The physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) was honored with the Nobel Prize as a pioneer of quantum mechanics and was highly esteemed by Albert Einstein. Pauli is famous for two reasons. The first is the Pauli principle, according to which electrons or other fermions (particles with half-integer spin) must be different in an atom and no two can be in the same state.
Fermions are loners, and they are the opposite of particles with integer spin, which are called bosons in the technical world and occur in masses with the same properties. As long as electrons are traveling individually, they experience a resistance that disappears when they move as pairs, because in this combination they have an integer spin. Even if this behavior remains mysterious, this change to the opposite helps to understand the property of superconductivity. The second reason for its fame, the Pauli effect, is comical. It causes the presence of the effect in a laboratory to lead to the failure of a measuring device or other apparatus. Now a "Pauli Engine" is described in the journal "Nature", with which thermal energy can be converted into mechanical work. The aim here was to use genuinely non-classical forms of energy to operate cyclically working machines with the aid of the Pauli principle, in the hope of keeping the Pauli effect at bay. In the apparatus described, the difference in energy that arises between an ensemble of bosons and fermions is exploited when sufficiently low temperatures prevail and "ultracold particles" are involved. With the help of a phenomenon known from scattering theory, the magnetic Feshbach resonance, the statistical properties of the fermions can miraculously be converted into those of bosons, as in superconductivity, and thanks to the Pauli principle, energy is released that becomes work. The machine works through quantum mechanical phenomena and uses the laws of statistics to provide a useful thermodynamic resource for the predictable production of work. Statistics creates physical labor. One would expect the opposite, namely a crumbling of energy in statistical noise. You could almost think that Pauli from heaven is responsible for the opposite of what he does on earth and has made him unpopular. You could call it a Pauli gag.
