Part 1 (1/2)

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

Arthur I. Miller.

Acknowledgments.

LOOKING into the story of Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli has taken me on a journey into ways of exploring the cosmos that transcend psychology and physics and transported me to areas to which I had never before given serious thought. A supposedly rational physicist and historian, I found myself investigating alchemy, mysticism, and the Kabbalah.

I owe an enormous debt to my friend and colleague Karl von Meyenn who opened many doors to me in my study of Pauli's life. For over thirty years Karl has worked on editing Pauli's vast correspondence, now published in eight splendid volumes. He was extremely generous in sharing unpublished insights and doc.u.ments for which I am hugely appreciative.

Early in my research I had the good fortune to meet Carl Jung's grandson, Andreas Jung. He graciously received me at 228 Seestra.s.se, Kusnacht, near Zurich, once his grandfather's house. He gave me a guided tour, showing me Jung's small study and large library crammed with esoteric books as well as the dining room, which Jung considered the center of the house. It was in these rooms that Pauli sat as Jung's patient and then as esteemed colleague and co-worker.

Information collected in archives is indispensable for historical work. I am grateful to Anita Hollier, the archivist at CERN who oversees La Salle Pauli where Pauli's physics papers and personal books are stored. She patiently guided me through it as well as the magnificent CERN Doc.u.ment Server and Pauli Photo Archive.

Thanks to Gabriele Veneziano, chair of the Pauli Committee at CERN, for his kind a.s.sistance in my research and for many good conversations on the nature of things. I would also like to take this occasion to express my grat.i.tude to the Pauli Committee for their kind considerations of my requests for access to archival materials.

Important archival material relating to Jung and Pauli is housed at the ETH-Bibliothek Archive. Michael Ga.s.ser, head of Archives and Private Collections, Rudolf Mumenthaler, and Yvonne Voegeli facilitated my access to this collection. A special thank-you for their splendid hospitality.

I found enlightening information on Pauli's sister, Hertha, at the Ma.n.u.scripts Division at the New York Public Library, which I thank for their a.s.sistance. Thanks to Susanne Blumesberger, Ursula Gabel, Christian Gastberger, and Charles Enz, Pauli's last a.s.sistant, for informative conversations on Hertha.

Interviews with Igal Talmi, at the Weizmann Inst.i.tute, Tel Aviv, and T. D. Lee at Columbia University, New York City, broadened my knowledge of Pauli the man.

Ullrich Muller-Herold and Norbert Straumann took me on several enjoyable strolls around Zurich and filled me in on the scientific milieu there during the last years of Pauli's life.

Helmut Rechenberg told me a great deal about Pauli's time in Munich as a student and his relations.h.i.+p with Heisenberg.

Sonu Shamdasani generously made available to me some of Jung's unpublished lectures and informed me about recent developments in Jung scholars.h.i.+p. Another Jung scholar, Angela Graf-Nold, helped me navigate Jung material at the ETH-Bibliothek and provided me with new Jung sources and information about his professional life in Zurich. My thanks to both.

At the May 2007 symposium on Jung and Pauli, in scenic Ascona in Switzerland, I was fortunate enough to meet a number of ”Jungians” who have been extremely helpful as well as becoming friends. Special thanks to Reinhard Nesper, Harald Atmans.p.a.cher, and Suzanne Gieser. Suzanne's scholars.h.i.+p has been enormously helpful to me.

I appreciate informative exchanges with Finn Aaserud and Herbert van Erkelens.

In Jerusalem Josef Dan, one of the world's foremost experts on the Kabbalah, gave me valuable insights into the subject.

Thanks to Hans-Joachim Braun and Karin Reich for wonderful historical tours of the University of Hamburg, where Pauli held his first professors.h.i.+p.

John Barrow, Jan Munch Pederson, and Simon Singh kindly replied to questions about ”strange numbers.”

Thanks to Chiara Ambrosio for her a.s.sistance in gathering source materials and for chats about creativity.

Conversations with Jeremy Bernstein, Freeman J. Dyson, and T. D. Lee were valuable for my investigation of events surrounding Pauli's 1958 lecture at Columbia University, for which I am grateful.

For perceptive comments on the ma.n.u.script, I thank Mike Brady, Karl von Meyenn, and Sonu Shamdasani. I am especially grateful to Gary Steigman for his insightful and detailed critiques, which were immensely helpful.

As always, my agent and good friend Peter Tallack of The Science Factory has been a pillar of support and enthusiasm, providing sagacious advice and comments on successive drafts.

I am hugely grateful to my editor at W. W. Norton, Angela von der Lippe, for her encouragement and for her many valuable criticisms. I could not have written this book without her help. Thanks too to Erica Stern for easing me through production hurdles.

Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are mine.

