Shared by the wonderful Stormierbones…
From The Dean of Debunking, a book review:
Pauli had three escalating levels of insult for colleagues he deemed to be talking nonsense: “Wrong!”, “Completely wrong!” and finally “Not even wrong!”. By which he meant that a proposal was so completely outside the scientific ballpark as not to merit the least consideration
“Not even wrong” is one of my favorite math phrases ever. To also include “it should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that this is true”, a phrase my calculus professor trotted out as a joke during difficult proofs.