The Nobel Prize in Physics 1945
Awarded on: 1945-11-15
"for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle"
Affiliations:
- Princeton University – Princeton, NJ, USA
Wolfgang Pauli
Born: 1900-04-25 in Vienna, Austria
Gender: male
Field: Austrian physicist (1900–1958)
Biography
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was an Austrian physicist and a pioneer of quantum mechanics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle". The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter. To preserve the conservation of energy in beta decay, he posited the existence of a small neutral particle, dubbed the neutrino by Enrico Fermi. The neutrino was detected in 1956.