Name: Wolgang Pauli

---

Identity area | Description area | Relationships area | control area | Link to archival materials and other resources | Database

---

Identity area [Top]

Type of entity

Person

Authorized form(s) of name

Pauli, Wolfgang Ernst Friedrich

Description area [Top]

Dates of existence

25 April 1900 - 15 December 1958

History

Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna on 25 April 1900. He attended the Döblinger Gymnasium, Vienna, then in 1918 went to the University of Munich where he received his Doctoral diploma in theoretical physics, 'summa cum laude' in 1921 (supervisor Arnold Sommerfeld). At Sommerfeld's suggestion, he wrote an article on relativity theory for the Encyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften.

He spent the winter term 1921-1922 as an assistant of Max Born at Göttingen University, where he met Niels Bohr for the first time. After a summer as assistant to Wilhelm Lenz at Hamburg University, he was invited by Bohr to the University of Copenhagen for a year. Here Pauli's 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 that he received the Nobel Prize in 1945.

From 1923-1928 he taught physics at the University of Hamburg. In April 1928 he became a professor at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich and kept his professorship until his death in 1958.

In December 1929 he married Käthe Deppner; the marriage lasted less than one year. During this period Pauli suffered a severe life crisis, aggravated by the suicide of his mother, and he underwent psychoanalytic treatment with Carl Gustav Jung from 1932-4. Most of his direct contact was initially with Jung's student, Erna Rosenbaum, but the two men remained friends and published together on various topics.

In 1930 Pauli postulated the existence of the neutrino, which was finally confirmed by its detection in the experiment by Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines at Los Alamos in 1956.

In April 1934 Pauli married Franca Bertram. In July 1940 he and his wife left Europe for the USA, where he was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. It was there, in November 1945, that Pauli received the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for the Exclusion Principle. He was not able to attend the Nobel festivities in Stockholm to give his Nobel Lecture until 1946.

He obtained American citizenship in 1946, but then returned to Zürich in the same year to take up his professorship at ETH. His links with the 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 15 December 1958 at the Red Cross Hospital in Zürich, Switzerland.

Places

Birth: Vienna, Austria. University studies: Munich, Germany. Teaching and professorships: Hamburg, Germany; Zürich, Switzerland; Princeton, USA.

Functions, occupations and activities

Theoretical physicist; lecturer; Nobel laureate 1945.

Genealogy

Father: Wolfgang Joseph Pascheles (1869-1955). Son of Jacob W. Pascheles and Helene Pascheles née Utitz. In 1898 he changed his name to Wolfgang Joseph Pauli, and around the same time he converted from Judaism to become a Roman Catholic. He married Bertha Camilla Schütz in 1899.

Paternal great grandfather: Wolf Pascheles (1814-1857) married Sara Taubeles in 1838. Their son Jacob W. Pascheles (Pauli's grandfather) was born in1839 and died in 1897.

Mother: Bertha Camilla Schütz (called Maria) (1878-1927)

Maternal grandfather: Friedrich Schütz (1845-1908, Prague) married Bertha Dillner (1847-1916) in 1875

General context

Wolfgang Pauli was one of the key players during a period of great change in physics, which included the development of quantum mechanics. He corresponded with many leading physicists and other scientists. He was also deeply interested in philosophy and spiritual matters, and developed close links with Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. The Second World War caused Pauli to leave Europe for the USA from 1940 to 1946 because he was of Jewish descent.

Relationships area [Top]

Control area [Top]

Authority record identifier

To be confirmed - CERN-SIPB-AC-2010-001

Institution identifiers

CERN Archives

Rules and/or conventions

ISAAR (CPF) - International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families, 2nd ed. International Council on Archives 2004

ISO 15924 Codes for the representation of names of scripts

Status

Awaiting approval

Level of detail

Full

Dates or creation, revision or deletion

Created 2010-11-04

Languages and scripts

English ISO 639-1 language code - eng; ISO 15924 script code - latn

Sources

Information from - CERN Web site (November 2010), and No Time to be Brief - A scientific biography of Wolfgang Pauli Charles P. Enz (OUP, 2002).

Maintenance notes

Created by A. Hollier, CERN Archivist, November 2010

Relating corporate bodies, persons and families to archival materials and other resources [Top]

Identifiers and titles of related resources

CERN's Wolfgang Pauli Archives

ETH Zurich Archive's Wolfgang Pauli collection

Types of related resources

Archival materials

Nature of relationships

Creator

Dates of related resources and/or relationships

c. 1900 - 1960