Wolfgang Pauli vs. Charles Sanders Peirce
Side-by-side comparison of two thinkers
Wolfgang Pauli
1900 – 1958
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was an Austrian–Swiss theoretical physicist and a pioneer of 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.
"Later, however, I came to recognize the objective nature of these dreams or fantasies … Thus it was that I gradually came to acknowledge that such fantasies or …"
Charles Sanders Peirce
1839 – 1914
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss, writing in 1934, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Bertrand Russell wrote in 1959, "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".
"If the sensation that precedes the present by half a second were still immediately before me, then on the same principle, the sensation preceding that would be …"
Connections
Both wrote about: