Customer Reviews

Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung

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I bought this book because I was intrigued by the title. As a non-scientist I love books which elucidate science for the ordinary reader - the lay person - and which inspire me to see the world in a different way and this is certainly one of those. It's a fascinating read about two seminal and intriguing personalities - Wolfgang Pauli, a major figure in the development of quantum physics, and Jung, one of the founders of psychoanalysis. Pauli was a very atypical scientist. While other scientists were very competitive and obsessed with their work, he was a more rounded personality. He spent time in the bar districts of Hamburg, had relationships with cabaret singers and eventually went too far and ended up on Jung's couch. This marked the beginning of a very fruitful relationship for both Jung and Pauli. As well as science and psychoanlysis, the book ranges across alchemy, the I Ching, mandalas and other areas which were of interest to Jung and also became of interest to Pauli, who realised that science alone was not enough to give a full description of the universe. Miller tells this fascinating story lucidly and brilliantly.

Arthur I. Miller addresses the foundational problem of the fine-structure constant (the "Cosmic Number") and the historical, biographical background entailed in the search for a solution to this mostly unsolved problem. The main title is only symbolic of the goal toward which Pauli and Jung were searching: the Philosopher's Stone, or Quintessence of alchemy, the attainment of an enlightened and individuated psyche. The "Cosmic Number" is symbolic of a vital archetypal process in nature, and the physical meaning as giving the strength of the electromagnetic interaction is only part of the problem that concerned Pauli in particular. What Pauli called his "background physics" was a catalyst for linking sense perceptions with creative concepts, and 137 was the "archetypal number" for this. So not only is the fine-structure constant a dimensionless number of fundamental importance in physics, it is of key symbolic significance to Jung's depth psychology and the history of alchemy.

In his study of the archetypal ideas of Johannes Kepler and Robert Fludd from the 17th century, Pauli traced the line of their research back to Pythagoras. While Plato is only briefly mentioned in this book, significant and remarkable parallels are to be found between the geometry of Plato's ideal City of Magnesia and Wolfgang Pauli's dream, "the great vision - of the World Clock". According to John Michell the ideal City of Magnesia is a form of the Cosmological Circle from ancient geometry. "By Plato's time, the very idea of a canon of music had been forgotten everywhere except in the academies of Egypt, but he himself had evidently studied and learned it, for the number code behind it is at the root of all his mathematical allegories and provided the scientific basis of his philosophy." (Dimensions of Paradise, p.9) and "The universe, human nature, and the mind of the Creator were made commensurable by number, which Plato called the 'bond' holding all things together." (p.230).

The fine-structure constant was introduced into physics by Arnold Sommerfeld, Pauli's professor and mentor, and being captivated by the mystery of spectral lines of the atom he said, "What we are nowadays hearing of the language of the spectra is a true music of the spheres within the atom, chords of integral relationships, an order and harmony that becomes even more perfect in spite of manifold variety."(p.64). Pauli's contributions to modern physics include the Pauli exclusion principle for electrons in the atomic orbit, the theoretical prediction of the neutrino particle, the fourth quantum number related to spin, CPT symmetry related to "mirror reflections," the legendary "Pauli effect," and his exit from the world stage from room number 137. Pauli also helped Jung to develop his theory of synchronicity, or acausal connecting principle related to meaningful events. Miller quotes Max Born on p.253: "If alpha (the fine structure constant) were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether (the vacuum, nothingness), and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult. The fact however that alpha has just its value 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy." Pauli concluded that "most modern physics lends itself to the symbolic representation of psychic processes." (p.162). Readers of Carl Jung may find this book more interesting than Pauli fans, as it is more biographical and "Jungian" in content.

The relationship between Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize winning scientist and influential person in the discovery of Quantum Physics, and C.G. Jung, famed psychologist, and founder of analytical psychology, has fascinated many people. The correspondence between the two men has been published, and there are now at least three books which deal with their relationship. The author has written several books on famed scientists, and he knows that field well. However, his knowledge and sensitivity to the work of Jung is not so deep. As I am a Jungian analyst I see that he really does not "get" Jung. So I found the part about Pauli more interesting, and I tended to skip the part on Jung, because I knew that history from my own study. Nevertheless, the book is well written, well researched, and I think it adds to the lore about these two men's relationship. The fact that these two men came from such different backgrounds and fields and yet forged a close relationship makes for a fascinating story.

