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Nobel 1945: the exclusion principle

Nature Reviews Physics volume 7, page 531 (2025)Cite this article

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One hundred years ago, Wolfgang Pauli (pictured left, with Niels Bohr on the right) published the paper that would, in 1945, earn him a Nobel Prize. Pauli had first described the exclusion principle — declaring that in the atom, no two electrons can coexist in a state in which they share the same four quantum numbers — in a letter to his colleague Alfred Landé dated 24 November 1924.

Pauli later recalled being asked by a friend who bumped into him on a Copenhagen street why he looked so mournful. His response: “How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?” For Pauli, who was 24 and already renowned for his prodigious mental powers, this was the first serious setback. For a while, he completely stopped working on atomic physics — at least at a conscious level — and focused on classical physics problems.

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References

Original article

  • Pauli, W. Über den zusammenhang des abschlusses der elektronengruppen im atom mit der komplexstruktur der spektren. Z. Physik 31, 765–783 (1925)

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Related articles

  • Heilbron, J. L. The origins of the exclusion principle. Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci. 13, 261–310 (1983)

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  • Miller, A. I. 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession (W. W. Norton, 2009)

  • Pauli, W. Remarks on the history of the exclusion principle. Science 103, 213–215 (1946)

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  • Duncan, A. & Janssen, M. Constructing Quantum Mechanics Volume Two (Oxford Univ. Press, 2023)

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  1. Nature Reviews Physics https://www.nature.com/natrevphys/

    Davide Castelvecchi

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  1. Davide Castelvecchi
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Correspondence to Davide Castelvecchi.

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Castelvecchi, D. Nobel 1945: the exclusion principle. Nat Rev Phys 7, 531 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-025-00886-6

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