Pauli effect

The Pauli effect refers to the phenomenon anecdotally documented that in the presence of the eminent theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli unusually often failed experimental apparatus or even spontaneously were broken. He is not to be confused with the Pauli principle.

Definition

The Pauli effect is jokingly alluding to Pauli's exclusion principle as the famous " second Pauli's exclusion " and formulated roughly as follows: "It is impossible that there are Wolfgang Pauli and a functioning device in the same room. "

Importance for Pauli and his environment

Pauli himself was convinced of the objective existence of the effect and led, among other things, a real Pauli effect, one made ​​without direct intervention or apparent good cause damage to their car, as the reason for the premature termination of a holiday trip with his second wife in 1934.

Some colleagues took the effect also serious: The experimental physicist Otto Stern, who was friends with Paul and who was his colleague in Hamburg, gave him so even laboratory and also institute ban. Stern pointed out in an interview, but also suggest that superstition (at the time ) was widespread among experimental physicists - he himself would, for example, in his Frankfurt period always a mallet next to it at a certain apparatus, so that it functioned smoothly. Once when he was gone, the machine would not work anymore until the hammer showed up three days later. Another colleague used by Stern's recollection of his experimental facility to bring flowers every day, to keep them in good spirits.

Pauli held the effect for real and was relieved when he appeared again. To the rescue came to him while the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, with the Pauli dealt intensively: There may be regarded as Synchronizitätsphänomen. The phenomena occur, so Pauli mean in a letter to Jung on 28 June 1949, and in particular on when pairs of opposites balance, and corresponds to the sign Zhen ( Thunder, tremor ) in the I Ching, the loss of but a few days would pick up again.

Individual events and reactions

Hans Bethe reported it: "The first time I met Paul in 1929 during a section meeting of the German Physical Society in Freiburg im Breisgau. As during the session turned out the slide projector, Paul stood up and pointed with pride to be in order ' to indicate the Pauli effect. At the time, the rumor was handled, that no test facilities would work as long as Pauli was in the room. "

Became famous for an incident in the laboratory of James Franck at Gottingen, in which a valuable and sensitive equipment part to break went, while Pauli was not present. Franck told this to the people living in Zurich with colleagues, linked to the joke, at least this time Pauli meet absolutely no fault in the incident. This, however, replied that he had on the train to Copenhagen had a short stay in Göttingen at the relevant time. During a stay at Princeton University in February 1950, the local cyclotron caught fire, which also brought to the Pauli effect in context.

Even Arnold Sommerfeld was the familiar effect after Pauli had broken his shoulder and hinders the lecture had to hold (in the U.S. in 1931 ), he spoke of an inverse Pauli effect, which would have been this time directed against the cause itself. In typical Pauli effects, the damage, however, taught never to Pauli himself

Stephen Hawking describes the Pauli effect: " Evil tongues say that he [ Paul ] need to reside only in a city that already all went there, experiments carried out wrong. " In an obituary in the Journal of the European Physical Society for Pauli this peculiarity is described decidedly.

George Gamow called the " Pauli effect" jokingly referred to as one of the three most important achievements Paulis, next to the Pauli principle and the prediction of the neutrino.