Pauli effect
- noun
- /ˈpaʊli ɪˈfɛkt/
- Jargon
:
efecto Pauli
- The Pauli effect seemed to occur every time he entered the lab.
Examples
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Whenever the projector broke during meetings, colleagues would laugh and blame the Pauli effect.
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The Pauli effect was invoked after several computers crashed during his visit.
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Some scientists jokingly attribute frequent lab mishaps to the Pauli effect.
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Have you ever experienced the Pauli effect during an experiment?
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Some scientists jokingly attribute frequent lab mishaps to the Pauli effect.
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The Pauli effect was invoked after several computers crashed during his visit.
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Whenever the projector broke during meetings, colleagues would laugh and blame the Pauli effect.
Synonyms
A humorous idea that a person's presence makes lab equipment stop working
Surface Forms
Morphology
Pauli + effect
‘Pauli’ is a proper name with no lexical meaning for a learner and ‘effect’ only signals a phenomenon; the phrase ‘Pauli effect’ therefore only indicates an eponymous phenomenon but gives no clue that it means a person’s mere presence causes technical failures. The specific humorous/idiomatic sense requires background knowledge of the name or the anecdote, so the meaning is not derivable from the constituents.
Etymology
Pauli effect comes from stories about the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. One popular story says that when he visited labs, machines often broke, so people joked his presence 'caused' the failures, and now the term means someone whose presence seems to make technical things go wrong.
