Part 10 (1/2)

Pauli was worried that his reputation might suffer if Jung published material on physics that made no sense and that quoted him as confirmation. But their conversations were far too fruitful to dream of abandoning them. Above all he was gripped by the notion of finding a link between quantum physics and psychology-which surely lay in synchronicity.

The scarab and the birds.

Wrestling with the concept, Pauli discovered that he found it useful to make a distinction between chance occurrences of synchronicity and occurrences of synchronicity brought about by consulting oracles such as the I Ching. For chance occurrences he used the term ”meaning-correspondence” rather than ”synchronicity,” which Jung tended to use synonymously with ”simultaneity.”

In reply, Jung brought to his attention two examples of synchronism in which he was able to identify ”some archetypal symbolism at work...which cannot be explained without the hypothesis of the collective unconscious.”

The first concerned a woman patient whose animus (that is, her male aspect, the female equivalent of the male anima) clung to a stubbornly logic-based view of reality. She had already been to two a.n.a.lysts before Jung. He was having no success either until one day she told him about a dream of a scarab she had had. At that same moment Jung heard a tapping on the windowpane. He flung open the window and an insect flew in. Jung caught it. It was of the scarab family. To Jung this was not a chance happening but a meaningful coincidence. The patient had been disturbed by the dream scarab and the sudden appearance of a real one completely shattered her stubbornly rational att.i.tude. The scarab bursting in through the window allowed her animus to burst its logical chains and place her on the path to psychic renewal-entirely appropriate, said Jung, given that the scarab is an ancient Egyptian symbol of rebirth. It was an example of a psychic state in the observer coinciding with an external event that corresponded to that psychic state.

The other example of synchronicity concerned the wife of one of Jung's patients. She told Jung that when her mother and grandmother died, on each occasion a flock of birds had gathered outside the window of the room. Some time later, Jung noticed that her husband had symptoms of an impending heart problem and recommended that he see a specialist. The specialist, however, could find no problem. On his way back the man collapsed in the street. Shortly after he had set off to see the specialist a large flock of birds had alighted on the house. His wife immediately recognized this as a sign of her husband's impending death.

Jung noted that in the Babylonian Hades the soul is adorned with feathers and in ancient Egypt the soul was considered to be a bird. It was an example of a psychic state coinciding with a corresponding, not yet existent, future event.

In Rhine's experiments it was the subjects' determination to achieve the impossible-to show that ESP existed-that caused them to tap into their unconscious. Dunne's dreams showed that the psychic state can coincide with an event (like the volcanic eruption) when the subject is asleep. In both cases quieting or closing down the conscious mind enabled the subject or dreamer to open the unconscious to the external world and to allow archetypes to emerge. Divinatory procedures, such as consulting the I Ching, required this same mental condition. In each instance of synchronicity that Jung observed, an archetype appeared-the scarabs, the birds. ”The effective (numinous) agents in the unconscious are the archetypes. By far the greatest number of spontaneous synchronistic phenomena that I have had occasion to observe and a.n.a.lyze can easily be shown to have a direct connection with an archetype,” Jung wrote.

Pauli was still doubtful about Jung's use of the term ”synchronistic” to mean ”at the same time.” Surely this held only for experiences in the first category (an external event coinciding with a psychic state, as in the case of the scarab). While he was mulling over this problem, Pauli had a dream. It was October 1949.

The stranger/Merlin appears.

The dream concerns a ”stranger” who appeared in earlier dreams as the ”blond” man.

In Jungian terms he is the voice of the collective unconscious, the background archetypes given shape-constellated-by twentieth-century scientific concepts, and represents authority. He often comments that modern physics is inadequate and incomplete and is able to move back and forth between the physical and the psychic, the conscious and the unconscious. He is an intermediary, like Hermes in alchemy, a ”psychopomp,” who moves between the dark and light worlds.

