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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 relationship 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 space and time was crucial. In our daily world of consciousness, space and time remain two separate entities. “No schoolboy would ever say that a lesson lasts for 10 km,” wrote Jung. The world of classical 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 space 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 space 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