Who was "Not Even Wrong" first?

The familiar quip — and a slippery origin

It has been reported that Wolfgang Pauli coined the stingy phrase “Das ist nicht einmal falsch” — “That is not even wrong” — after reading a paper a colleague had handed him and, with apparent sadness, dismissing it. That account appears in Rudolf Peierls’s biographical memoir of Pauli and in a 1992 letter Peierls wrote to Physics Today; Peter Woit’s blog recently collected these threads and surfaced the Peierls passage. The line lands hard. It’s short, surgical, and it perfectly captures a certain kind of scientific contempt: not merely incorrect, but outside the game.

Conflicting memories — seminars, seminars everywhere

But the story isn’t neat. John Minkowski relayed a different memory from his father Jan Minkowski’s ETH days in the late 1940s: it has been reported that Pauli presided over a seminar, twirling his thumbs, smiling benevolently, then delivered the verdict — “It isn’t even wrong.” Could that be the same moment Peierls described? Or a separate instance entirely? Some have pointed to a 1957 candidate — Hugh Everett’s “relative state” paper — since Sam Goudsmit, then at Physical Review, might have sought Pauli’s view; allegedly the timing fits. Adding more spice, Konrad Bleuler’s interview name-checks Ernst Stueckelberg as a possible seminar visitor who drew Pauli’s harsh taxonomy of papers (“old and right” vs. “new and wrong”) and, if worse, “not even wrong.”

Why the fuss still matters

Why care who said it first? Because the phrase has become a cultural touchstone — a shorthand for ideas that are untestable, incoherent, or simply outside the rules of the discipline. The emotional core of the tale is human: a brilliant mind’s public shrug, the pain of seeing work fall short, the seminar-room theatre of academic judgment. Historical evidence is tantalizing but circumstantial; it has been reported that Pauli may have used the line more than once, and perhaps in more than one setting. In the end, the verdict is fittingly Pauli-esque — rigorous, a little cruel, and not even wrong about its own staying power.

Sources: columbia.edu, Hacker News