Wolfgang Pauli

Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna, on the 25th April 1900. In 1918 he went to the University of Munich where he received his Doctors diploma in theoretical physics, "summa cum laude" in 1921 with A. Sommerfeld. Pauli, while still an undergraduate at Munich, wrote an article on the theory of relativity which became the standard text. From 1921-1922 he was an assistant of Max Born at Göttingen University. He went on to be an assistant of Wilhelm Lenz at Hamburg University (1923). It was at the University of Copenhagen with Niels Bohr, where his research and interest in the anomalous Zeeman effect culminated in 1924 with the formulation of the "Exclusion Principle" which governs how particles, like electrons, co-exist. It was for this he received the Nobel Prize in 1945.

The theoretical prediction of the existence of the neutrino by Pauli in 1930 was finally confirmed by its detection in the experiment by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines (Nobel Prize 1995) at Los Alamos in 1956.

From 1924-1928 he taught physics at the University of Hamburg. In 1924 he proposed a quantum spin number for electrons. In April 1928 he became a professor at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich and kept his professorship until his death in 1958.

In July 1940, Pauli and his wife, Franciska (Franca) left Europe to go as a visiting professor to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. It was there, in November 1945, Pauli received news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for the Exclusion Principle. It was not until 1946 he was able to attend the Nobel Festivities in Stockholm and give his Nobel Lecture.

He obtained American citizenship in 1946, but then returned to Zurich the same year to take up his professorship at ETH. His links with Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton remained.

On the 25 July 1949 Pauli also became a Swiss citizen.

At the age of 58, Wolfgang Ernst Friedrich Pauli died on the 15 December 1958 at the Red Cross Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland.

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