Wolfgang Pauli

Sourced

• When that amusing 'Pauli effect' of the overturned vase occurred, on the occasion of the founding of the Jung Institute, I had the immediate and vivid impression that I should ‘pour out water inside’ (- to use the symbolic language that I have acquired from you). Then when the connection between psychology and physics took up a relatively large part of your talk, it became even more clear to me what I was to do. The outcome of all this is the enclosed essay.
  • Letter to Carl Jung (16 June 1948 ), referring to an incident where a vase fell over, apparently spontaneously as he entered a room, and an essay: Moderne Beispiele zur 'Hintergrunds-physik' (Modern Examples of 'Background Physics' ). Jung and Pauli worked together in developing theories of Synchronicity.

• Later, however, I came to recognize the objective nature of these dreams or fantasies ... Thus it was that I gradually came to acknowledge that such fantasies or dreams are neither meaningless nor purely arbitrary but rather convey a sort of 'second meaning' of the terms applied.
  • Letter to Carl Jung, (16 June 1948 )

• The purely psychological interpretation only apprehends half of the matter. The other half is the revealing of the archetypal basis of the terms actually applied in modern physics. What the final method of observation must see in the production of 'background physics' through the unconscious of modern man is a directing of objective toward a future description of nature that uniformly comprises physis and psyche, a form of description that at the moment we are experiencing only in a prescientific phase. To achieve such a uniform description of nature, it appears to be essential to have recourse to the archetypal background of the scientific terms and concepts.
  • Letter to Carl Jung, (16 June 1948 )

• When one analyzes the pre-conscious step to concepts, one always finds ideas which consist of 'symbolic images.' The first step to thinking is a painted vision of these inner pictures whose origin cannot be reduced only and firstly to the sensual perception but which are produced by an 'instinct to imagining' and which are re-produced by different individuals independently, i.e. collectively... But the archaic image is also the necessary predisposition and the source of a scientific attitude. To a total recognition belong also those images out of which have grown the rational concepts.
  • Letter to Markus Fierz (1948)

• 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.
  • Letter to Markus Fierz (1948)

• Both of us [seem] to agree that the future of Jung's ideas is not with [psycho-] therapy... but with a unitarian, holistic concept of nature and the position of man in it.
  • Letter to Markus Fierz regarding Carl Jung's ideas (25 December 1950)

• "The fact of the existence of two theories [causal and acausal] that contradict each other in Jung ... corresponds psychologically to the vascillation between 3 and 4.
  • Letter To C.A. Meier (1950)

• It is always the older that emanates the new one.
  • Letter to Markus Fierz (13 October 1951)

• "The designation 'Jungian Psychology' is actually already unscientific sectarianism. I only acknowledge C.G. Jung's contribution to the general psychology of the unconscious.
  • Letter to C.A. Meier (the president of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich) in (1956)

• There is no God and Dirac is his messenger. (German: Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet.)
  • W. Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze, 1969, Piper, München, p. 119

• Comment on Heisenberg's radio advertisement. "This is to show that I can paint like Titian." (A big drawing of a rectangle) "Only technical details are missing."
  • Letter to George Gamow, 1958, in reaction to Werner Heisenberg's claim that a unified field theory had been found, but the technical details were missing.

Attributed

• I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.

• If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet.
  • Variant: There is no God, and Paul Dirac is his prophet.
  • Variant of a sourced quote

• This paper is so bad it is not even wrong.
  • Variant: This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. This saying and its attribution to Pauli are discussed in Peter Woit (2006) Not Even Wrong. Vintage. The book is primarily a critical discussion of string theory.

• The deepest pleasure in science comes from finding an instantiation, a home, for some deeply felt, deeply held image.
  • Paraphrased in The Origins of Order by Stuart Kauffman (see this online paper for citation). This quote makes sense given Pauli's serious interest in Jungian psychology.

• God made the bulk; surfaces were invented by the devil.

• I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.
  • when he postulated the existence of the very elusive neutrino, see for example Frederick Reines' foreword in