Although Jung briefly refers to synchronicity in his forward to Wilhelm's translation of the "I Ching," it wasn't elaborated as a theory until he and Pauli jointly published, "The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche." That the two men became friends and collaborated together can almost be seen as a synchronistic event in itself. I am tempted to call Jung a mystic who dabbled in science and Pauli a scientist who dabbled in mysticism. That would be over-generalizing, but not by much. Jung's theories have never been accepted within some mainstream schools of thought. Yet, Pauli not only accepted them, but was put in touch with his emotional side through their therapeutic implementation.

Miller's book explains how the two men influenced each other, yet the cosmic number in its title has more to do with Pauli than with Jung. The number 137 is more important in physics than in Jungian theory, though it is involved in some interesting synchronicities. For example, the values of the Hebrew letters for Kabbalah total 137. Pauli's quest to uncover the meaning of the cosmic number is similar in nature to Jung's quest to understand the self and the process of individuation.

I see this hardcover (c. 2009) is now available in softcover (c. 2010) with a slightly different title: "137."

Ironically (and I think I use that overused word correctly here), the new title "137" will lead to a disappointment for most folks.

I enjoyed the hardcover (and have not seen the softcover) but unless the author has added a lot more to the 2010 edition, many readers are going to be frustrated that not more was written about one of the dimensionless constant in physics: the fine structure constant, 137.

Things I liked best about the book:

a. Author is a physicist, so he brings a different perspective to this, than, let's say, a liberal arts undergraduate in literature who writes about physics.

b. In just a few pages, Arthur Miller manages to distill the theories of Freud and Jung into comprehensible jargon.

c. It complements very nicely "Hydrogen: The Essential Element," by John Rigden.

What I disliked about the book:

1. Way too much on dream analysis, but I think most other readers will appreciate this and wish there was more. But that's fine. If one does not enjoy this part of the book, it's easy to skip ahead. If one enjoys it, one can re-read the sections over to see deeper meanings that may have been missed the first time.

2. Not enough on the fine structure constant, 137. If this is all there is about "137," it won't engender much of a following.

A random thought:

It is absolutely incredible, the quantum jumps men and women made in the first quarter of the 20th century: from Virginia Woolf and James Joyce to Picasso and Cezanne to Einstein and Pauli. Absolutely incredible.

A.I. Miller throws a new light on the relationship between W.Pauli and C. Jung and describes in a magistral way how, what was at the beginning a professional consultation of Jung by Pauli ,evolves into a cooperation each influencing each other into its own territory until they actually fused through some kind of alchemic process,described at its best in the chapter on Synchronicity. One however - at least myself- remains unsatisfied as Pauli personality and his work on quantum mechanics-which does require some familiarity with the subject- seems to invade the story a little bit at the expense of Jung contribution.At the end these two out -of -the box thinkers did revolutionize the world and it would be fascinating to go further in exploring how the mingling of science and unconsciousness have been at the source of such creativity. In that regard the book is definetely more than the story of a relationship.

This is more about Pauli than Jung, but a useful juxtaposition nonetheless. Unfortunately there are too many loose strings here for my taste: I'd like to see less physics and more psyche and perhaps some links to Yogacara Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta "consciousness only" insights. There's an important book in this subject, but we probably don't know enough for it to be written yet. This seems to be a good rough draft and will be useful to specialists who want to take it further.

A very interesting read, though the number doesn't play as big a part in the book as the title and some reviewers make it sound like. More the biography of a rather strange physicist before, after, and during WWII. Jung comes off as far more wacky than I realized he was. A good read, but only if you are into the off-beat and physics .

The author is fascinated by mysticism of ancient age. This might be the reason why he doesn't have very basic understanding of science. He mentioned so many big names and classics in history to show off his knowledge, but he actually doesn't understand a little what he talks about. It might sound cool to know both Jung and Pauli, but these two names are all about the author knows. The author fill ancient mysticism which modern science has spent more than 300 hundred year to get rid of from its own territory in the enormous vacuum of scientific knowledge of him between Jung and Pauli. No real physicists would spend time on thinking why fine structure constant is 1/137 rather than anything else, because from a broader view point fine structure constant is only an aspect of something more fundamental, of which the author has no idea at all. Some years ago there was another book "Tao of Physics", written by another quack and fanned some other amateur "science-lovers". When a Chinese young physicists asked C.N. Yang about it, Yang replied simply "I don't think it's true". This book is simply the same type as that one-Not true.