137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession Part 9

There is a story about Bancroft's unconventional way of communicating with an important German contact. Telephones could be tapped, so this method of communication was used only with the greatest care. Bancroft claimed that when she needed to speak to her contact she used telepathy, willing him to call her. Minutes later he phoned saying, "I just got your message to call."

Dulles was incredulous. "I wish you'd stop this nonsense! I don't want to go down in history as a footnote to a case of Jung's!" he said. But Jung was interested in telepathy and asked her to keep records of how long she spent willing him to call and how long it took him to respond.

Whether true or not, that the story is told at all is evidence of Jung's involvement with intelligence activities in Zurich.

SO DID JUNG have n.a.z.i sympathies or not? The judgment of history is still out. It is difficult to weigh the anti-Semitic opinions he expressed, supporting the n.a.z.i line, against his comments about the dark side of n.a.z.ism, though these were never as strongly put during the war. Was his ambivalence an attempt to play it safe? In fact, throughout his life he made anti-Semitic comments. In 1918 he declared that Jews were so overcivilized that they no longer possessed that essential dark Germanic quality-being a pure barbarian br.i.m.m.i.n.g with creative potential of the greatest complexity.

He wrote at some length of Freud's psychoa.n.a.lysis as a Jewish doctrine and described how its reduction of everything mental to material beginnings based on primitive s.e.xual wishes as an oversimplification unsuitable for application to the complex German mentality. He had voiced similar opinions even earlier. In 1897, when he was a medical student at the University of Basel, he spoke to a Swiss student fraternity where he remarked, repeating the then-current prejudice against Jews, that they were materialists who robbed science and culture of their spiritual foundations.

Jung was a man of his times, typical of the Northern Swiss culture, a region that remained neutral yet was sympathetic to the n.a.z.is. But as early as 1934 he realized that he may have overstepped the mark. "I have fallen afoul of contemporary history," he wrote. Yet he persisted.

Many years later, in 1947, Jung invited Gershom Scholem, a well-known Israeli scholar of Jewish mysticism, to lecture at the annual Eranos Conference in Ascona, Switzerland. Aware of the rumors that Jung had sympathized with the n.a.z.is, Scholem asked the highly respected Rabbi Leo Baeck for advice. Baeck had visited Zurich shortly after being released from the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, where he had been one of the camp's spiritual leaders. At that time he had refused Jung's invitation to visit him at home. Jung was insistent and came to Baeck's hotel where they talked for two hours. Defending his stance, Jung spoke of the wartime conditions in which it had not been clear how long the n.a.z.is would be in power, that things might get better, and that to survive it was best to play along with them. Then Jung said, "Well, I slipped up." It was the closest he ever came to an admission of guilt. This satisfied Baeck and they parted as colleagues. Having heard this story, Scholem accepted Jung's invitation and stayed two weeks at his house.

Pauli wins the n.o.bel Prize.

For Pauli 1945 was a momentous year. At the suggestion of Einstein and the mathematician Hermann Weyl, he was offered a permanent position at the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study and also at Columbia University. Then came the greatest honor of all: He was awarded the n.o.bel Prize for his discovery of the exclusion principle.

During a dinner in Princeton in his honor, Einstein gave an impromptu address in which he spoke of Pauli as his successor. Pauli was visibly moved. Panofsky also spoke highly of his friend's knowledge of Kepler and his period.

He recalled their first meeting, in 1928 or 1929, in Hamburg, where they had been introduced by a mutual friend over lunch at an outdoor restaurant. For Panofsky it was an unforgettable occasion on many levels, one being that it provided him with a personal experience of the famous Pauli effect. After the meal, when the three stood up, Panofsky and the friend discovered that the two of them-but not Pauli-had been sitting in whipped cream for the whole three hours. He added two more stories of the Pauli effect. On one occasion "two dignified-looking ladies simultaneously and symmetrically collapsed with their chairs on either side of Pauli" as he took his seat in a lecture hall. On another, Pauli was on a train when, unknown to him, the rear cars decoupled and were left behind while he proceeded to his destination in one of the front cars.

The Pauli effect was surely, Panofsky concluded, based on the Pauli exclusion principle in that whenever Pauli appeared, catastrophes occurred to animate and inanimate objects in his vicinity-but always "excluding Pauli himself."

