Academics From Austria

"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!"

"What distinguished him mostly was his sharp tongue. Everybody was scared of him. He had nasty things to say about almost everybody. I remember the very first time I met him at a conference in Zurich. He was talking with a whole group of people about Julian Schwinger, who had just come to Switzerland. Schwinger was a brilliant young American who had done some very fine work. He was a rival of Feynman; they were the two geniuses then. Pauli was saying that Schwinger told us all this stuff that actually made sense, not like that nonsense Dyson has been writing. At that point I came walking up with a friend of mine, Markus Fierz, who was also a Swiss scientist. With a twinkle in his eye, Fierz came up to Pauli and said, “Please allow me to introduce you to my friend, Freeman Dyson.” Pauli said, “Oh that doesn’t matter. He doesn’t understand German.” Which of course I did. That was a good beginning and we were friends right from the very first day."

"In later years, Pauli seems to have decided that Bohr himself was not a complete supporter of the Copenhagen interpretation. [...] He felt that the real Copenhagen interpretation did insist that the mind was something that you could not avoid referring to in formulating quantum mechanics. Pauli thought, as far as I can judge, that the division between system and apparatus was ultimately between mind and matter."

"I cannot believe God is a weak left-hander."

"One shouldn’t work on semiconductors, that is a filthy mess; who knows whether any semiconductors exist."

"Against all the retrogressive endeavors (Bohm, Schrödinger etc. and in some sense also Einstein) I am sure that the statistical character of the ψ-function and hence of nature’s laws – on which you insisted from the very beginning against Schrödinger’s resistance – will define the style of the laws at least for some centuries. It may be that later, e.g. in connection with the living processes, one will find something entirely new, but to dream of a way back, back to the classical style of Newton-Maxwell (and these are just dreams these gentlemen are giving themselves up to) seems to me hopeless, digressive, bad taste. And, we could add, it is not even a beautiful dream."

"Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato, interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato, looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge."

"205. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false."

"115. If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes ."

"105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life."

"94. I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false."

"1. If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest."

"What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life."

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him."

"If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of."

"A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view."

"The human body is the best picture of the human soul."

"One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief. If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative."

"So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay."

"Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?"

"But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?""

"My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense."

""Everything is already there in...." How does it come about that [an] arrow points? Doesn't it seem to carry in it something besides itself? — "No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." — That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it."

"So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound."

"When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly."

"If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do.""

"To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)"

"The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question."

"The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful."

"Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it."

"Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning."

"What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood."

"What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use."

"Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language."

"Don't say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’" but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won't see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!"

"For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."

"Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses."

"Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination."

"A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide."

"Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint."

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."

"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes."

"Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony."

"The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word "white"?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for."

"Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only."

"Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein: "To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby." That is what I would have liked to say about my work."

"What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within."

"We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming."

"This is not for me, I want an entirely rural spot."

"Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?""