Pauli Passed As Machinery Failed

Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli gained such a reputation for causing scientific equipment to malfunction that his colleagues jokingly called it the "Pauli effect." When an expensive measuring device suddenly failed at the University of Gottingen while Pauli was absent, institute director and physicist James Franck wrote to him that he was innocent this time. They later discovered that Pauli had been traveling to Zurich and changed trains at a nearby station at approximately the same moment the machine stopped working. Physicist George Gamow later recorded the coincidence in Thirty Years That Shook Physics, making it one of the best-known stories behind Pauli's supposed jinx.

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