In photographs Pauli is smiling and relaxed. His great discovery had finally been recognized.

In January 1946 Pauli was granted U.S. citizenship. With job offers at Columbia and the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study he could easily have stayed in the United States forever-as many scientists, such as Einstein, chose to do. But in fact he decided to return to Zurich and the ETH. It was not so much that he pined for Switzerland: "For me, of course, it is not possible to consider myself as belonging to a single country (that would contradict the whole course of my life). I feel, however, that I am European," he wrote to Casimir. He went on, "I know how bad the material situation in Europe is, and it is true that the material side of life is very well and undisturbed here. I cannot say the same about the spiritual situation."

He was more explicit about what he meant by the "spiritual situation" in a letter to his old friend from his earliest visits at Bohr's Inst.i.tute in Copenhagen, Oskar Klein, "I am a bit concerned (though not surprised) on this new instrument of murder, the 'atomic bomb'. Although your first hope, that it will shorten the j.a.panese war, has been fulfilled, I am very skeptical about your other hope, that it will never more be used in any war! I feel that our profession will be discredited among decent feeling persons if the production of this new instrument of murder will not soon be brought under international control."

Pauli never regretted not having taken part in the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. As he saw it, science in the United States was becoming nothing more than an arm of the military: "As in Austria during the First World War, in this year in the U.S.A. I suddenly had the feeling that I was placed in a 'criminal' atmosphere-and this at the time when those 'A-bombs' were dropped," he wrote scathingly. It has even been said that he once referred to the American scientists who worked on the bomb as "gangsters." So clearly he didn't feel at home in the United States.

Friends say, however, that he simply missed his home in Zollikon, outside Zurich.

Thus it was that Pauli returned to Zurich and the ETH in July 1946. Meeting him again after six years, President Rohn found him totally different from the arrogant character he had been when he left. Pauli declared he wanted to put all the difficulties he had had at the ETH behind him. What had hurt him most, he said, was being judged unworthy of being a Swiss citizen and a professor at the ETH. Nevertheless it took another three years before Pauli was finally naturalized.

He had also missed seeing Carl Jung.

Dreams of Kepler.

Once he was settled in Zurich, Pauli quickly got back in touch with Jung and sent him some dreams.

One of his first dreams, which he sent to Jung in October 1946, was about a "blond" man. In the dream, Pauli is reading an ancient book about the Inquisition and how it persecuted disciples of Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno, and also about Kepler's image of the sun as a concrete symbol of the unvisualizable Trinity. The blond man tells Pauli that "The men whose wives have objectified rotation are being tried." Then Pauli is in the courtroom with them. His wife is not among them and he wants to send a note to her. The blond man tells him that not even the judges understand what rotation means.

The blond man then says he is seeking a "neutral language" that transcends terms such as "physical" or "psychic."

Pauli kisses his wife goodnight and tells her how sorry he feels for the accused. He weeps. The blond man says to him with a smile, "Now you've got the first key in your hand."

Shaken, Pauli awakens. The essence of the dream, he thinks, is that men have lost touch with their animas-their female aspect, that is, their wives, for their wives, being cut off from the world of science, cannot understand the scientific term "rotation." But what does this have to do with ancient science and with Kepler? Thinking through the problem, Pauli realizes that Kepler too did not fully understand "rotation." Kepler's image of the Trinity as a sphere is also a mandala. But, in the Jungian sense of the term "mandala," it is incomplete in that it is made up of three, not four, elements.

Kepler's image of the creation of the universe is a straight line emanating from the center, from G.o.d, like a ray of light emanating from the sun. Pauli's a.n.a.lysis is that this line snags the surface of the sphere and as a result Kepler's mandala is static and cannot rotate. It cannot be a true mandala until it is completed by the fourth element, the anima. This is why in Pauli's dream his wife is absent in the court scene.

Beginning with Kepler, Pauli realizes, modern scientists deliberately excluded the anima (in the Jungian sense of the female aspect of their psyche) as they tried to mechanize the world, partially guided, perhaps, by the image of the Trinity, which they saw in the three dimensions of s.p.a.ce. Fludd recognized that modern science's emphasis on inert matter relegated human feeling to the depths of the unconscious. It is when Pauli weeps in his dream, expressing feeling, that the blond man tells him he has found the "first key." Pauli recognizes Kepler and Fludd as opposing psychological types-Kepler the thinking type and Fludd the feeling type. Thus his knowledge of Jungian psychology has revealed to him the limitations of modern science.