My primary interest has always been in studying the creative process. The interaction between Jung and Pauli is a powerful example. To unravel the equations of the soul, they embarked on a path that led them deep into the psychology of the unconscious, which Jung called the ”darkest hunting ground of our times.” To tell their story I have spun a scenario based on available information. In this way I hoped to look into their minds and understand better who these men really were.

Chapters 8 and 9 explore Jung's a.n.a.lysis of Pauli's dreams. We cannot know exactly what transpired between them in the privacy of Jung's study. I have inferred the scenario in these chapters on the basis of the in-depth descriptions Jung made soon afterward and Pauli's biographical details.

For all this I bear full responsibility. Any errors that remain are my own.

Many thanks to those who provided me with photographs and who helped me locate them as well as their copyright owners. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders; if any have been missed, I would appreciate them contacting me.

My wife, Lesley, as always full of good cheer and love, provided me with peace of mind and indispensable encouragement. She is also a fount of invaluable advice on how to turn out a readable book. I am indebted to her for all this and for much else. This book is dedicated to her.

Arthur I. Miller.

London, 2008.

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The no-man's land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious [is] the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times. -CARL JUNG What is decisive for me is that I dream about physics as Mr. Jung (and other non-physicists) think about physics. Every time I have talked to Mr. Jung (about the ”synchronistic” phenomenon and such), a certain spiritual fertilization takes place. -WOLFGANG PAULI

Prologue.

IS THERE a number at the root of universe? Is there a primal number? Is there a number that everything in the universe hinges on, that explains everything? Many of the major discoveries in science have emerged out of mathematics-Einstein's general theory of relativity, black holes, parallel universes, string theory, and complexity theory are only a few of many examples. All of these can be expressed in equations; yet they also depict concrete aspects of the physical universe.

Could there be a single number at the root of the universe which is, as Douglas Adams has it in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, ”the answer to life, the universe and everything?” Physicists, psychologists, and mystics have pondered this question. Some have proposed the number three-as in the Trinity and the three dimensions of length, breadth, and depth. Some have argued for four-after all, we have four seasons, four directions (north, south, east, and west), and four limbs. Some have been convinced that the answer might be the very weird number 137, which on the one hand very precisely describes the DNA of light and on the other is the sum of the Hebrew letters of the word ”Kabbalah.” This is a matter that exercised many of the great minds of the twentieth century, among them the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychoa.n.a.lyst Carl Jung.

137 is the story of two mavericks-Pauli, the scientist who dabbled in the occult, and Jung, the psychologist who was sure that science held answers to some of the questions that tormented him. Both made enormous and lasting contributions to their fields. But in their many conversations they went much further, exploring the middle ground between their two fields and striking sparks off each other.

In 1931 Wolfgang Pauli was at the height of his scientific career. He had discovered the exclusion principle-known to this day as the Pauli exclusion principle-which explains why the structure of matter is as it is and why certain stars die as they do.

Just a year earlier, he had made the audacious suggestion that there might be an as yet undiscovered particle-an outrageous suggestion in those days. Besides the electron, proton, and light quantum, which everyone took for granted, he insisted that there had to be another particle that became known as the neutrino. Twenty-six years later Pauli's neutrino was finally discovered in the laboratory.

But while his friends and colleagues competed to win science's glittering prizes, Pauli was a different kind of character. He seemed almost indifferent to success. His scientific work was not enough to give him satisfaction and his personal life too fell deeper and deeper into chaos as he trawled the bars of Hamburg, sampling the nightlife and chasing after women.

In 1932 a prize-winning film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came out, starring Frederic March as the tormented doctor. Pauli's life too seemed to have fractured.

The solution was obvious. He turned to the world-famous psychologist Carl Jung who, as it turned out, lived not far from him just outside Zurich.

Pauli was thirty-one. Jung, his senior by twenty-six years, was firmly established and hugely famous. He was the toast of the wealthy ladies and gentlemen of European and American high society, who came to him hoping to solve their various psychological malaises.

At the time the world was still living through the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street crash; two years earlier in Germany the n.a.z.is had won 37 percent of the vote in a key election and Adolf Hitler was on the way to becoming chancellor; j.a.pan had recently invaded Manchuria; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just been elected president of the United States. But none of this much affected Jung and his wealthy patients. They were interested in more arcane and intimate matters.

Along with Sigmund Freud, Jung had opened up the concept of the mind as something that could be studied and understood-and also healed. But the approaches of the two legendary psychoa.n.a.lysts could not have been more different.

Right from the start Jung wanted to shed light on those deep recesses of the unconscious that were beyond Freud's method, which dealt only with the areas of the unconscious generated by events in one's daily life. Yet Jung was far more than just a psychologist. His interests ranged far and wide across Chinese philosophy, to alchemy and UFOs. He saw the same patterns underlying radically different ways of thinking across the world, and he was convinced that these patterns arose from the mind. He called them archetypes, essential elements of the pysche. Thus he developed the concepts of the collective unconscious and of archetypes, which are today taken for granted.