Writings on Physics and Philosophy by Wolfgang Pauli

Writings on Physics and Philosophy by Wolfgang Pauli

Like Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli was not only a Nobel laureate and one of the creators of modern physics, but also an eminent philosopher of modern science. This is the first book in English to include all his famous articles on physics and epistemology. They were actually translated during Pauli's lifetime by R. Schlapp and are now edited and annotated by Pauli's former assistant Ch. Enz. Pauli writes about the philosophical significance of complementarity, about space,time and causality, symmetry and the exclusion principle, but also about therole of the unconscious in modern science. His famous article on Kepler is included as well as many historical essays on Bohr, Ehrenfest,and Einstein as well as on the influence of the unconscious on scientific theories. The book addresses not only physicists, philosophers and historians of science, but also the general public.

Wolfgang Pauli: The Young Genius
Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), Austrian by birth, was one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century and winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the Pauli exclusion principle in quantum mechanics. His classic work on relativity was first published in Germany in 1921, when Pauli was twenty-one years old. The physicist A. Sommerfeld wrote this in his Preface to the 1921 German edition of Pauli's work:

In view of the apparently insatiable demand, especially in Germany, for accounts of the Theory of Relativity, both of a popular and of a highly specialized kind, I felt I ought to advise the publishers to arrange for a separate edition of the excellent article by Herr W. Pauli, Jr., which appeared in the Encyklopadie der mathematischen Wissenschaften, Vol. V. Although Herr Pauli was still a student at the time he was not only familiar with the most subtle arguments in the Theory of Relativity through his own research work, but was also fully conversant with the literature of the subject.

First translated and published in English in 1958, and reprinted by Dover in 1981, Pauli's Theory of Relativity continues to find readers another fifty years later. In 2000, Dover reprinted the six volumes of Pauli's collected lectures on physics which had first been published by MIT: Electrodynamics (Volume 1), Optics and the Theory of Electrons (Volume 2), Thermodynamics and the Kinetic Theory of Gases (Volume 3), Statistical Mechanics (Volume 4), Wave Mechanics (Volume 5), and Selected Topics in Field Quantization (Volume 6).

In 1928, Pauli, not yet thirty years old, was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich where he did much of his most important work. Following Germany's takeover of Austria in 1938, and the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Pauli emigrated to the United States where he was Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton. In 1946, he became a naturalized American citizen before returning to Zurich, where he mostly lived for the last decade of his life.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9783540568599
ISBN 10	354056859X
Title	Writings on Physics and Philosophy
Author	Wolfgang Pauli
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. KG
Year published	1994-09-27
Number of pages	290
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.