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Wolfgang Pauli (1900 – 1958)


Austrian-Swiss physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1945.
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Wolfgang Pauli
The famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli is said to have remarked that the deepest pleasure in science comes from finding an instantiation, a home, for some deeply felt, deeply held image.
Pauli quotes
The designation "Jungian Psychology" is actually already unscientific sectarianism. I only acknowledge C. G. Jung's contribution to the general psychology of the unconscious.
Pauli
Yes, yes, our friend Dirac has a religion, and its creed runs: "There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet."




Pauli Wolfgang quotes
The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.
Pauli Wolfgang
What now is the answer to the question as to the bridge between the perception of the senses and the concepts, which is now reduced to the question as to the bridge between the outer perceptions and those inner image-like representations. It seems to me one has to postulate a cosmic order of nature — outside of our arbitrariness— to which the outer material objects are subjected as are the inner images... The organizing and regulating has to be posited beyond the differentiation of physical and psychical... I am all for it to call this "organizing and regulating" "archetypes." It would then be inadmissible to define these as psychic contents. Rather, the above-mentioned inner pictures (dominants of the collective unconscious, see Jung) are the psychic manifestations of the archetypes, but which would have to produce and condition all nature laws belonging to the world of matter. The nature laws of matter would then be the physical manifestation of the archetypes.
Wolfgang Pauli quotes
Although I have no objection to accepting the existence of relatively constant psychic contents that survive personal ego, it must always be born in mind that we have no way of knowing what these contents are actually like "as such." All we can observe is their effect on other living people, whose spiritual level and whose personal unconscious crucially influence the way these contents actually manifest themselves.
Wolfgang Pauli
I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.
Pauli Wolfgang quotes
God made the bulk; surfaces were invented by the devil.
Pauli
It seems significant that according to quantum physics the indestructibility of energy on one hand — which expresses its timeless existence — and the appearance of energy in space and time on the other hand correspond to two contradictory (complementary) aspects of reality. In fact, both are always present, but in individual cases the one or the other may be more pronounced.
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