The article on Wolfgang Pauli is very good, as one would expect from such a Pauli scholar as Karl von Meyenn. I have only minor comments.
The general relativity argument Niels Bohr used against Albert Einstein is from the 1930 Solvay conference, not from the one in 1927.
I don’t think Pauli introduced vacuum degeneracy (the authors do not provide a reference). The concept appears elusively in Werner Heisenberg’s unsuccessful attempt at a unified field theory of elementary particles (1953, 1958); Pauli collaborated on some stages of the theory. Vacuum degeneracy was not really understood until the advent of Goldstone’s theorem in 1961.
P. A. M. Dirac’s comment on explaining “much of physics and the whole of chemistry” does refer to quantum mechanics as a whole, not to Erwin Schrödinger’s first paper on wave mechanics (27 January 1926).
The authors say Pauli “beat Schrödinger to the theory of the hydrogen atom.” Although this statement is chronologically not incorrect (Pauli’s paper was sent in 17 January 1926; Schrödinger’s later that same month), it is misleading: Pauli obtained the H-atom spectrum by matrix mechanics, actually beating Heisenberg, who had never tried using his newborn matrix mechanics to solve for the hydrogen spectrum. And Pauli also beat Dirac, who solved the problem again (in two dimensions!) using matrix mechanics, five days later than Pauli. Schrödinger, of course, presented the wave-mechanical solution in a completely independent development.
The authors also say Pauli “discovered nuclear magnetism,” but this is an overstatement. In 1924, Pauli published a paper suggesting that the hyperfine structure in sodium was due to the nuclear spin. People tend to consider Pauli to be the first who suggested that the nuclei should carry spin, but the first calculation of the hyperfine structure (for hydrogen) had to wait until Enrico Fermi’s work (1930).
The article goes on to state, “In papers with Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan, Pauli introduced relativistic quantum field theory.” This sentence is too short to appropriately establish the origins of quantum field theory. Quantum electrodynamics started with Dirac’s 1927 paper on the quantum theory of radiation. In 1928, Jordan and Pauli established the fully relativistic commutation rules for the electric and magnetic fields in vacuum. Incidentally, Jordan is the unsung hero of the quantum theory of fields. But the modern covariant quantum theory of fields truly started with the two papers coauthored by Heisenberg and Pauli in 1929 and 1930.
The respective roles of Heisenberg and Pauli in the crucial years around and after 1925 are still a matter of discussion. I do not agree with the authors’ opinion that “much of Heisenberg’s work was inspired by Pauli’s ideas.” It is clear that Heisenberg sent many of his papers to Pauli prior to publication, in particular the 1925 matrix mechanics one and the uncertainty papers of 1927. But it is equally clear that most of Heisenberg’s ideas were his own. When the draft earned Pauli’s approval, Heisenberg happily sent it for publication. And when the two men got stuck, as in the naive application of quantum rules to the electromagnetic field, it was Heisenberg who eventually solved the riddle. The same is true with the anomalous Zeeman effect and the helium spectrum, monumental works done essentially by Heisenberg alone (although Jordan collaborated in the Zeeman paper).
I think the statement that Pauli and Heisenberg “were the phenomenologists par excellence” and “felt themselves to be the real physicists” is unfair and vague. True, both were conversant with the latest in theory and phenomenology, but so were others. Also, it is well known (and I have personal testimony) how much Heisenberg appreciated Dirac and Jordan, to mention just two; the same is true of Pauli.
