Pauli's Exclusion Principle

Michela Massimi is a Research Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge, affiliated to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

• 1. The exclusion principle: a philosophical overview; 2. The origins of the exclusion principle: an extremely natural prescriptive rule; 3. From the old quantum theory to the new quantum theory: reconsidering Kuhn's incommensurability; 4. How Pauli's rule became the exclusion principle: from the Fermi-Dirac statistics to the spin-statistics theorem; 5. The exclusion principle opens up new avenues: from the eightfold way to quantum chromodynamics.

Review of the hardback: 'Michela Massimi seeks in her marvellous book a more systematic answer to a more specific question: 'under what conditions are we justified in regarding an empirical and contingent rule as a scientific principle?' … The result is a subtle, thought-provoking book that exemplifies the good that can come of putting careful history of science to sound philosophical use …Massimi's book is a significant contribution to the history and philosophy of physics and offers fresh perspectives on long-standing philosophical problems regarding science.' Kent Staley, British Journal for the History of Science