Kepler, he thinks, saw the soul "almost as a mathematically describable system of resonators"-like Bohr's virtual oscillators-rather than an ent.i.ty that could be visualized. Fludd, conversely, focused on four, not three, and used drawings to communicate his beliefs.

It was as he was thinking through this dream that Pauli decided to look more deeply into Kepler and his work. Delighted with Pauli's plan, Jung gave him alchemical literature, as did Panofsky. Pauli also corresponded with his one-time a.s.sistant Markus Fierz. Fierz had studied Newton, who was born twelve years after the death of Kepler, and pointed out that his concepts of s.p.a.ce and time were saturated with religion; to Newton both s.p.a.ce and time were relative to G.o.d.

What of Kepler's era, Pauli wondered, when s.p.a.ce and time had not yet been elevated to such heavenly heights? He was eager to go back to the moment when mysticism and alchemy clashed with the new rational scientific thinking. He suspected that this collision still went on in "a higher level in the unconscious of modern man."

Early in 1948 Pauli gave two lectures on Kepler and Fludd at the Psychological Club in Zurich. Jung was in the audience. In his lectures Pauli queried the relationship between sense perceptions and the abstract thinking necessary to understand the world around us. How do we generate knowledge from the sense impressions that bombard us? Sensations enter our minds and knowledge emerges. But what happens in between?

We could argue that we have nothing in our minds with which to organize incoming sense perceptions and stumble about learning from experience. But in that case how do we arrive at an exact science such as mathematics from the results of inexact measurements? The alternative is to a.s.sume that we are born with certain organizing principles already existing in our minds. Pauli argued that it is archetypes that function "as the long sought-for bridge between the sense perceptions and the ideas and are, accordingly, a necessary presupposition even for evolving a scientific theory of nature." They are, in other words, catalysts for creativity.

A month after Pauli's second lecture, the C. J. Jung Inst.i.tute opened in Zurich. It was to be the base for a multidisciplinary approach toward understanding the unconscious, which would require forging a link between psychology and physics.

In his speech at the opening ceremony, Jung took particular pleasure in drawing attention to Pauli's work in examining this problem "from the standpoint of the formation of scientific theories and their archetypal foundations."

Pauli, of course, attended and once again his presence had a devastating effect on a material object. In this case it was not a piece of scientific equipment that broke down but a vase that overturned, spilling water all over the ground. Pauli wrote gleefully to Jung about "that amusing 'Pauli effect'." Inspired by Jung's lecture on the importance of linking psychology and physics, he wrote up his own thoughts on the subject in an essay ent.i.tled, "Modern Examples of 'Background Physics'."

Dreams of physics.

Starting from around 1935 Pauli had occasionally had dreams and fantasies in which "terms and concepts from physics appeared in a quant.i.tative and figurative-i.e., symbolic sense." He called this "background physics." At first he dismissed it as personal idiosyncrasy and was reluctant to discuss it with psychologists because of the physics terminology involved. But then he was struck by the similarity of the symbols in these dreams with the images he came across in seventeenth-century treatises like Kepler's, written at a time when "scientific terms and concepts were still relatively undeveloped."

When he looked into it, he discovered that people who knew nothing of science often created similar images. From this he concluded that his dreams were not, after all, meaningless or arbitrary. It seemed to be proof that "'background physics' is of an archetypal nature." Because physics and psychology are complementary, he was certain that there is "an equally valid way that must lead the psychologist 'from behind' (namely, through investigating archetypes) into the world of physics." In other words, the prevalence of these symbols seemed to provide firm evidence that the symbols of atomic physics derived from archetypes.

Pauli gave as an example of background physics "a motif that occurs regularly in my dreams": the fine structure of spectral lines. What he was looking for was the underlying meaning of these dreams, their "second meaning," beyond pure physics. To understand this he needed to find a "neutral language," understandable by psychologists as well as physicists, into which to translate the concept of spectral lines. He was particularly interested in his dreams of doublets-where the fine structure appears as two spectral lines. He related this to our experience of the division into two components at the moment of birth when, like the doublet splitting, a child becomes an independent existence. It is also linked to doubling in a psychic sense in which the "new conscious content indicates a mirror image of the unconscious"-the conscious as the mirror of the unconscious.

