines, for whom I pray the favor of a hearing will explain in more detail, I have... hit upon a desperate remedy for rescuing the "alternation law".. This is the possibility that there might exist in the nuclei electrically neutral particles, which I call neutrons.

Wolfgang Pauli
Both of us [seem] to agree that the future of Jung's ideas is not with [psycho-] therapy... but with a unitarian, holistic concept of nature and the position of man in it.

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

Wolfgang Pauli
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.

Wolfgang Pauli
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.

Wolfgang Pauli
The designation "Jungian Psychology" is actually already unscientific sectarianism. I only acknowledge C. G. Jung's contribution to the general psychology of the unconscious.

Wolfgang Pauli
I don't mind if you think slowly, Doctor. but I do mind if you publish faster than you think.

Wolfgang Pauli
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
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.

Wolfgang Pauli
Although I have no objection to accepting the existence of relatively constant psychic contents that survive personal ego, it must always be born in mind that we have no way of knowing what these contents are actually like "as such." All we can observe is their effect on other living people, whose spiritual level and whose personal unconscious crucially influence the way these contents actually manifest themselves.

Wolfgang Pauli
The purely psychological interpretation only apprehends half of the matter. The other half is the revealing of the archetypal basis of the terms actually applied in modern physics. What the final method of observation must see in the production of "background physics" through the unconscious of modern man is a directing of objective toward a future description of nature that uniformly comprises physis and psyche, a form of description that at the moment we are experiencing only in a prescientific phase. To achieve such a uniform description of nature, it appears to be essential to have recourse to the archetypal background of the scientific terms and concepts.

Wolfgang Pauli
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.

Wolfgang Pauli
Already in my original paper I stressed the circumstance that I was unable to give a logical reason for the exclusion principle or to deduce it from more general assumptions. I had always the feeling, and I still have it today, that this is a deficiency.

Wolfgang Pauli
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.'

Wolfgang Pauli