While working on Kepler, Pauli read Romans de la Table Ronde (Stories of the Round Table), containing the legends of the Holy Grail. He was struck by the similarity between the ”stranger” and the wizard, Merlin. Emma, Jung's wife, was also interested in the Grail. Pauli wrote to her: [The stranger] is a spiritual light figure with superior knowledge, and on the other hand, he is a chthonic [dark] natural spirit. But his knowledge repeatedly takes him back to nature, and his chthonic origins are also the source of his knowledge, so that ultimately both aspects turn out to be facets of the same ”personality.” He is the one who prepares the way for the quaternity, which is always pursuing him.... He is not an ”Antichrist,” but in a certain sense an ”Anti-scientist,” ”science” here meaning especially the scientific approach, particularly as it is taught in universities today.... My branch of science, physics, has become somewhat bogged down. The same thing can be said in a different way: When rational methods in science reach a dead end, a new lease on life is given to those contents that were pushed out of time consciousness in the 17th century and sank into the unconscious. [The stranger] happily uses the terminology of modern science (radioactivity, spin) and mathematics (prime numbers) but does so in an unconventional manner. Inasmuch as he ultimately wishes to be understood but has yet to find his place in our contemporary culture, he is, like Merlin, in need of redemption.

In some ways the ”stranger” seems to represent Pauli himself-not surprisingly, for he springs from the collective unconscious, which, according to Pauli, has now been given ”a new lease on life.”

Of the stranger, he wrote to Aniela Jaffe, Jung's secretary:.

Like Merlin, he knows the future, but cannot change it.... In my opinion, however, man can alter the ”future.”...I want to recognize [Merlin], talk to him again, bring his redemption a little nearer. That, I believe, is the myth of my life.

For Pauli rational methods had reached a dead end and were no longer the tools that would enable him to change the world. Rather, the magical world of Merlin with its search for the quaternity held the key. If Pauli could only come face to face with him, he could ”bring his redemption a little nearer” and so, too, with the ”stranger” who could not speak a language that could be understood by everyone. Pauli believed that to move forward in examining the human psyche he needed to fuse physics with psychology. This was the ”myth of [his] life,” no less heroic than that of Merlin.

In Pauli's dream, an airplane lands and some foreigners step out, among them the stranger. He tells Pauli, ”You should not exaggerate your difficulties with the notion of time. The dark girl has only to make a short journey, in order to determine the time!”

Jung's interpretation of this dream was that the airplane represented Pauli's intuition and the foreigners his ”not-yet-a.s.similated thoughts.” The dark girl is Pauli's anima. She has to ”make a short journey,” that is, change her place in order to achieve definite time. At present ”she has no definite time,” meaning that she lives in the unconscious. She has to transplant herself ”into consciousness in order to be able to define time.” The stranger wants Pauli's anima-the feminine side of his personality-to study the mathematics of whole numbers which are the ”archetypes of order,” in order to understand synchronicity. In this way, Pauli will be able to move toward a unification of physics and psychology, the reverse of Kepler's materialistic worldview so deplored by Fludd.

Jung concluded his letter with a new quaternary diagram: Jung's response to Pauli's mandala.

In this, Jung takes s.p.a.ce and time as complementary. Opposite the causality of physics he places ”correspondentia”-the correspondence between the psychological and the physical view of life, including synchronicity.

Back to Bohr's complementarity principle.

Bohr, too, in his view of complementarity had something to say about causality: The very nature of the quantum theory...forces us to regard the s.p.a.ce-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the cla.s.sical physical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and definition respectively.

Cla.s.sical physics combines how a system develops in s.p.a.ce and time with causality (meaning a logical chain of cause and effect). The mathematical structure of Newton's laws of motion permitted the path of an object to be traced in s.p.a.ce and time with, in principle, perfect accuracy, that is, to predict the paths of cannonb.a.l.l.s, falling objects, and planets. This is the law of causality. To use it the scientist needs only two pieces of information: where the object was and how fast it was moving when the process began. Knowing that a stone was six feet off the ground and dropped from a resting position, we can predict where it will be as it is falling and when it will hit the ground.

Yet Heisenberg's uncertainty principle a.s.serts that it is impossible to make exact measurements of an electron's position and its momentum in the same experiment. Thus according to quantum theory it is an impossibility-an idealization, as Bohr puts it-to combine a description in s.p.a.ce and time with causality.