In 1953 Pauli had a particularly memorable dream about spectral lines. In it, he and Franca were observing an experiment whose results appeared as spectral lines on a photographic plate. One of the lines had a fine structure. He described it thus: the dream "contains a favorable indication-namely, the fine structure of the second line." His interpretation was: "What this does is to indicate the beginning of an a.s.similation of an unconscious content into consciousness." In the dream, he added, "My wife says that she finds this very interesting." In other words, he took the dream to mean that his unconscious was emerging in the conscious. Perhaps by this he meant that his interpretation of the dream was that he was developing some characteristics of Franca's psychological types. Unlike him, Franca was outgoing and in touch with the world.

He noticed that the doublets were like the alternating dark and light stripes on wasps (a great source of fear for him) and tigers. This was, he knew, an archetype. It occurred in Western alchemy and also in India, where he had seen the pattern on Indian temples when he was there with Franca earlier that year. It was an expression of two opposite forces, light and dark, endlessly repeating. In psychological terms it symbolized the tendency of a psychic situation to repeat.

This opposition between light and dark was further clarified by Bohr's complementarity concept, which stated that quantum phenomena could be fathomed in terms of the opposition between complementary pairs-such as wave and particle. Bohr had been sure that complementarity went beyond physics and was basic to all of life, where the complementary pairs of life/death, love/hate, and yin/yang played a key role. All this, said Pauli, "seems to point to a deeper archetypal correspondence of the complementary pairs of opposites." And it was symbolized by the splitting of spectral lines into two, a separation defined by 137. This reinforced his belief that 137 was an archetypal number.

It also reminded him of the patterns of lines that form the basis of the Chinese Book of Changes-the I Ching.

I Ching.

The I Ching, a Chinese oracle, was written four thousand years ago. It was translated into German by Richard Wilhelm, a Sinologist and a close friend of Jung's. Jung considered that it revealed insights into chance occurrences that cannot be understood using the Western concept of causality.

The basic structure of the I Ching consists of sixty-four combinations of six broken and unbroken lines, laid out one above the other: the hexagram. The broken line represents yin, the feminine principle, the unbroken one, yang. To consult the oracle, one builds up a hexagram by casting three Chinese coins six times. The inscribed side of the coin counts as yin and has a value of two, the other side as yang with a value of three. One then looks up that hexagram in the I Ching. What the oracle has to offer for any one hexagram is extremely gnomic and requires careful interpretation.

The prediction relates to many factors, foremost that the world about us emerges from a struggle of opposites-yin and yang-signifying good/evil, light/darkness, love/hate, man/woman, and other dualities, quite foreign to the rationalism of Western thought. Jung often emphasized that to the Western mind the whole process seems like nonsense. But Western science also has little light to shed on the psyche. Thus other ways of knowing have to be considered. Jung believed that the message of a hexagram-written thousands of years ago-can illuminate the hidden qualities of the present moment, a coincidence in time that cannot be explained by Western physics.

Pauli, too, consulted the I Ching for advice "when interpreting dream situations." He noted that to consult the oracle one has to "draw" three times "whereas the result of the draw depends on the divisibility of a quant.i.ty by four"-those numbers again. Sixty-four, of course, is four multiplied by four three times-43. This brought Pauli back to the world clock in which the "motif of the permeation of the 3 and the 4 was the main source of the feeling of harmony."

In his writings Wilhelm had discussed the significance of "magical pictures of trees in rows," relating the image to hexagram 51-"The Arousing" (Shock, Thunder)-in the I Ching. In this hexagram the two trigrams-the top and bottom sets of three lines-consist of two broken lines (like two doublets) on top of an unbroken one, which seems to push them violently upward, as if in the awakening of a life force. The text reads: The superior man sets his life in order.

And examines himself.

It was a message Pauli was determined to take to heart.

Synchronicity.

The riddle of the electron.

