Wolfgang Pauli

Pauli was born in Vienna to a chemist, Wolfgang Joseph Pauli (né Wolf Pascheles, 1869–1955), and his wife, Bertha Camilla Schütz; his sister was Hertha Pauli, a writer and actress.

Pauli's middle name was given in honor of his godfather, physicist Ernst Mach.

Pauli's paternal grandparents were from prominent Jewish families of Prague; his great-grandfather was the Jewish publisher Wolf Pascheles.

Pauli's mother, Bertha Schütz, was raised in her mother's Roman Catholic religion; her father was Jewish writer Friedrich Schütz.

Pauli was raised as a Roman Catholic.

Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics.

Pauli attended the Döblinger-Gymnasium in Vienna, graduating with distinction in 1918.

Two months later, he published his first paper, on Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

He attended the University of Munich, working under Arnold Sommerfeld, where he received his PhD in July 1921 for his thesis on the quantum theory of ionized diatomic hydrogen.

Sommerfeld asked Pauli to review the theory of relativity for the Encyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences).

Two months after receiving his doctorate, Pauli completed the article, which came to 237 pages.

Einstein praised it; published as a monograph, it remains a standard reference on the subject.

Pauli spent a year at the University of Göttingen as the assistant to Max Born, and the next year at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen (later the Niels Bohr Institute).

From 1923 to 1928, he was a professor at the University of Hamburg.

During this period, Pauli was instrumental in the development of the modern theory of quantum mechanics.

In particular, he formulated the exclusion principle and the theory of nonrelativistic spin.

In 1928, Pauli was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1930.

At the end of 1930, shortly after his postulation of the neutrino and immediately after his divorce and his mother's suicide, Pauli experienced a personal crisis.

He held visiting professorships at the University of Michigan in 1931 and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1935.

In January 1932 he consulted psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung, who also lived near Zürich.

Jung immediately began interpreting Pauli's deeply archetypal dreams and Pauli became a collaborator of Jung's. He soon began to critique the epistemology of Jung's theory scientifically, and this contributed to a certain clarification of Jung's ideas, especially about synchronicity.

A great many of these discussions are documented in the Pauli/Jung letters, today published as Atom and Archetype.

Jung's elaborate analysis of more than 400 of Pauli's dreams is documented in Psychology and Alchemy.

In 1933 Pauli published the second part of his book on Physics, Handbuch der Physik, which was considered the definitive book on the new field of quantum physics.

Robert Oppenheimer called it "the only adult introduction to quantum mechanics."

The German annexation of Austria in 1938 made Pauli a German citizen, which became a problem for him in 1939 after World War II broke out.

In 1940, he tried in vain to obtain Swiss citizenship, which would have allowed him to remain at the ETH.

In 1940, Pauli moved to the United States, where he was employed as a professor of theoretical physics at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle".

The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter.

In 1946, after the war, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen and returned to Zürich, where he mostly remained for the rest of his life.

In 1949, he was granted Swiss citizenship.

In 1958, Pauli was awarded the Max Planck medal.

The same year, he fell ill with pancreatic cancer.

When his last assistant, Charles Enz, visited him at the Rotkreuz hospital in Zürich, Pauli asked him, "Did you see the room number?"

It was 137.

Throughout his life, Pauli had been preoccupied with the question of why the fine-structure constant, a dimensionless fundamental constant, has a value nearly equal to 1/137.

Pauli died in that room on 15 December 1958.

Pauli made many important contributions as a physicist, primarily in the field of quantum mechanics.