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Physical Review

An Interpretation of Pauli's Exclusion Principle

E. U. Condon, J. E. Mack

Published Mar 15, 1930• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

I. Pauli's exclusion principle can be understood as an instance of the subjectivity of our knowledge. We are built out of only a particular world constructed according to one of the non-combining patterns possible under the laws of quantum mechanics. Therefore we are capable of having sense perceptions of only that world.II. Dirac's theory of the proton shows why Pauli's principle governs the world.

DOI
10.1103/physrev.35.579

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Cambridge University Press eBooks•Aug 4, 2005•0 citations
I. Pauli's exclusion principle can be understood as an instance of the subjectivity of our knowledge. We are built out of only a particular world constructed according to one of the non-combining patterns possible under the laws of quantum mechanics. Therefore we are capable of having sense perceptions of only that world.II. Dirac's theory of the proton shows why Pauli's principle governs the world.
The history of the exclusion principle is already an old one, but its conclusion has not yet been written. It is now eighty years since Wolfgang Pauli introduced an ‘extremely natural’ prescriptive rule, while dealing with some spectroscopic anomalies that beset physicists in the heyday of the old quantum theory. The rule excluded the possibility that any two bound electrons in an atom were in the same dynamic state, identified by a set of four quantum numbers. Hence the name of Ausschlieβungsregel (exclusion rule), or Pauli's Verbot (Pauli's veto) as Werner Heisenberg nicknamed it. The far-reaching physical significance of this rule became clear only later. From spectroscopy to atomic physics, from quantum field theory to high-energy physics, there is hardly another scientific principle that has more far-reaching implications than Pauli's exclusion principle. It is thanks to Pauli's principle that one obtains the electronic configurations underlying the classification of chemical elements in Mendeleev's periodic table as well as atomic spectra. To this same principle we credit the statistical behaviour of any half-integral spin particles (protons, neutrons, among many others) and the stability of matter. Shifting to high-energy physics, it is the exclusion principle that fixes the crucial constraint for binding quarks in hadrons, which together with leptons compose our physical world. This book advances a philosophical analysis of the enduring and far-reaching validity of Pauli's principle. It does not aim to address what a scientific principle is.
Modern scientists describe the universe in terms of two basic partial theories: firstly, the general theory of relativity proposed by Albert Einstein, and secondly, the theory of quantum mechanics. This theory introduces an immense reality and simultaneously creates complex questions for the world of physics. Quantum mechanics is an incompletable knowledge however scientists are finding the basic theories from this theory. They propose complex mathematical expressions from quantum mechanics to prove the basic law of atoms. Quantum mechanics is the entire knowledge of subatomic particles such as electrons, protons, and neutrons. Quantum mechanics reveals that what we see is just a part of a deeper reality. Then we can grasp from this theory that the material world is not the completed reality; there are other things beyond human physical senses. The concept of quantum mechanics describes particles that can exist in multiple states. The concept of quantum mechanics is directly proportional to contemporary world technologies. The super specialty of this theory is that scientists cannot be explained universe without quantum mechanics. The uncertainty principle of Heisenberg in quantum mechanics suggests that there are limits to what we can know about a particle state of an atom. Humans cannot yet find out what it looks like and how we can imagine the existence of subatomic particles in an atom. That was an unseen dynamite for humans' perspective observation of the material world.
The Pauli exclusion principle is one of the fundamental laws of modern physics. It determines the structure of atoms, the stability of matter, the properties of fermionic systems, and macroscopic phenomena ranging from chemistry to astrophysics. In standard quantum mechanics (QM), this principle is formulated as an axiom of antisymmetry: the wave function of two fermions must change sign under the exchange of coordinates. However, the origin of this antisymmetry remains unexplained within QM itself. Within ZEBTS — the Law of Unity of Being of the Triune Substance — the Pauli principle acquires a geometric and topological foundation. In this ontology, fermions are not treated as elementary particles but as topological modes of the operator metric, arising from the spectral structure of quantum geometry. Antisymmetry and the prohibition of identical states emerge as consequences of: the non‑commutativity of the operator metric, the topological charge λ, the spectral non‑intersection of eigenvalues, holographic constraints on information density. Thus, ZEBTS derives the Pauli principle as a topological law of quantum geometry, rather than a postulate.
Abstract The exclusion principle is one of the most far-reaching theorems in physics. In a telegram to the Nobel committee, quoted in [1], Einstein wrote: ‘Nominate Wolfgang Pauli for physics prize stop his contributions to modern quantum theory consisting of so-called Pauli or exclusion principle became fundamental part of modern physics being independent from other basic axioms of that theory stop Albert Einstein.’ It is interesting to note that quantum mechanics, the theory Einstein alluded to, was formulated a little after the Pauli principle.
Shortly after their introduction, the electron's Zweideutigkeit and Pauli's Ausschliessungsregel were embedded into a growing theoretical framework: from Fermi–Dirac statistics in 1926 (Section 4.2), to the non-relativistic quantum mechanics of the magnetic electron with Pauli's spin matrices in 1927 (Section 4.3); from Wigner and von Neumann's group theoretical derivation of the spin matrices in 1927 (Section 4.4), to Jordan's reinterpretation of Pauli's exclusion principle in terms of anticommutation relations for particle creation and annihilation operators in 1928 (Section 4.5), which paved the way for quantum field theory. The most important step in building up this theoretical framework was the transition from non-relativistic to relativistic quantum mechanics, with Dirac's equation for the electron in 1928 (Section 4.6), which finally allowed the derivation of the electron's spin with its anomalous magnetic moment and hence clarified in a conclusive way the origin of spectroscopic anomalies. The negative energy solutions of the Dirac equation, and Dirac's attempt to accommodate them via the hole theory in 1930, anticipated the experimental discovery of the antiparticle of the electron, the positron. Sections 4.7-4.9 reconstruct Pauli's sustained criticism of Dirac's hole theory. The history of this debate is intertwined with Pauli's search for a spin–statistics connection, which finally culminated in the spin–statistics theorem in 1940. With this theorem, the nomological shift from the status of a phenomenological rule to that of a fundamental scientific principle is finally completed. Introduction The year 1925 was the annus mirabilis for quantum mechanics.