IN ANCIENT TIMES, matter was thought of as being the mother of all things. From this alchemists derived the notion of the prima materia (prime matter), which is uncreated and which therefore contains the attributes of G.o.d. In modern physics, conversely, matter has become entirely ephemeral in that it can be created and destroyed, as in the spontaneous creation and annihilation of pairs of antiparticles and particles. One of these antiparticles is the antiparticle of the electron, the positron, which possesses exactly the same properties as the electron except that it has a positive instead of a negative charge. When particle and antiparticle come together they disintegrate in a flash of light. In 1932 the positron-first predicted by Paul Dirac in the famous Dirac equation-had been discovered in the laboratory.

This supported Pauli's view that there was no foundation for a view of life based on the pre-eminence of matter. Einstein symbolized his discovery that ma.s.s-that is, matter-and energy were equivalent in the equation E = mc2. Here solid ma.s.s is replaced by energy, which has no form. Energy is indestructible and outside of time, and as a result the total quant.i.ty of energy always remains the same. This is known as the law of conservation of energy. But one of the astounding results of relativity theory is that there is no law of conservation of ma.s.s.

Although energy is timeless, it appears in s.p.a.ce and time in particular ways. In quantum physics the energy of a spectral line is proportional to its frequency, that is, the number of oscillations of light per time interval. Imagine you have isolated a single hydrogen atom whose lone electron occupies a stationary state above its ground state or lowest level. The atom is said to be in an excited state. In nature the preferred mode of being is equilibrium. The lone electron will eventually drop to its lowest level and emit light. This can be measured in the laboratory as a spectral line. Observing the atom over a long time results in a very narrow spectral line with a precisely determined energy. Information has been lost, however, because the scientist doesn't know when the electron made its transition to the lowest level. Conversely, observing the atom in its excited state over a short time results in a broad spectral line whose precise energy cannot be determined-there is a spread of energies. But at least now the scientist knows the precise time at which the transition to the lowest level was made.

In other words, the more precisely you know the energy of a spectral line which sparks when an electron jumps from a higher to a lower orbit in an atom, the less precisely you can measure the time that it took to make the transition. There is an uncertainty relationship between energy and time, similar to the one between position and momentum that Heisenberg discovered.

Pauli referred to these two axes-energy and time-as "Indestructible energy and momentum" versus "Definite Spatio-Temporal Process" and saw them as complementary aspects of reality, in that a little of each is always present to a greater or lesser degree.

Pauli's dreams had convinced him that there was a relationship between the frequency of spectral lines, particularly doublets, and the tension between pairs of opposites such as conscious and unconscious. Energy, which is outside of time, is complementary to processes occurring at definite intervals of s.p.a.ce and time, and similarly there is a complementarity between the archetypal psyche which exists throughout time (the timeless collective unconscious) and our own individual conscious psyche, or ego, which exists over specific time intervals in our daily life. (He abbreviated the ego as "self-awareness" and the archetypal psyche as "time.") Pauli laid all this out as a mandala in the shape of a cross. From this he deduced that the laws of physics are a projection onto the psyche (the conscious/unconscious) of an archetypal a.s.sociation of ideas arising from the collective unconscious: in other words, a clash of the four opposing concepts that he depicts at opposite ends of the two crosses.

Pauli's preliminary mandala showing the collective unconscious and events in s.p.a.ce and time.

The mandala lays out the fundamental complementarity at the heart of both psychology and quantum physics. Bohr had spoken of "the general difficulty in the formation of human ideas, inherent in the distinction between subject and object." In quantum physics, the person making the measurement and the measuring apparatus affect whatever is being measured. Similarly in psychology, the psychologist can never really know the unconscious through psychoa.n.a.lysis. He must always interpret the results of his questions and inevitably he himself will affect his conclusions. Data can never be understood except through the lens of a theory.

In 1948, around the time of the spring equinox, Pauli had two dreams. For him the equinoxes, he said, were times of "relative psychic instability, which can manifest itself both negatively and positively (creatively)." The dreams that arose at those times were always of particular significance.

His dreams were full of mathematical symbols. In one of them i appears, i being the square root of 1: . i is an "imaginary number" because it is not one of the numbers we use in daily life-the so-called real numbers. Nevertheless, i often functions to unify complicated formulas by making them more compact.

