Wolfgang Pauli

At 58 years old, Wolfgang Pauli physical status not available right now. We will update Wolfgang Pauli's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Sommerfeld asked Pauli to review the theory of relativity for the Encyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences). Two months after receiving his doctorate, Pauli completed the article, which came to 237 pages. Einstein praised it; published as a monograph, it remains a standard reference on the subject.

Pauli spent a year at the University of Göttingen as the assistant to Max Born, and the next year at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen (later the Niels Bohr Institute). From 1923 to 1928, he was a professor at the University of Hamburg. During this period, Pauli was instrumental in the development of the modern theory of quantum mechanics. In particular, he formulated the exclusion principle and the theory of nonrelativistic spin. He also wrote a paper on colloid chemistry and medicine in 1924.

In 1928, Pauli was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1930. He held visiting professorships at the University of Michigan in 1931 and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1935.

At the end of 1930, shortly after his postulation of the neutrino and immediately after his divorce and his mother's suicide, Pauli experienced a personal crisis. In January 1932 he consulted psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung, who also lived near Zurich. Jung immediately began interpreting Pauli's deeply archetypal dreams based on the I Ching, and Pauli became a collaborator of Jung's. He soon began to critique the epistemology of Jung's theory scientifically, and this contributed to a certain clarification of Jung's ideas, especially about synchronicity. A great many of these discussions are documented in the Pauli/Jung letters, today published as Atom and Archetype. Jung's elaborate analysis of more than 400 of Pauli's dreams is documented in Psychology and Alchemy. In 1933 Pauli published the second part of his book on Physics, Handbuch der Physik, which was considered the definitive book on the new field of quantum physics. Robert Oppenheimer called it "the only adult introduction to quantum mechanics."

The German annexation of Austria in 1938 made Pauli a German citizen, which became a problem for him in 1939 after World War II broke out. In 1940, he tried in vain to obtain Swiss citizenship, which would have allowed him to remain at the ETH.

In 1940, Pauli moved to the United States, where he was employed as a professor of theoretical physics at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1946, after the war, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen and returned to Zurich, where he mostly remained for the rest of his life. In 1949, he was granted Swiss citizenship.

In 1958, Pauli was awarded the Max Planck medal. The same year, he fell ill with pancreatic cancer. When his last assistant, Charles Enz, visited him at the Rotkreuz hospital in Zurich, Pauli asked him, "Did you see the room number?" It was 137. Throughout his life, Pauli had been preoccupied with the question of why the fine-structure constant, a dimensionless fundamental constant, has a value nearly equal to 1/137. Pauli died in that room on 15 December 1958.

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