Pauli effect

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The Pauli effect describes the anecdotally documented phenomenon that, in the presence of the important theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli , experimental equipment failed or even broke spontaneously with unusual frequency.

The effect should not be confused with the Pauli Principle (or Pauli Exclusion Principle ), but is also jokingly referred to as the “second Pauli Exclusion Principle ” and formulated as follows: “It is impossible for Wolfgang Pauli and a functioning device in the same room. "

Significance for Pauli and his environment

Pauli himself was convinced of the objective existence of the effect and cited, among other things, a real Pauli effect , damage to his car without direct intervention or an externally recognizable cause, as the reason for the premature termination of a vacation trip with his second wife in 1934.

Some colleagues also took the effect seriously: The experimental physicist Otto Stern , who was friends with Pauli and who was his colleague in Hamburg, even banned him from laboratories and institutes. In an interview, Stern also pointed out that superstition was widespread (at the time) among experimental physicists - for example, when he was in Frankfurt, he would always have put a mallet next to a certain apparatus so that it worked smoothly. Once, once he disappeared, the machine would have stopped working until the hammer reappeared three days later. According to Stern's memory, another colleague used to bring flowers to his experimental facility every day to keep them in a good mood .

Pauli thought the effect was real and was relieved when it reappeared. The psychology of Carl Gustav Jung , with which Pauli dealt intensively, came to his aid : There it can be viewed as a synchronicity phenomenon. According to Pauli in a letter to CG Jung dated June 28, 1949, the phenomena occur above all when pairs of opposites are balanced, and correspond to the zhèn (thunder, tremor) sign in the I Ching , which means loss, but which manifests itself in a few Days.

Individual incidents and reactions

Hans Bethe reported: “I met Pauli for the first time in 1929 during a section meeting of the German Physical Society in Freiburg im Breisgau . When the slide projector failed during the meeting, Pauli stood up and proudly pointed to himself to indicate the 'Pauli effect'. At that time there was a rumor that no test facilities would work as long as Pauli was in the room. "

An incident in James Franck's laboratory in Göttingen became famous in which a valuable and sensitive piece of equipment broke while Pauli was not present. Franck reported this to his colleague living in Zurich, linked to the joke that this time at least Pauli was not at all to blame for the incident. However, the latter replied that at the time in question he had had a short stay in Göttingen on the train to Copenhagen. During a stay at Princeton University in February 1950, the cyclotron there caught fire, which Pauli also linked to the effect.

Even Arnold Sommerfeld , the effect was familiar, after Pauli had broken his shoulder and hinders the lecture (in the US in 1931) hold had, he spoke of a inverse Pauli effect that would have directed this time against the perpetrator himself. With typical Pauli effects, however, the damage was never directed against Pauli himself.

Engelbert Schücking reports on another Pauli effect . During his time in Hamburg in the 1920s, Pauli used to visit his friend Walter Baade and other astronomers he knew there at the observatory in Bergedorf for a few glasses of wine during the full moon (during this time the astronomers could not observe). It was on one such occasion that the Great Refractor was almost completely destroyed.

Giuseppe Occhialini wanted to make Pauli happy on his visit to Brussels and staged a "Pauli effect": a hanging lamp was prepared in such a way that it should fall down when Pauli opened the door. It worked well in the rehearsal, only when Pauli entered did it not fall down.

Stephen Hawking describes the Pauli effect: "Evil tongues claim that he [Pauli] only needs to be in one city, and all the experiments carried out there went wrong." This peculiarity is described in an obituary in the Journal of the European Physical Society for Pauli .

George Gamow jokingly described the “Pauli Effect” as one of the three most important achievements of Pauli, alongside the Pauli principle and the prediction of the neutrino .

See also

literature

  • F. David Peat: Synchronicity — The hidden order , Scherz Verlag, Bern 1991 ( Review in der Zeit , Ulrich Schnabel: Synchronicity or the strange simultaneity, Die Zeit , April 10, 1992, No. 16)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Harald Atmanspacher, Hans Primas, Eva Wertenschlag-Birkhäuser: The Pauli-Jung Dialogue and its Significance for Modern Science , Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1995, page 71.
  2. ↑ Scientific correspondence with Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg and others. a, Volume 3 by Wolfgang Pauli, Karl von Meyenn, editor Karl von Meyenn, Verlag Birkhäuser, 1993, ISBN 0387549110 , p. 763.
  3. ^ A b Charles Enz : Of Matter and Spirit - Selected Essays , World Scientific 2009, therein: Rational and irrational features of Pauli's Life , p. 152, Enz quotes Markus Fierz Natural Science and History - lectures and essays , Birkhäuser 1988, P. 191. Fierz refers to personal memories of both Stern and Pauli, with whom he corresponded about it. Likewise in Enz Not time to be brief- a scientific biography of Wolfgang Pauli , Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 149, referring to an interview by Stern with Res Jost . Stern: The number of guaranteed Pauli-effects is enormously large . Only in his institute would they not perform, since Pauli was not allowed to enter it.
  4. ↑ Enz, Not time to be brief, p. 149.
  5. ↑ Enz Not time to be brief , p. 150 after Fierz.
  6. ↑ Enz No time to be brief , p. 150
  7. ^ Hans Bethe : Encounters with Wolfgang Pauli , in: Wolfgang Pauli und die moderne Physik (catalog for the special exhibition of the ETH library, 2000), p. 85.
  8. ↑ Wolfgang Pauli, et al .: Scientific correspondence with Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, and others. a. , ed. Karl von Meyenn, Volume vol. 4 / I, Springer, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3540594426 , p. 37, OCLC 36847539 . .
  9. ↑ quoted in Enz Not time to be brief , p. 224
  10. ↑ Enz No time to be brief , p. 511.
  11. ^ Karl von Meyenn, Engelbert Schücking: Wolfgang Pauli, Physics Today, February 2001, p. 47
  12. ^ Valentine Telegdi , Pauli-Anekdoten, in: Charles P. Enz, Karl von Meyenn, Wolfgang Pauli. The conscience of physics, Vieweg 1988, p. 119
  13. ↑ Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time , German by Hainer Kober, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1988, page 92.
  14. ↑ CPEnz: Wolfgang Pauli 100th birthday in: europhysics news July / August 2000 p.12; European physical society.
  15. ↑ Gamow Thirty years that shook physics - the story of the quantum , Dover 1966, p. 64. Gamow also describes the episode with Franck in Göttingen there.