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 theoretical physicist (1900–1958)
Biography
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist and a pioneer in quantum mechanics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the 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.