Pauli effect

Last updated
Wolfgang Pauli, c. 1924 Wolfgang Pauli.jpg
Wolfgang Pauli, c.1924

The Pauli effect or Pauli's device corollary is the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people. The term was coined after mysterious anecdotal stories involving Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, describing numerous instances in which demonstrations involving equipment suffered technical problems only when he was present.

Contents

The Pauli effect is not related to the Pauli exclusion principle, which is a bona fide physical phenomenon named after Pauli. However the Pauli effect was humorously tagged as a second Pauli exclusion principle, according to which a functioning device and Wolfgang Pauli may not occupy the same room. [1] Pauli himself was convinced that the effect named after him was real. [1] Pauli corresponded with Hans Bender and Carl Jung [1] and saw the effect as an example of the concept of synchronicity.

Background

Since the 20th century, the work in some subfields of physics research has been divided between theorists and experimentalists. Those theorists who lack an aptitude or interest in experimental work have on occasion earned a reputation for accidentally breaking experimental equipment. Pauli was exceptional in this regard: it was postulated that he was such a good theorist that any experiments would be compromised by virtue of his presence in the vicinity. For fear of the Pauli effect, experimental physicist Otto Stern banned Pauli from his laboratory located in Hamburg despite their friendship. [2] Pauli was convinced that the effect named after him was real. [3] He corresponded with Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz about the concept of synchronicity and did so as well with Hans Bender, lecturer at Freiburg university Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, the only parapsychology chair in Germany. [4]

Jung and Pauli saw some parallels between physics and depth psychology. [5] Pauli was among the honored guests at the foundation festivities of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich in 1948. A famous Pauli effect at the ceremony—as he entered, a china flower vase fell on the floor without any obvious reason—caused Pauli to write his article "Background-Physics", in which he tries to find complementary relationships between physics and depth psychology. [6]

Anecdotal evidence

An incident occurred in the physics laboratory at the University of Göttingen. An expensive measuring device, for no apparent reason, suddenly stopped working, although Pauli was in fact absent. James Franck, the director of the institute, reported the incident to his colleague Pauli in Zürich with the humorous remark that at least this time Pauli was innocent. However, it turned out that Pauli had been on a railway journey to Zürich and had switched trains in the Göttingen rail station at about the time of the failure. The incident is reported in George Gamow's book Thirty Years That Shook Physics, [7] where it is also claimed the more talented the theoretical physicist, the stronger the effect.

R. Peierls describes a case when at one reception this effect was to be parodied by deliberately crashing a chandelier upon Pauli's entrance. The chandelier was suspended on a rope to be released, but it stuck instead, thus becoming a real example of the Pauli effect. [8]

In 1934, Pauli saw a failure of his car during a honeymoon tour with his second wife as proof of a real Pauli effect since it occurred without an obvious external cause. [9]

In February 1950, when he was at Princeton University, the cyclotron burnt, and he asked himself if this mischief belonged to such a Pauli effect, named after him. [10]

Cultural references

Philip K. Dick makes reference to "Pauli's synchronicity" in his 1963 science fiction novel The Game-Players of Titan in reference to pre-cognitive psionic abilities being interfered with by other psionic abilities such as psychokinesis: "an acausal connective event." [11]

Tatsuhisa Kamijō (Lucidien Kallister in the English version) is a self-claimed 'demon-embodied' human who can randomly cause electronic devices such as phones and drones to malfunction or self destruct with his hands in the series Yu-Gi-Oh! Sevens . The main character, Yuga Ohdo attributes this to the Pauli Effect. [12]

Kent, a character from the visual novel and anime Amnesia: Fated Memories, also references this event in the anime adaptation when speaking to the heroine.

See also

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Werner Heisenberg</span> German theoretical physicist (1901–1976)

Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist, one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics, and a principal scientist in the Nazi nuclear weapons program during World War II. He published his Umdeutung paper in 1925, a major reinterpretation of old quantum theory. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during the same year, his matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was substantially elaborated. He is known for the uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wolfgang Pauli</span> Austrian physicist (1900–1958)

Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle". The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter.

Synchronicity is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung "to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection." In contemporary research, synchronicity experiences refer to one's subjective experience whereby coincidences between events in one's mind and the outside world may be causally unrelated to each other yet have some other unknown connection. Jung held that this was a healthy, even necessary, function of the human mind that can become harmful within psychosis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arnold Sommerfeld</span> German theoretical physicist (1868–1951)

Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld, was a German theoretical physicist who pioneered developments in atomic and quantum physics, and also educated and mentored many students for the new era of theoretical physics. He served as doctoral supervisor and postdoc supervisor to seven Nobel Prize winners and supervised at least 30 other famous physicists and chemists. Only J. J. Thomson's record of mentorship offers a comparable list of high-achieving students.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Analytical psychology</span> Jungian theories

Analytical psychology is a term coined by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, to describe research into his new "empirical science" of the psyche. It was designed to distinguish it from Freud's psychoanalytic theories as their seven-year collaboration on psychoanalysis was drawing to an end between 1912 and 1913. The evolution of his science is contained in his monumental opus, the Collected Works, written over sixty years of his lifetime.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marie-Louise von Franz</span> Swiss psychologist and scholar (1915-1998)

Marie-Louise von Franz was a Swiss Jungian psychologist and scholar, known for her psychological interpretations of fairy tales and of alchemical manuscripts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Scherrer</span> Swiss physicist (1890–1969)

Paul Hermann Scherrer was a Swiss physicist. Born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, he studied at Göttingen, Germany, before becoming a lecturer there. Later, Scherrer became head of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rudolf Peierls</span> German-born British physicist (1907–1995)

Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied nuclear bomb programme. His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs".

