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Pauli’s Exclusion Principle (1925)

S. Brandt

Published Apr 22, 1992• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1093/oso/9780199544691.003.0036

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•Sep 26, 2002•0 citations
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.
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.
It is strange to note so little discussion of the exclusion principle in the philosophical literature. Philosophers, largely engrossed in their perennial problems, are hardly aware of the fact that, during the last two decades, there has been introduced into physical methodology a principle of utmost philosophical importance, easily rivaling that of relativity and, in some respects, indeed that of causality. Discovered by Pauli in 1925, it immediately elucidated a whole realm of physical facts and was accepted by physicists with wide acclaim. Called the exclusion principle—or Pauli principle, or principle of anti-symmetry—it was embodied in the axiomatics of quantum mechanics; its peculiar methodological significance passed out of view.
Abstract Wolfgang Pauli (1900-58)was one of the titans who presided over theoretical physics during its golden age in the early decades of the twentieth century. He was celebrated not only for his devastating intelligence but also for his indiscriminate rudeness, or perhaps more properly unyielding candour. He became known in his profession as The scourge of the Lord’. According to Victor Weisskopf [95], who served a happy term as Pauli’s assistant, one could ask him any question without worrying whether he might think it idiotic, for Pauli found all questions idiotic. In his most accommodating mood, and while still a student, Pauli began his remarks in the discussion that followed a lecture by Albert Einstein: ‘You know, what Einstein says is not so stupid!’ Weisskopf recalled what happened when he arrived in Zurich and called on Pauli in his office.
The modern state of the Pauli exclusion principle is shortly discussed. We describe the discovery by Pauli, his principle for electrons, and how it was generalized for all elementary particles in the framework of quantum mechanics. The motivations and theoretical conceptions that induced the experiments for verification of the Pauli exclusion principle are analyzed. The results and methodology of two different types of experiments are discussed: (1) the search of unusual atoms and nuclei in the stable non-Pauli states, and (2) the experiments in which the emitted radiation of non-Pauli transitions is measured. In conclusion, the comments on the discussed experiments that follow from the general quantum mechanical conceptions and group theory are formulated.
Abstract Although quantum theory had its origins in Albert Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect (for which, and not for relativity, he received the Nobel Prize), its indeterminacy was something Einstein could never accept. This was the origin of his famous assertion that the Lord does not play dice. If the Universe was ruled by chance, he said, he would rather be a croupier in a gambling casino than a physicist. Einstein [161] was not alone in his epistemological distaste. In 1913, two future winners of the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s then assistant, Otto Stern [6| and Max von Laue [112], while on a walk up the Utliberg near Zurich, shook hands on an oath, contemptuously dubbed by Wolfgang Pauli [25] the Utlischwur (an allusion to William Tell’s Rutlischwur—the oath that led to the union of the Swiss cantons): ‘If this nonsense of Bohr’s should in the end prove right we will leave physics.’ (They of course reneged.)