Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist whose mere presence supposedly broke equipment
Colleagues joked that laboratory apparatus failed whenever Wolfgang Pauli walked nearby, and he loved the reputation. The Austrian theorist was also the sharpest critic in physics, dismissing sloppy ideas as utterly wrong or, worse, not even wrong. His own exclusion principle explains why atoms have structure at all.
Born in Vienna in 1900, with the physicist Ernst Mach as godfather, Pauli published a paper on general relativity two months after leaving school. He earned his doctorate under Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich in 1921, and within two more months had written a 237-page encyclopedia article on relativity that Einstein praised and that is still a standard reference. On first meeting him, Paul Ehrenfest said he preferred the article to its author; Pauli replied that he felt exactly the opposite about Ehrenfest, and the two became close friends.
In 1924 he proposed a new two-valued quantum property and stated that no two electrons can share the same quantum state, the exclusion principle that won him the 1945 Nobel Prize after Einstein nominated him. When George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit identified that property as electron spin, Pauli refused for a long time to accept it. In 1926 he used Heisenberg's new matrix mechanics to derive the hydrogen spectrum, lending the theory crucial credibility.
To rescue energy conservation in beta decay, he wrote on 4 December 1930 to a meeting of 'radioactive ladies and gentlemen' proposing an unseen neutral particle with tiny mass. Enrico Fermi named it the neutrino. When Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan detected it in 1956, Pauli telegraphed that everything comes to those who know how to wait. He often skipped publishing, letting ideas circulate in letters to Niels Bohr and Heisenberg.
After a divorce and his mother's death, he consulted Carl Jung in 1932; Jung analysed more than 400 of his dreams, and the two corresponded about synchronicity. The annexation of Austria made him German, so he spent the war at Princeton before returning to Zurich, gaining Swiss citizenship in 1949. His friendship with Heisenberg soured in 1958 when a press release called Pauli merely his assistant. He died that December.
Source: Wolfgang Pauli