Ernst Carl Gerlach Stueckelberg was a Swiss mathematician and physicist, regarded as one of the most eminent physicists of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Bender</span> German lecturer

Hans Bender was a German lecturer on the subject of parapsychology, who was also responsible for establishing the parapsychological institute Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg. For many years his pipe smoking, contemplative figure was synonymous with German parapsychology. He was an investigator of 'unusual human experience', e.g. poltergeists and clairvoyants. One of his most famous cases was the Rosenheim Poltergeist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Gustav Carus</span> German painter

Carl Gustav Carus was a German physiologist and painter, born in Leipzig, who played various roles during the Romantic era. A friend of the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he was a many-sided man: a doctor, a naturalist, a scientist, a psychologist, and a landscape painter who studied under Caspar David Friedrich.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Double-aspect theory</span> Theory in the philosophy of mind

In the philosophy of mind, double-aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance. It is also called dual-aspect monism, not to be confused with mind–body dualism. The theory's relationship to neutral monism is ill-defined,

Neutral monism and the dual-aspect theory share a central claim: there is an underlying reality that is neither mental nor physical. But that is where the agreement stops. Neutral monism has no room for the central feature of the dual-aspect theory: the mental and physical aspects, sides, or properties that characterize the underlying entities of dual-aspect theory. The neutral monist accepts the mental/physical distinction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry Lehmann</span> German physicist

Harry Lehmann was a German physicist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reichsuniversität Straßburg</span>

The Reichsuniversität Straßburg was founded in 1941 by the Nazis in Alsace after the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Nazi Germany. The University of Strasbourg had moved to Clermont-Ferrand in 1939. The university's purpose was to restore the German character of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universität, as the University of Strasbourg was named from 1872 to 1918, and to advance "German knowledge" in the annexed territory. When the Allies arrived in Alsace in 1944, the Reichsuniversität was first transferred to Tübingen and then dissolved.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Martin Sutermeister</span> Swiss physician, writer, and politician

Hans Martin Sutermeister was a Swiss physician and medical writer, politician, and activist against miscarriages of justice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Jung publications</span>

This is a list of writings published by Carl Jung. Many of Jung's most important works have been collected, translated, and published in a 20-volume set by Princeton University Press, entitled The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Works here are arranged by original publication date if known.

"Not even wrong" is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously and scientifically. The phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous with "unfalsifiable".

Aniela Jaffé was a Swiss analyst who for many years was a co-worker of Carl Gustav Jung. She was the recorder and editor of Jung's semi-autobiographical book Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emil Mattiesen</span>

Emil Karl Gustav Alfred Mattiesen was a Baltic Germans musician, music pedagogue, composer and philosopher. He composed lieder, song cycles, ballads, chamber music and organ music, but is better known for standard works in German on parapsychology. He was a professor of church music at the University of Rostock from 1929.

Charles Paul Enz is a Swiss theoretical physicist, known for his long association with Wolfgang Pauli.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Der "Pauli-Effekt"" (in German). ETHistory. Retrieved 14 August 2014.
  2. Enz (2009), p. 152.
  3. Enz (2002), p. 150.
  4. Hans Bender und die Gründung des "Instituts für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene"Eberhard Bauer, September 1997. published in Jahnke, J., Fahrenberg, J., Stegie, R., & Bauer, E. (Hrsg.): Psychologiegeschichte: Beziehungen zu Philosophie und Grenzgebieten (Passauer Schriften zur Psychologiegeschichte; Bd. 12). München; Wien: Profil, 1998.
  5. Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, Bibliothek, Frei122-Z60 Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie Band 4.1960/61, p.13
  6. Pauli, Wolfgang; Jung, C G (2001). Atom and Archetype: the Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958. ed. C.A. Meier. Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp. 179–196. ISBN   0-691-01207-5. OCLC   45757717.
  7. Thirty Years That Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory, 1966, Dover Publications, ISBN   0-486-24895-X.
  8. Peierls, R. (1960). "Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, 1900-1958". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 5: 174–192. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1960.0014. S2CID   62478251.
  9. Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel mit Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg u. a, Band 3 von Wolfgang Pauli, Karl von Meyenn, Herausgeber Karl von Meyenn, Verlag Birkhäuser, 1993, ISBN   0-387-54911-0, P. 763
  10. Pauli, Wolfgang; et al. (1996). Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel mit Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, u.a. Vol. 4/I. ed. Karl von Meyenn. Berlin: Springer. p. 37. ISBN   3-540-59442-6. OCLC   36847539.
  11. Dick, Philip K. (1963/1992). The Game-Players of Titan, p.128. Vintage Books (New York) first edition, first published by Ace Books. ISBN   0-679-74065-1.
  12. Yu-Gi-Oh! Sevens "The Man Who Possesses Evil". 2020. [film] Directed by T. Takeuchi. Japan: Bridge.