TelexExternal LinkInternal LinkInventory Cache
Wolfgang Pauli
This nOde last updated September 28th, 2001 and is permanently morphing...
(10 Et'znab (Knife)/10 Tijax (Blade) - 218/260 - 12.19.8.10.18)

Pauli (pou´lê), Wolfgang
1900-1958
Austrian-born American physicist. He won a 1945 Nobel Prize for work on atomic fissions.

Pauli, Wolfgang

Pauli, Wolfgang (1900-1958), American physicist, born in Vienna, Austria. In 1925 Pauli defined the exclusion principle: Only two electrons can occupy the same energy level simultaneously in an atom. In 1931 he hypothesized the existence of the subatomic elementary particle called the neutrino, a fundamental contribution to the meson theory. Pauli was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in physics.

exclusion principle

exclusion principle (îk-skl¡´zhen prîn´se-pel) noun
The principle that two particles of a given type, such as electrons, protons, or neutrons, cannot simultaneously occupy a particular quantum state. Also called Pauli exclusion principle.

Exclusion Principle

Exclusion Principle, in physics and chemistry, fundamental principle stating that two electrons cannot simultaneously occupy the same energy state in an atom. This principle, which explains the regularities of the periodic law, was developed in 1925 by Austrian-American theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

In the quantum mechanical model of the atom, electrons are limited by four values called quantum numbers that describe the atom mathematically. The principal quantum number defines the principal shell (energy state) of an electron. The angular momentum quantum number describes the magnitude of an electron's angular momentum. The magnetic quantum number describes the magnetic orientation of the orbital plane of an electron. The spin magnetic quantum number designates the electron's spin as counterclockwise or clockwise. Physicists use these quantum numbers to establish the maximum number of electrons permitted in each electron shell of an atom.

The Pauli exclusion principle also applies to free electrons and to protons and neutrons in the nucleus. Particles called fermions obey the exclusion principle, but others called bosons do not.

Science, 1930

The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University is established with an initial endowment of $5 million from department store magnate Louis Bamberger, now 75, and his sister Mrs. Felix Fuld. Abraham Flexner of 1910 Flexner Report fame has urged them to charter a new type of institution dedicated to "the usefulness of useless knowledge"; it will attract such minds as Albert Einstein, Thorstein Veblen, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann.
 
 

Quantum Electrodynamics

Quantum Electrodynamics or Qed, in physics, a set of equations that accounts theoretically for the interactions of electromagnetic radiation with atoms and their electrons. QED appears to underlie the chemical and readily observable behavior of matter and to encompass classic electromagnetic theory. The equations, which explain electromagnetism in terms of the quantum nature of the photon, the carrier of the force, were formulated by British physicist Paul Dirac, German physicist Werner Heisenberg, and Austro-American physicist Wolfgang Pauli in the 1920s and 1930s and were elaborated thereafter.

French physicist Louis Victor de Broglie suggested in 1924 that because electromagnetic waves show particle characteristics, particles should also show wave qualities; physicists later verified this prediction experimentally. The wave concept led Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger to develop an equation that described the wave behavior of particles and, specifically, of the electron in the hydrogen atom. Schrödinger showed that no two electrons in an orbit could be in the same energy state. Called the exclusion principle, this rule had been established in experiments by Austro-American physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925.

           - Wolfgang Pauli

Physicist Wolfgang Pauli, discoverer of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, would co-write with psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung an essay entitled "Sychronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle." Pauli claimed that new discoveries vindicated synchronicity, which as one commentator has noted, is "the old belief in a system of magical correspondences in a new guise," because it suggest events may be linked by similarity just as much as by proximity. And Pauli also felt that it might explain some of the mysteries of psi.

TelexExternal LinkInternal LinkInventory Cache