In one of his dreams a woman brings Pauli a bird. It lays an egg that then divides into two eggs. Then he notices that he has another egg in his hand, which makes three. Suddenly the egg in his hand divides into two. He now has four; a quaternity has appeared. Before his eyes the four eggs morph into four mathematical symbols, in two groups, side by side: "cos" (cosine) and "sin" (sine) are quant.i.ties from trigonometry (a form of mathematics that deals with triangles) while ""(delta) is the angle formed by two sides of a triangle. These four symbols coalesce into a single expression, unified by the symbol i: This expression is well known to mathematicians.

In his dream he turns this expression into an equation: where e, the "base of natural logarithms," has a numerical value of 2.71828...(referred to as an "irrational" number in that the group of numbers "1828" never repeats); and has a magnitude of 1. The insertion of i into these sets of four has created a unity.

Reflecting on the eggs in his dream, Pauli realized that it was precisely what Maria Prophetissa, the early pract.i.tioner of alchemy, had described some seventeen centuries earlier: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the One as the fourth." This transformation, he noticed, "typically comes about for me through mathematics."

Pauli's interpretation of this whole dream is far removed from mathematics. Describing it to Jung, he explains that is a number that always lies on a circle of radius 1. Through the power of the mathematical symbol i, a mandala has appeared in the form of a circle. In Pauli's dream i "has the irrational function of uniting pairs of opposites"-the cosine and sine functions arranged in two groups of opposites-"and thus producing wholeness." But e too is "irrational," it is an irrational number. This shows, he says, that mathematics "is a symbolic description [of nature] par excellence." Mathematical symbols are the perfect way to unite and represent counterintuitive features of the quantum world, such as the wave-particle duality, which can never be visualized.

Reflecting further, Pauli suggests that the successive splittings of the eggs are a.n.a.logous to the splitting of spectral lines. When one examines the fine structure of a spectral line, the spectroscope shows that what appears to be a single line is actually two and that the s.p.a.cing between the two lines is defined by the number 137. In that case, could it be, he wondered, that two was the primal number in physics, not four? In both physics and psychology there were complementary opposites suggesting that two was the predominant number in the psyche as well. But four-the quaternity-had appeared in his dreams, signifying the wholeness of the material world and our conscious knowledge of it as well as the unconscious. Pauli's discovery of the fourth quantum number indicated precisely the need for this wholeness and therefore, although it was surprising at first, it should have been expected all along, given that four was the archetype of completeness.

i, the square root of 1, which unifies the various elements in Pauli's dream, also appears in Schrodinger's wave function (the solution to Schrodinger's equation). Schrodinger's wave function depends on i and unifies the wave and particle properties of matter as well as being the essential ingredient in making measurements in quantum physics.

This dream reinforced Pauli's conviction that quantum physics ought somehow to form part of a more comprehensive, bigger world picture. It referred only to phenomena that could be described by mathematics and focused its attention on what could be measured in the laboratory, and did not take into account notions such as consciousness. It dealt only with the realm of inanimate matter and thus the anima had been excluded. This excluding of the anima was exactly what Kepler had done when he set about developing modern physics and why Pauli eventually came to side with Fludd.

Parallels and coincidences.

Any discussion of dreams, physics, and psychology, Jung believed, required examining the notion of time, and in particular "synchronicity," a concept which he had been exploring since his early fascination with parapsychological phenomena as a medical student.

In the following years Jung had read deeply in mythology and alchemy where he developed the notion of "one world"-the unus mundus. If there were one world, he reasoned, surely there should also be one mind, which he identified as the collective unconscious of humankind.

When he consulted the I Ching, the advice appeared to be called forth by the moment. If he asked the same question a second time-at a different moment-the advice might be quite different. If the I Ching's answers had any meaning at all, then how did "the connection between the psychic and physical sequence of events come about?" he wondered.

In the 1920s Jung began to look seriously into parallels between out-of-body occurrences and mental states. One notable example occurred in 1928, when Jung drew a mandala that looked to him very Chinese and on the exact same day received in the mail Richard Wilhelm's ma.n.u.script of his translation of the Secret of the Golden Flower. To Jung, that was what synchronicity was all about. In the Western world, we usually a.s.sume that events develop sequentially, one after the other, by a process of cause and effect. But Jung was convinced that as well as a vertical connection, events might also have a horizontal connection-that all the events occurring all over the world at any one moment were linked in a kind of grand network. Thus when one threw the coins to consult the I Ching, the throwing of the coins coincided with one's feelings at that precise moment and the answer reflected the truth of that moment.

