Pauli Exclusion Principle - Everything is Connected to Everything ~ Prof. Brian Cox

About Brian Cox

Brian Edward Cox, OBE (born 3 March 1968) is a British particle physicist, a Royal Society University Research Fellow, PPARC Advanced Fellow and Professor at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.

The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen
by Brian Cox, Jeffrey R. Forshaw

Pauli, Wolfgang (1900-1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist who won the 1945 Nobel Prize in physics for his proposal in 1925 of a rule explaining the behavior of electrons in atoms. Such electrons orbit the nucleus of the atom. The rule, now called the Pauli exclusion principle, holds that no two electrons in an atom can have the same quantum numbers. An electron in an atom has four such numbers. They define the energy of the electron in terms of the distance of its orbit from the nucleus, the orbit’s shape, the orientation of the axis of the orbit, and the electron’s spin on its own axis.

… Pauli’s discovery of the exclusion principle enabled scientists to picture the atomic structure and the behavior of the electrons of every known chemical element. Because the behavior of an atom’s electrons determines how it will take part in chemical reactions, the principle also explained the chemical characteristics of the elements. Pauli helped to lay the foundations of the quantum theory of fields and he participated actively in the great advances made in this area of physics in the mid-1900’s.

excerpts from: http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/famous-scientists/physicists/wolfgang-pauli-info.htm