Quotes by Wolfgang Pauli

A synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity is the mythos, spoken or unspoken, or our present day and age.

As I regard physics and psychology as complementary types of examination, I am certain that there is an equally valid way that must lead the psychologist from behind (namely, through investigating the archetypes) into the world of physics. As an example of background physics, I shall discuss a motif that occurs regularly in my dreams - namely, fine structure, in particular doublet structure of spectral lines and the separation of a chemical element into two isotopes.

This isnt right. This isnt even wrong.

Wolfgang Pauli, in the months before Heisenbergs paper on matrix mechanics pointed the way to a new quantum theory, wrote to a friend, At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it is too difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics. That testimony is particularly impressive if contrasted with Paulis words less than five months later: Heisenbergs type of mechanics has again given me hope and joy in life. To be sure it does not supply the solution to the riddle, but I believe it is again possible to march forward.

... it should be remembered that the atomicity of electric charge has already found its expression in the specific numerical value of the fine structure constant, a theoretical understanding of which is still missing today.

The theoretical determination of the fine structure constant is certainly the most important of the unsolved problems of modern physics. We believe that any regression to the ideas of classical physics (as, for instance, to the use of the classical field concept)cannot bring us nearer to this goal. To reach it, we shall, presumably, have to pay with further revolutionary changes of the fundamental concepts of physics with a still farther digression from the concepts of the classical theories.

“A synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity is the mythos, spoken or unspoken, or our present day and age.”

“Our friend Dirac has a creed; and the main tenet of that creed is: There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.”

“Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I dont believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him.”