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By Root 723 0

the general public, what he actually did is less well known than the man himself. For many years the psychoanalytic community spurned him because of his interest in what they saw as the occult. In part this was due to the lambasting he received from Freud’s circle. He was later adopted by New Age movements, which did not help matters; nor did his alleged Nazi sympathies. Today there is renewed interest in the connection between Freud and Jung. Scholars are also trying to understand Jung and his work within the culture of his day, both when he was forming his ideas and later as a practitioner. To this end scholars are examining his unpublished papers and preparing them for publication, seeking out further information about who this extraordinary man really was, who started a whole new school of psychology and whose work forms much of the basis of psychology as we have it today.

Today scientists, psychologists, and neurophysiologists routinely assert that the understanding of the mind, including consciousness, cries out for an approach that crosses disciplines. But when Pauli and Jung embarked on this same route it was so innovative—so totally out of the box—that they had to keep it to themselves, for fear their colleagues would laugh at them.

Many developments in the study of the mind have happened since their work together first appeared. Some scientists now assert that it should be possible to simulate the working of the mind on a computer, encapsulated as logical procedures for solving problems. This echoes the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle in the early twentieth century.

Neurophysiologists such as Antonio Damasio investigate how parts of the brain are stimulated by images or problems. One of the instruments they use to study which sections of the brain become stimulated and in what order is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This produces images of the brain derived from the way electrons line up their spins in a magnetic field, the understanding of which derives from Pauli’s fourth quantum number. Another method is to measure the increased oxygen flow to a particular area of the brain that occurs when a subject solves a task. To do so the researcher injects radioactive oxygen into the subject’s bloodstream. It produces positrons that collide with the electrons in the brain to produce light quanta which are detected by radiation counters around the patient’s head (positron emission tomography [PET]). These are examples of the marriage of physics and brain research that Pauli might have thought up himself.

Neurophysiologists have also produced evidence showing how important visual images are to the working of the mind. Pauli’s discovery of the fourth quantum number brought to an end the convenient image of the atom as a miniature solar system and led both him and Heisenberg to decide reluctantly to abandon the use of visual images. But Pauli hoped that some day, somehow, in a new theory, a usable visual image of atomic processes would be discovered. Richard Feynman’s theory of quantum electrodynamics, formulated in 1949, produced just such an image. Feynman produced the Feynman diagrams, deduced from the equations of his new quantum electrodynamics which was free of the infinities that had rendered invalid Pauli’s and Heisenberg’s theory of quantum electrodynamics of the 1930s.

Pauli was well aware of Feynman’s theory and was not satisfied because it concerned only electrons and light. It did not remove the infinities from theories that contained newly discovered elementary particles, nor those in Fermi’s theory of weak interactions; and it did not produce the fine structure constant, either. Pauli did, however, agree that Feynman’s procedure—which physicists called “renormalization”—was along the right lines. Jokingly he referred to a Feynman diagram as a “sentimental painting.”

In recent years Roger Penrose has made a pioneering attempt to combine neurophysiology with physics. He suggested that structures within neurons—microtubules—could be the seat of the quantum computations that are the