According to Bohr's complementarity principle, the description in s.p.a.ce and time of a physical system (such as a quantum of light hitting an electron in the same way that two billiard b.a.l.l.s strike each other) and causality (predicting where the electron and light quantum will be after they bounce off each other) are complementary and mutually exclusive. But every scientific theory must be causal or else it cannot make predictions, which are essential to science.

So can there be predictability, that is, causality, in quantum mechanics? The conservation laws of energy and momentum state that the amount of energy and momentum in a system cannot change. Scientists can apply these laws to predict the final condition of a system from its initial state.

If a quantum of light striking an electron is like two billiard b.a.l.l.s, then it should be possible to use the laws of conservation of energy and momentum to work out where to set up instruments to detect the light quantum and the electron after they collide. In quantum physics the law of causality of cla.s.sical physics-which requires precise measurements of position and momentum in the same experiment-is replaced by predictions made by the laws of conservation of energy and momentum.

A new mandala.

In response to Jung's a.n.a.lysis of his dream, Pauli commented that he agreed that the stranger conveyed a holistic view of nature quite different from the ”conventional scientific point of view.” Unlike his colleagues, Pauli wrote, he considered the quantum mechanics as incomplete. What was required was a fusion with psychology. He had ”no shortage of 'not-yet-a.s.similated thoughts',” he added wryly.

He disagreed, however, with Jung's mandala primarily because it showed s.p.a.ce and time as separate, whereas scientists understood that they were one-the s.p.a.ce-time continuum. He suggested another one which included s.p.a.ce-time while retaining the psychological element of Jung's: Pauli's suggested improvement to Jung's mandala.

Here he lays out complementary pairs, causality-the chain of cause and effect-against synchronicity; and conservation of energy against the s.p.a.ce-time continuum, in agreement with Bohr's complementarity principle. Cla.s.sical physics pairs causality with a description in s.p.a.ce and time. But this is an idealization. And so Pauli set in its place the law of conservation of energy; to be more precise the law of conservation of momentum should be included too.

Synchronicity in physics and psychology.

The essential question Pauli felt needed to be asked was, ”How do the facts that make up modern quantum physics relate to those of other phenomena explained by [Jung] with the aid of the new principle of synchronicity?” How did quantum physics sit in relation to synchronicity and other psychological phenomena. Both types of phenomena, he noted, went beyond ”cla.s.sical determinism.”

In Pauli's mandala, energy and s.p.a.ce-time, and causality and synchronicity, are complementary but mutually exclusive, like light and dark and life and death. Both arms are necessary. It is the tension between them that gives physical meaning to reality.

Pauli also noted that when Jung used ”physical terms to explain psychological terms or findings,” to Jung these were ”dreamlike images of the imagination.” Jung, for example, referred to radioactivity as a physical a.n.a.logy for a coincidence in time-total nonsense to a physicist. Pauli proceeded to explain to Jung the notion of probability in quantum physics using radioactive decay.

In quantum physics there is a law for determining how many of a large sample of nuclei will undergo radioactive decay by emitting particles and light. But it cannot determine at what precise point in time a single nucleus will decay because it is impossible to investigate a single atom and how it develops in s.p.a.ce and time. In other words, individual events are outside of the chain of cause and effect.

On average, half the total sample will decay in the ”half-life”-a period of time that is a characteristic property of each radioactive element. After another half-life, another half of the sample will decay. But it is impossible to know when any particular nucleus will decay. To find out, one has to carry out a measurement on the system that causes decay rather than measuring when the decay naturally occurs. The law of radioactive decay is built up out of the probability of each nucleus decaying, that is, it is statistical. Moreover, the statistical regularity-the prediction of when half the sample will decay-is reproducible and has nothing to do with the psychic state of the experimenter. This is the exact reverse of experiments (such as Rhine's) on synchronicity, which turned up a small number of examples of synchronicity that when viewed statistically were so few as to be negligible. The regularity of the half-life period could be ascertained only when there was a large number of cases, whereas in the Rhine experiments synchronicity appeared only in a small number.