The turn-of-the-century adventurer John William Dunne reported experiences that were not explicable within the usual sequential framework of time. In his book An Experiment with Time, published in 1927, he wrote of recurrent dreams in which he foresaw tragic events such as disastrous military expeditions and volcanic explosions which resulted in large-scale ruin and deaths. In 1902, at the age of twenty-seven, while a soldier in the second Boer War, he had a dream in which he saw the catastrophic volcanic explosion of Mount Pelee on Martinique. When he tried to warn the French authorities, they turned a blind eye. A few days later he read about the disaster in the newspaper. The most extraordinary thing was that the dream had occurred not at the time of the eruption, but several days later when the paper was on its way.

Dunne proposed that time might not always unfold in a straight line, as in physics. Perhaps during sleep the psyche was freed from the rigid march of time and time took on a multidimensionality in which haphazard combinations could occur. Jung wrote glowingly to Pauli about Dunne's clairvoyance.

In May 1930, in a memorial lecture for Richard Wilhelm who had recently died, Jung spoke of the philosophy behind the I Ching, which Wilhelm had translated. He said, "The science of the I Ching is based not on the causality principle but on one which-hitherto unnamed because not familiar to us-I have tentatively called the synchronistic principle."

Synchronicity, he often boasted, was "one of the best ideas" he ever had. His experiences as a psychologist had convinced him that scientific laws of causality were insufficient to explain "certain remarkable manifestations of the unconscious." Jung was well aware, however, that physicists would have nothing to do with acausality. He was eager to find a way to back up his developing ideas with scientific rigor. He desperately needed guidance. It was at that point that he met Pauli.

Synchronicity and telepathy.

In 1934 Pauli put his friend and successor at Hamburg, Pascual Jordan, in touch with Jung. Jordan was a highly respected physicist who had carried out ground-breaking research in the new quantum mechanics. He was also a rather eccentric character with a p.r.o.nounced stutter; his wife used to attend his lectures and make bird noises to distract him whenever he lost control of his words. He modeled his hairstyle on Adolf Hitler's, which, unfortunately, reflected his politics. (This was the friend to whom Pauli wrote the postcard addressed to PQQP.) In the 1930s Jordan moved from pure physics research into studying the effect of quantum physics on biology and also began looking seriously into telepathy.

Pauli sent Jung one of Jordan's articles, which the editor of the highly respected scientific journal Die Naturwissenschaften had asked him to referee. It was on the subject of parapsychology. Pauli was skeptical but also curious. He told Jung about Jordan's physics credentials, his speech defect, and his personal problems. Jordan often complained that he had "run out of luck in physics," which was what had led to his "preoccupation with psychic phenomena."

Jung was ecstatic that a physicist of such high repute was interested in the paranormal. Jordan's interpretation of telepathy was that it was sender and receiver sensing the same object simultaneously in a common conscious s.p.a.ce. Jung, conversely, considered that the instance of telepathy occurred not in a conscious s.p.a.ce but in a common unconscious with only one observer "who looks at an infinite number of objects," not just one.

Jung wrote directly to Jordan in glowing terms, congratulating him on his interest in psychology. He drew his attention to Wilhelm's translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower. "Chinese science," he wrote, "is based on the principle of synchronicity, or parallelism in time, which is naturally regarded by us as superst.i.tion." Jung also suggested that Jordan look at the I Ching.

Synchronicity in physics and psychology.

It was not until many years later, in 1948, that Pauli and Jung began to look deeply into synchronicity. In a letter, Pauli asked whether Jung would use the term synchronous, or synchronistic, if there was a gap of time between the dream and the external event it predicted. Jung replied, "nowadays, physicists are the only people who are paying serious attention to such ideas." Pauli suggested Jung record his thoughts on the matter. Jung happily complied and sent Pauli a thick ma.n.u.script to read. Four years later it appeared as "Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle," in a book that Jung and Pauli coauth.o.r.ed: The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. The book also contained Pauli's essay on Kepler. Before that, however, Jung had to undergo tough criticism from Pauli.

