"It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold. A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli's presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck's laboratory in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zürich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the mishap in Franck's laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Göttingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli Effect!"
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Academics from the United StatesBiochemistsCosmologistsPhysicists from the United StatesAstronomers from the United States
Original Language: English
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Thirty Years That Shook Physics : The Story of Quantum Theory (1966), p. 64
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Gamow
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George Gamow
George Gamow [pronounced "GAM-off"] (March 4 1904 – August 19 1968) was an American physicist and cosmologist of Russian descent. He developed the Big Bang theory of cosmology, using it to predict the existence of Cosmic background radiation, and his insight that DNA nucleotides probably formed "a triplet code of four symbols" was influential on very important research and discoveries in genetics.
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