Massimi M. Pauli’s Exclusion Principle: The Origin and Validation of a Scientific Principle

Cambridge University Press, 2005. — 211 p.There is hardly another principle in physics with wider scope of applicability and more far-reaching consequences than Pauli’s exclusion principle. This book explores the origin of the principle in the atomic spectroscopy of the early 1920s, its subsequent embedding into the emerging quantum mechanics, and the later experimental validation with the development of quantum chromodynamics and parastatistics.
The origin of the exclusion principle in 1924 is intertwined with the discovery of the electron’s spin, which marked the crisis of the old quantum theory and the transition to quantum mechanics. The reconstruction of this crucial historical episode provides an excellent foil to reconsider Thomas Kuhn’s view on incommensurability. In this book, Michela Massimi defends the prospective rationality of this revolutionary transition by focussing on the specific way in which Pauli’s principle emerged as a phenomenological rule ‘deduced’ from some anomalous phenomena and theoretical assumptions of the old quantum theory. The process of validation, which took place in the following decades and transformed Pauli’s rule into an important scientific principle, is analysed from both historical and philosophical points of view. A suitable version of ‘dynamic Kantianism’ is proposed as the philosophical framework for an understanding of the role and function of the exclusion principle.
This historico-philosophical investigation touches upon some of the most relevant issues in philosophy of science and suggests new answers. The variety of themes skilfully woven together makes this book of interest to philosophers, historians, physicists and those with an interest in philosophy working in the natural and social sciences.The exclusion principle: a philosophical overview.
The origins of the exclusion principle: an extremely natural prescriptive rule.
From the old quantum theory to the new quantum theory: reconsidering Kuhn’s incommensurability.
How Pauli’s rule became the exclusion principle: from Fermi–Dirac statistics to the spin–statistics theorem.
The exclusion principle opens up new avenues: from the eightfold way to quantum chromodynamics.