Wolfgang Pauli

Wolfgang Pauli is the conscience of physics: the man his peers called die Geissel Gottes, the Scourge of God, whose approval was so rarely given that it meant something, and whose most devastating verdict on a piece of work was not that it was wrong but that it was not even wrong—so vague, so insulated from any possible observation, that it could not even earn the dignity of being refuted. He was born in Vienna in 1900, the godson of Ernst Mach, and produced at twenty-one a 237-page article on relativity that Einstein described as the work of a mature man; he shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics for the exclusion principle, which he formulated in 1925: no two electrons in an atom can occupy the same quantum state. That single prohibition explains the structure of the periodic table, why matter has shape, why chemistry exists, why your hand does not pass through a table. The exclusion