Pauli's explanation of probability in radioactive decay was also a reply to a query Jung had raised: what light does synchronicity throw on the ”half-life phenomenon of radium decay?” Just as it was impossible to tell whether any one radium nucleus had decayed, similarly it was impossible to identify the precise connection of one individual with the collective unconscious. The moment when an individual nucleus decays is not determined by any laws of nature and exists independently of any experiments. Nevertheless, when someone carries out the experiment this moment becomes a part of the experimenter's time system. The very act of measuring whether an individual nucleus has decayed alters its condition and perhaps even causes it to decay.

Pauli suggested that the state of the individual radium nucleus before the experiment was carried out might correspond to the relations.h.i.+p of an individual to the collective unconscious through archetypal content of which the individual was unaware. As soon as one tried to examine an individual consciousness, the synchronistic phenomenon would immediately vanish.

Pauli's understanding of synchronicity firmly separated it from processes in physics. Jung offered quite a different definition: perhaps ”synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which 'similar' things coincide, without there being any apparent 'cause'.... I see no reason why synchronicity should always just be a coincidence of two psychic states or a psychic state and a nonpsychic state.” In opposition to Pauli, Jung suggested broadening the concept of synchronicity to include every sort of coincidence, whether between two psychic states or two elementary particles. He was intrigued by the fact that it is impossible to predict when an individual nucleus will decay, which opens up the possibility of phenomena in individual atoms that are beyond cause and effect.

Jung pointed out that modern physics had shown that the connection between s.p.a.ce and time was crucial. In our daily world of consciousness, s.p.a.ce and time remain two separate ent.i.ties. ”No schoolboy would ever say that a lesson lasts for 10 km,” wrote Jung. The world of cla.s.sical physics had not ceased to exist-we still use Newtonian science to build bridges, for example. Similarly, despite Jung's and Freud's discovery of the unconscious, ”the world of consciousness has not lost its validity against the unconscious.” Our commonsense perceptions about the world-of s.p.a.ce and time as separate and consciousness as our preeminent experience-were still valid.

To replace the mandala he had drawn showing the world of consciousness which experiences s.p.a.ce and time as separate, Jung proposed a more complex one that he devised with Pauli's help.

Jung's mandala covering all instances of synchronicity.

This, claimed Jung, satisfied the ”requirements of modern physics on the one hand and the psychology of the unconscious on the other hand.”

Jung's definition of synchronicity-that is, ”inconstant connection through contingency, equivalence (synchronicity)”-Pauli replied, seemed to cover every system that was beyond cause and effect, including quantum physics. Pauli was intrigued because Jung's broadened definition of the archetype seemed to offer a means to develop a unified view of the world. Did this mean that the concept of the archetype, too, could somehow be applied to quantum physics? Perhaps the ”archetypal element in quantum physics [was] to be found in the mathematical concept of probability.”

Jung enthusiastically agreed that mathematical probability must correspond to an archetype. Bringing archetypes and synchronicity together, he suggested that the archetype ”represents nothing else but the probability of psychic events.” Although all of us are born with a collective unconscious made up of archetypes, it is not inevitable that any single archetypal image will actually appear in our consciousness. It is only highly probable-not inevitable-that patients recovering from deep depression will draw mandalas.

The law of probability in quantum physics is a law of nature and laws of nature contain the patterns of behavior of the cosmos. Given that the archetype is also a pattern of behavior, does this mean that laws of nature have their bases in psychic premises? And how do archetypes enter our human minds in the first place? Jung suggested that they were ”out there,” ready to be plucked out of the air, and in this way entered our minds. We are all, after all, merely small elements in one world. The origin of the word is immaterial, Jung insisted; it's what the archetypes can do that is important.

Returning to the ever-fascinating issue of threes and fours, Jung perceived that quantum physics widened the threesome of cla.s.sical physics-s.p.a.ce, time, and causality-to include synchronicity, thereby becoming a foursome. This happy development solved the age-old problem of alchemists, encapsulated in the ”so-called axiom of Maria Prophetissa: Out of the Third comes the One as the Fourth.... This cryptic observation confirms what I said above, that in principle new points of view are not as a rule discovered in territory that is already well known, but in out-of-the-way places that may even be avoided because of their bad name.”

Jung was delighted to have this unique opportunity ”to discuss these questions of principle with a professional physicist who could at the same time appreciate the psychological arguments.”

Pauli's Jungian take on Kepler and Fludd.