Respected figures in physics frequently find themselves having to adopt points of view that can be completely opposed to positions they once held, like Pauli with spin theory:
"The physical interpretation of Pauli's "degree of freedom" was initially unknown. Ralph Kronig, one of Landé's assistants, suggested in early 1925 that it was produced by the self-rotation of the electron. When Pauli heard about the idea, he criticized it severely, noting that the electron's hypothetical surface would have to be moving faster than the speed of light in order for it to rotate quickly enough to produce the necessary angular momentum. This would violate the theory of relativity. Largely due to Pauli's criticism, Kronig decided not to publish his idea. In the fall of that year, the same thought came to two young Dutch physicists, George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit. Under the advice of Paul Ehrenfest, they published their results in a small paper. It met a favorable response, especially after Llewellyn Thomas managed to resolve a factor of two discrepancy between experimental results and Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit's calculations (and Kronig's unpublished ones). This discrepancy was due to the necessity to take into account the orientation of the electron's tangent frame, in addition to its position; mathematically speaking, a fiber bundle description is needed. The tangent bundle effect is additive and relativistic (i.e. it vanishes if c goes to infinity); it is one half of the value obtained without regard for the tangent space orientation, but with opposite sign. Thus the combined effect differs from the latter by a factor two (Thomas precession). Despite his initial objections to the idea, Pauli formalized the theory of spin in 1927, using the modern theory of quantum mechanics discovered by Schrödinger and Heisenberg. He pioneered the use of Pauli matrices as a representation of the spin operators, and introduced a two-component spinor wave-function." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(physics) Thinking about consciousness in the Physics field is a (relatively) new thing, but don't be surprised when physicists are talking completely differently about the meaning of consciousness in their field in a few years...
