Observations placeholder
Pauli, Wolfgang - And the Pauli effect
Identifier
019657
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Journal of Consciousness studies 3 No 2 1996
The Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli – Harald Atmanspacher, Max Planck Institute
Pauli lived in a permanent state of tension with our technical world and he was notoriously clumsy with experimental tools.
It is reported that his very presence in the vicinity of a laboratory was sufficient to cause the breakdown of experimental equipment in most inexplicable ways.
Pauli’s sardonic humour and his sense for the burlesque permitted him to enjoy the countless anecdotes about this so called ‘Pauli effect’ (Weizsacher, 1959; Jordan 1973).
Their authenticity is well documented by many independent accounts. Indeed several experimental physicists became nervous whenever Pauli approached their labs, and one of them – Otto Stern – categorically prohibited his close friend Pauli from ever entering his laboratory (Fierz, 1979).
Pauli did not take these phenomena lightly, he considered them to be manifestations of a deep conflict between his conscious and subconscious.