I talked to him on the phone about this and his article contains some accurate quotes from me, together with a link to this weblog. Just recently, Oliver Burkeman wrote a short piece for The Guardian about the Pauli phrase and its recent uses. Pauli remarked sadly ‘It is not even wrong.’īiographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. Quite recently, a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. No doubt many of the stories of this kind circulated about him are apocryphal, but the examples below come from reliable sources or from conversations at which the writer was present… No account of Pauli and his attitude to people would be complete without mention of his critical remarks, for which he was known and sometimes feared throughout the world of physics… He pointed me to a biographical notice about Pauli written soon after his death by Rudolf Peierls as the best source for the story of Pauli using the phrase. Karl von Meyenn, the editor of Pauli’s correspondence, wrote back to tell me that the phrase doesn’t occur in his correspondence. I started to worry that these stories, like many of the best ones about Pauli, might be apocryphal, so I contacted a few physicists who had some connection to Pauli to ask them about this. No one seemed to have any information about this, other than the attribution to Pauli, and various different stories existed about the context in which he had used the phrase. Of course, someone who was around at the time would be needed to confirm that.When I first started thinking about using “Not Even Wrong” as the title of a book, I did some research to try and find out where the supposed Pauli quote came from. The timeline of it's usage, especially by the Sandinistas, makes it most likely that the conflation comes from the 60s counter-cultural movements, when their usage of it would have been well known and when popularity of LotR was really starting to take off (particularly in the US). Think of all the hand-wringing about whether Nate Silver was wrong when he said that HRC had a 74 chance of winning or whatever in 2016. Even though it can be difficult, a truly toxic situation may mean it's a good idea to go 'no contact' with your mom where you stop reaching, stop visiting, and fully focus on your own life. It was also used during the Spanish Civil War and has since been used by various anti-fascist groups worldwide, as well as by the Sandinistas (according to the same Wikipedia article). When I first started thinking about using Not Even Wrong as the title of a book, I did some research to try and find out where the supposed Pauli quote came from. This opens the possibility that Tolkien himself was quite well aware of that form of the phrase and may have even been inspired by it. Later during the war, it also was used by Romanian soldiers during the Battle of Mărășești. It appears on propaganda posters, such as that by Maurice Neumont after the Second Battle of the Marne, which was later adopted on uniform badges by units manning the Maginot Line. This does not mean that these fields should be held in contempt their methods are sometimes capable of establishing specific facts with a very high degree of certainty, beyond a reasonable doubt as the saying goes. Was most famously used during the Battle of Verdun in World War I by French General Robert Nivelle. It was most likely a conflation with “ they shall not pass”, which the Wikipedia article notes: Thus, we get the popular saying "you shall not pass!" even though it didn't exist in the original text. The modern film-makers were less prescriptivistic than Tolkien so they had no objection to using shall in the more modern manner of it being an archaic-sounding command, similar to the modern must. *.unless we take the alternate explanation that Gandalf was using some sort of Jedi mind trick. the triviality of phi4 theory for why you might be able to take a limit but its not 'the theory you want') - is a thorny issue for rigor as well. Thus, saying "you shall not pass" would be saying "you do not want to pass" which is false.* That Balrog really wanted to pass. Lattice approaches are not plagued by issues with things like the path integral, but the continuum limit - both whether it exists and whether it converges against the theory we want it to (see, e.g. A swimmer in distress cries, "I shall drown no one will save me!" A suicide puts it the other way: "I will drown no one shall save me!" The formula to express the speaker's belief regarding a future action or state is I shall I will expresses determination or consent. In formal writing, the future tense requires shall for the first person, will for the second and third. The guide to prescriptivist English, The Elements of Style says: Tolkien was a noted prescriptivist, regarding Shakespearean neologisms as a bastardization of English and attempting to prescribe specific rules for the usage of his own invented languages.