Wolfgang Pauli Dies: Quantum Pioneer Who Demanded Rigor

Wolfgang Pauli died on December 15, 1958, in Zurich, at fifty-eight. His exclusion principle, proposed in 1925 when he was twenty-five, explained why electrons could not occupy the same quantum state. Without it, all electrons in an atom would collapse into the lowest energy level, atoms would be uniform in size and behavior, and the periodic table would not exist. The principle is the reason matter has structure, the reason chemistry works, the reason you can sit in a chair without falling through it. He also predicted the existence of the neutrino in 1930, proposing a nearly massless, chargeless particle to explain the missing energy in beta decay. He called the prediction "a terrible thing" because he believed he had invented a particle that could never be detected. Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan detected it in 1956, two years before Pauli's death. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945 for the exclusion principle, and Einstein nominated him. His intellectual standards were legendarily severe: he dismissed weak physics papers as "not even wrong," a phrase that has entered the scientific vocabulary. He also had a documented tendency to cause laboratory equipment to malfunction in his presence. Other physicists called it the Pauli Effect, and some refused to let him near their experiments. He was reportedly amused by this. He was admitted to room 137 at the Rotkreuz Hospital in Zurich for surgery on pancreatic cancer. The number 137 is the approximate inverse of the fine-structure constant, one of the most important dimensionless numbers in physics and a number that had preoccupied Pauli throughout his career. He remarked on the coincidence to his assistant before he died.