The scientific basis that Jung proposed for synchronicity lay in one of the most dramatic implications of quantum physics: that the coordination in s.p.a.ce and time of any atomic process and its causal description are mutually exclusive. One can choose one or the other, but not both. As we saw above, the reason lay in the measurement process itself, in which the measuring apparatus and the "system being measured" (for example, the electron) were inextricably linked. This resulted in unavoidable errors and was at the root of the statistical basis of quantum physics. Moreover, the characteristics of the "system being measured" underwent an unalterable change in such a way that all its individual features were lost. Deriving his knowledge of science from Pauli, Jung interpreted this as showing that there could be other connections of events in s.p.a.ce and time besides the causal connection. Perhaps the same applied to the psyche.

Rhine's experiments in ESP.

Jung was also intrigued by the experiments that Joseph Banks Rhine, an American psychologist at Duke University, North Carolina, performed in the 1930s and recorded in a book called Extra Sensory Perception. It was Rhine who coined the acronym ESP.

Rhine conducted a series of experiments in which a person drew a card from a shuffled deck and a test subject in another room tried to guess what it was. The subjects often achieved astounding results, guessing the correct cards 40 or 50 percent of the time. One subject was 100 percent correct.

Jung examined the archetypal basis for Rhine's experiments. One thing that was striking was that the number of successes decreased sharply after the first attempts and eventually disappeared as the number of tests increased. Rhine attributed this to the subject's lack of interest as time wore on. But when interest and enthusiasm were revived, along with the subject's belief in ESP, the number of successful guesses rose.

Pauli suggested that the decline in the success rate of Rhine's subjects was due to the "pernicious influence of the statistical method," by which he meant that the statistical approach only dealt with large numbers of successful and unsuccessful tests. The size of the sample was so huge that the fact that some subjects had achieved an extraordinarily high success rate simply disappeared in the welter of figures and "the actual influence of the psychic state of the partic.i.p.ants" became imperceptible.

Added to this, the mechanical nature of the experiments meant that the partic.i.p.ants eventually got bored. As their interest in the experiment decreased, so did their psychic power, thereby blurring the initially exciting valid results. Nevertheless, this was clearly another example of complementarity, in that "any connection between causality and synchronicity can never be ascertained," the two by definition being mutually exclusive. Acausal-that is, synchronous-events were certainly rare, in the realm of single figures. But they existed nonetheless.

Jung and Pauli were impressed by the quality of Rhine's professed scientific standards and marveled at how his data had stood up to criticism. Pauli could see that this was important for Jung's theory of synchronicity, based on the claim that scientific causality was not the complete story. But he could not "see any archetypal basis (or am I wrong there?)," he wrote.

Jung took up the challenge.

Jung's astrology experiment.

Around this time, Jung was conducting an astrology experiment. Having gathered data on 180 married couples, he constructed the horoscopes of each partner, hoping to find out whether the dates of birth and positions of the sun and moon for each actually correlated in the way that astrology predicted, within statistical bounds. If they did, then that could provide a scientifically verifiable proof of astrology.

Pauli was uncomfortable with this. He pointed out to his friend, the scientist Markus Fierz, who was a.s.sisting Jung with statistical calculations on his astrological data, that Jung had not included the effect of irrational factors entering from Jung's own unconscious and that of his co-workers. "It's a curious thought that it is we physicists who have to call the attention of the psychologists of the unconscious to this," he wrote. In the published version of his experiment Jung admitted as much, giving instances where his state of mind and that of his co-workers affected the way in which they constructed the horoscopes. Sadly, his results did not bode well for constructing a scientific basis for astrology. Small samples, however, produced good results, which Jung interpreted as demonstrating the predominance of archetypes from astrology: even though people think they are consciously choosing their partners, in fact they are not. Just as when one consults the I Ching and in Rhine's ESP experiments there is no cause-and-effect connection. Jung was the eternal optimist.

In 1949 Pauli wrote to Fierz:.

May this now be a good omen as regards my relationship with physics and psychology, which undoubtedly is among the peculiarities of my intellectual experience. What is decisive to me is that I dream about physics as Mr. Jung (and other nonphysicists) think about physics. The danger of this situation lies in Mr. Jung publishing nonsense about physics and could moreover quote me in the process. The thing is to prevent this and to turn the matter to advantage. I simply cannot evade it! But every time I have talked to Mr. Jung (about the "synchronistic" phenomenon and such), a certain spiritual fertilization takes place.