wolfgang pauli

“I confess, that very different from you, I do find sometimes scientific inspiration in mysticism … but this is counterbalanced by an immediate sense for mathematics.”
― Wolfgang Pauli 

The Pauli exclusion principle is the quantum mechanical principle that no two identical fermions (particles with half-integer spin) may occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. A more rigorous statement is that the total wave function for two identical fermions is anti-symmetric with respect to exchange of the particles. The principle was formulated by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925.

Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna in 1900, the same year that quantum mechanics itself was born with Planck’s announcement of the idea of the energy quanta. Pauli’s father was a physician and chemistry professor at the University of Vienna, and his godfather was Ernest Mach. As a young prodigy, when he found himself bored during class, Pauli would read Einstein’s papers on relativity. By age 20 Pauli, then a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, had published papers on relativity and written an encyclopedia article on relativity which greatly impressed other physicists, including Albert Einstein himself. Having learned classical mechanics and relativity, Pauli was disconcerted by quantum mechanics upon being introduced to it by Sommerfeld, and at first he found the subject rather confused