1900-1958

Austrian-American Physicist

Wolfgang Pauli developed one of the most important ideas in modern physics, which came to be known as the Pauli exclusion principle. It holds that no two electrons in an atom can exist in exactly the same quantum state. Pauli put forth the principle in an effort to explain a feature in atomic spectra called the anomalous Zeeman effect. He was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in physics for this work.

Pauli was born on April 25, 1900, in Vienna, Austria. His father was a professor of physical chemistry. Pauli received his Ph.D. in 1921 from the University of Munich, where he studied under Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951) and wrote a 200-page encyclopedia article on the theory of relativity.

In 1916 Sommerfeld had extended the atomic model of Niels Bohr (1885-1962), in which electrons orbited the atomic nucleus in specified circular paths, to include elliptical orbits. The Bohr-Sommerfeld...