Wolfgang Pauli Quotes

Wolfgang Pauli offers argumentative, grand musings on science and psychology that challenge conventional thinking.

27 quotes

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. '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.

8. It is always the older that emanates the new one.

9. 'The designation 'Jungian Psychology' is actually already unscientific sectarianism. I only acknowledge C.G. Jung's contribution to the general psychology of the unconscious.

10. There is no god and Dirac is his messenger. (German: Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet.)

11. 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.'

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

13. If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet.

14. This paper is so bad it is not even wrong.

15. The deepest pleasure in science comes from finding an instantiation, a home, for some deeply felt, deeply held image.

16. Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato , interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato , looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.

17. 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.

18. A colleague who met me strolling rather aimlessly in the beautiful streets of Copenhagen said to me in a friendly manner, "You look very unhappy"; whereupon I answered fiercely, "How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?".

19. One shouldn't work on semiconductors, that is a filthy mess; who knows whether any semiconductors exist.

20. The fact that the author thinks slowly is not serious, but the fact that he publishes faster than he thinks is inexcusable.

21. 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.

22. The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.

23. God made the bulk; the surface was invented by the devil.

24. How can one avoid despondency if one thinks of the anomalous Zeeman effect?

25. If speculative ideas can not be tested, they're not science; they don't even rise to the level of being wrong.

26. From the point of view of logic, my report on 'Exclusion principle and quantum mechanics' has no conclusion. I believe that it will only be possible to write the conclusion if a theory will be established which will determine the value of the fine structure constant and will thus explain the atomistic structure of electricity, which is such an essential quality of all atomic sources of electric fields actually occurring in nature.

27. For quite a while I have set for myself the rule if a theoretician says 'universal' it just means pure nonsense.