As a starting quantum physicist I am very interested in reasons why does Pauli's Exclusion Principle works. I mean standard explanations are not quite satisfying. Of course we can say that is because of fermionic nature of electrons – but it is just the different way to say the same thing. We can say that we need to antisymmetrize the quantum wavefunction for many electrons – well, another different way to say the same. We can say that it is because spin 1/2 of electron – but the hell, fermions has by the definition half-integral spin so it doesn't explain anything. Is the Exclusion Principle something deeper, for example in Dirac's Equation, like spin of the electron? I think it would be satisfying.
[Physics] Is there is a reason for Pauli’s Exclusion Principle
fermionsidentical-particlespauli-exclusion-principlequantum mechanics
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Best Answer
I think that while these "explanations" are all dancing around the same pole, they aren't created equal. I think the meat is in the fact that nature has a local Lorentz symmetry, so we expect to be able to decompose things into representations of the group $SO(3,1)$. It's a mathematical fact that this group (or it's algebra, rather) has integer and half-integer representations.
Once you have this structure, then a few meagre assumptions about causality and unitarity lead to the Spin-statistics theorem. In order to understand the proof you'll need to first dig deeper into the representations of the Lorentz group, and how they label single-particle states.