137 - Arthur I. Miller [123]
By this time Jung was a venerable figure, receiving scores of visitors at his mansion in Küsnacht, outside Zürich. More than his psychological work, most wanted to hear his views on UFOs. In 1958 he published Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. It was greeted with an acclaim that astonished even him.
Among the visitors to Küsnacht who tried to convince Jung that UFOs did not exist was Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly across the Atlantic. The United States Air Force had investigated hundreds of sightings of UFOs, he told Jung, and found not the slightest evidence to support them. The author of one of Jung’s favorite books on flying saucers, Donald Keyhoe, suffered from poor mental health, he added, and the Pentagon had disproved all his allegations.
The commander of the American Air Force, General Carl Spaatz, had told Lindbergh that if UFOs actually existed, surely both of them would have heard about it. Jung snapped, “There are a great many things going on around this earth that you and General Spaatz don’t know anything about.”
Pauli’s last letter to Jung was in August 1957. He continued to send him off prints of his papers. Aniela Jaffé apologized for replying on Jung’s behalf, saying that he was very tired. He was now eighty-two. She sent Pauli her “best wishes for 1958—many long journeys.”
Carl Jung was to outlive Pauli. Jung died on June 6, 1961, at the age of eighty-five.
The Mysterious Number 137
The fine structure constant
PAULI once said that if the Lord allowed him to ask anything he wanted, his first question would be “Why 1/137?”
One of his colleagues mischievously filled in the rest of the story. He imagined that one day Pauli did get the chance to ask his question. In response the Lord picked up a piece of chalk, went to a blackboard and started explaining exactly why the fine structure constant had to be 1/137. Pauli listened for a while, then shook his head. “No,” said the man who was famous for declaring of a theory, “Why, that’s not even wrong!” He then pointed out to the Lord the mistake that He had made.
The fine structure constant is one of those numbers at the very root of the universe and of all matter. If it were different, nothing would be as it is. As Max Born put it, it “has the most fundamental consequences for the structure of matter in general.” To recap: spectral lines are the lines that are the fingerprints of an atom, revealed when they are illuminated by light. The fine structure is the structure of individual spectral lines. The fine structure constant, in turn, is the immutable figure that defines the fine structure.
Pauli’s mentor, Arnold Sommerfeld, calculated the fine structure constant as 0.00729. Later scientists, however, discovered that this could be written as the simpler, more meaningful number 1/137 (that is, 1 divided by 137). It soon became known more familiarly as 137.
This number was beyond discussion. It simply had to be 1/137 because this determines the spacing between the fine structure of spectral lines, as had been discovered in the laboratory. But why this figure? Why 137? There was something about 137—both a prime and a primal number—that tickled everyone’s imagination.*
To reiterate: The three fundamental constants that make up the fine structure constant are the charge of the electron, the speed of light, and Planck’s constant, which determines the smallest possible measurement in the world. All these have dimensions. The charge of the electron is 1.61 × 10–19 Coulombs, the speed of light is 3 × 108 meters per second, and Planck’s constant is 6.63 × 10–34 Joule-seconds. All three depend on the units in which they are measured. Thus the speed of light is 3 × 108 meters per second in the metric system but 186,000 miles per second in the imperial system. All three would certainly play an essential part in a relativity or quantum theory formulated by physicists on another planet in another galaxy, but these physicists might have a different system of measurements from ours and therefore