Wolfgang Paul Quotations

After finishing the gymnasium in Muenchen with 9 years of Latin and 6 years of ancient Greek, history and philosophy, I decided to become a physicist. The great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, an university colleague of my late father, advised me to begin with an apprenticeship in precision mechanics.

I grew up in Muenchen where my father has been a professor for pharmaceutic chemistry at the university. He had studied chemistry and medicine, having been a research student in Leipzig with Wilhelm Ostwald, the Nobel Laureate 1909. So I became familiar with the life of a scientist in a chemical laboratory quite early.

I was born on August 10, 1913, in Lorenzkirch, a small village in Saxony, as the fourth child of Theodor and Elisabeth Paul, nee Ruppel. All in all, we were six children. Both parents were descendants from Lutheran ministers in several generations.

In 1952, I was appointed Professor at the University of Bonn and Director of the Physics Institute, with very good students waiting for a thesis advisor.

Solid state I don't like, even though I started it.

God made solids, but surfaces were the work of the devil.

It's all bound to end in tears,

It would be most satisfactory if physics and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality

I do not mind if you think slowly, but I do object when you publish more quickly than you think.

God does not exist and Dirac is His prophet.

I am of course getting angry if biologists try to use the general concept 'chance' in order to explain phenomena which are so typical for living organisms as, for instance, those appearing in the biological evolution.