Pauli Effect

         

             Pauli effect

Just a couple of days ago, I posted some very important and thought-provoking 

 anecdotes made by legendary physicist Wolfgang Pauli.(in photo) Taking  cue of  that, two of my brilliant physicist friends reacted describing "Pauli Effect", a term used for the mysterious malfunctioning of equipments in the presence of a certain person. We all know someone who has this effect.

How Disaster Accompanied a Quantum Physicist Wherever He Went. To the world, Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli was an esteemed theoretical physicist, a Nobel laureate. 

To the depth psychology community associated with Carl Gustav Jung (adjacent photo) his extraordinary, vivid dreams, packed with symbolism (according to Jung), and anonymously conveyed to preserve patient privacy, were widely discussed. (Once Pauli and Jung published a book together, the thin cloak of anonymity dropped away). Finally to the circle of physicists surrounding Pauli, he was admired for his brilliance, feared for his scathing criticisms, and mocked for the "Pauli Effect", a propensity for disaster striking whenever he was in the vicinity of a laboratory or other structure.

 

If Wolfgang Pauli set foot in an experimental physics laboratory, the legend went, sheer mayhem would result. Beakers would crack, bunsen burners fail to ignite, oscilloscopes would cease to function, and expensive equipment would catch on fire. Collecting data would be useless, except perhaps calculating the total damage for an insurance report. Thus the Pauli Effect, succinctly stated, is that Pauli and labs were an explosive mix. No wonder researcher Otto Stern decided to bar Pauli from passing through the doors of his laboratory.

Pauli's friend and colleague, Rudolf Peierls (shown in photo) described the Pauli Effect as follows: "This was a kind of spell he was supposed to cast on people or objects in his neighborhood, particularly in physics laboratories, causing accidents of all sorts: Machines would stop

running when he arrived  in a laboratory, a glass apparatus would suddenly break, a leak would appear in a vacuum system, BUT none of these accidents would even hurt or inconvenience Pauli himself"

When important experimental equipments in Professor James Frank's laboratory at the Physics Institute at the University of Gottingen blew up for no apparent reason, someone remarked that this could be the Pauli Effect. However, Pauli was nowhere near in the area; he was on a train, travelling to Denmark. It was later discovered that at the time of the lab explosion, the train carrying Pauli from Zurich to Copenhagen was making a STOP at Gottingen. 

So goes the stories of Pauli Effect. Let me entertain my viewers with some such interesting facts.

When Pauli arrived at Princeton  in 1950, an expensive new Cyclotron that had recently been installed burned for NO obvious reason, and there was again speculation about the Pauli Effect.

Such phenomena happened outside the laboratory. When Jung Institute was inaugurated in Zurich in 1948, Pauli attended the opening ceremony, since Jung had asked him to become a "scientific patron" and so represent the convergence of physics and psychology.  At the time, Pauli's mind was turning on the tension between two earlier approaches to knowledge represented by the alchemist Robert Fludd and the scientist Johannes Kepler. When Pauli entered the reception room, for the Jung party, a large Chinese vase inexplicably slid off the table,  creating a flood that drenched some of the distinguished guests. Pauli saw huge symbolic significance of the echo of "Fludd" in the phenomenon of the spontaneous "Flood".This incident inspired him to write his paper "Background Physics". 

On another occasion, Pauli was sitting at a table in the window of a café Odeon, thinking intently about the colour RED and it's feeling tones. While thinking "red" he was unable to take his eyes off a large unoccupied car parked  in front of the restaurant. As he watched, the car burnt into flames and his field of vision was filled with fiery red.

In yet another, quite hilarious, incident in New York Pauli was lunching with Erwin Panofsky, the famous art historian and two other scholars. When they rose from the table, after dessert, three of the men found that they had been sitting - inexplicably on a whipped cream , now smeared over their trousers rumps. The only one unscathed, of course, was Pauli.

According to his close colleague, Marcus Fierz, "Pauli believed thoroughly in his Effect." He experienced an unpleasant inner tension before things blew up. After the event, he felt relief and release his from tension, even moments of euphoria. No doubt he enjoyed his ever growing reputation for producing wickedly strange phenomena. This was, after all, the man who dressed up as Mephistopheles for a skit in front of Niels Bohr's circle in Copenhagen. 

The best story on the Pauli Effect is from Rudolf peierls, a German- born physicist who moved to England and later worked on the Manhattan Project. Some of Pauli's fellow-scientists plotted to spoof the Effect attributed to him at a reception. They carefully suspended a chandelier by a rope that they intended to release when Pauli entered the room, causing the chandelier to crash down. But when Pauli came, the rope became wedged on a pulley and nothing happened - a typical example of Pauli Effect. 

It has been suggested that the reason Pauli was not invited to join the Manhattan project- which recruited many physicists from his circle was that the directors knew that Pauli's reputation and were worried that he would blow up something vital.