137 - Arthur I. Miller [151]
He dedicated it to von Franz: The Piano Lesson is in the Appendix to Pauli to von Franz, October 30, 1953: PLC5 [1667].
holding forth on psychology, physics, and biology: Pauli saw a role for synchronicity in making Darwinian evolutionary theory more palatable. The complex end products of evolution were not just the result of directionless random mutations, with some selection and input from the environment, but “meaningful or purposeful coincidences of causally unconnected events.” This was a third path in addition to those offered by Darwin and Lamarck (see The Piano Lesson). Pauli discussed his neo-Darwinism in lectures and with colleagues, especially his friend Max Delbrück who had moved from physics into biology and would be awarded a Nobel Prize in that field in 1969. In 1943 Delbrück had found results strongly suggesting that the environment had no effect on bacterial mutations. Most biologists interpreted this to mean that genetic changes were purely random. Further successes of molecular biology were taken as meaning that our understanding of evolution could one day be reduced to the laws of quantum physics. This did not sit well with Pauli and no doubt was one of the reasons behind his neo-Darwinian position.
Delbrück was infuriated. He described Pauli as acting as if he were part of a “conspiracy of unemployed physicists against biology [and this is] simply stupid [and] not interesting at all” (Delbrück to Heisenberg, March 15, 1954: PLC5[1744]). See also Atmanspacher and Primas (2006) for a discussion of modern data that, to some degree, square with Pauli’s neo-Darwinian view in that not all mutations are random. They argue that “Pauli’s uneasiness with the straight Darwinian picture of biological evolution was fully justified” (p. 41).
the unity of wave and particle: See The Piano Lesson in Pauli to von Franz, October 30, 1953: PLC5 [1667].
“get from Three to Four”: P/J [64J], October 24, 1953.
“That was really the main work”: Pauli to Fierz, October 3, 1951: PLC4 [1286].
“The professor who shall calculate numerically”: Pauli to von Franz, November 6, 1953: PLC5 [1669].
“what is still older is always the newer”: Pauli to von Franz, November 6, 1953: PLC5 [1669].
“believe that the full moon and the new moon”: Pauli to von Franz, November 6, 1953: PLC5 [1669].
Cambridge Platonist Thomas More: Fierz to Pauli, October 9, 1953: PLC5 [1648].
“the dark half relapsed into the unconscious”: Pauli to Fierz, October 11, 1953: PLC5 [1651].
when these topics were hotly debated: Pauli to von Franz, November 6, 1953: PLC5 [1669].
“God speaks to us always in riddles”: Pauli to von Franz, November 6, 1953: PLC5 [1669].
“until the summer of 1953”: Pauli to von Franz, November 6, 1953: PLC5 [1669].
Pauli’s “active imagination”: Pauli to von Franz, November 6, 1953: PLC5 [1669].
In the youth phase of his life the archetypes are: Pauli to von Franz, November 6, 1953: PLC5 [1669].
this woman is no longer his mother: Pauli to von Franz, November 6, 1953: PLC5 [1669].
“anima-projections upon actual women”: Pauli to von Franz, November 6, 1953: PLC5 [1669].
“two aspects of the same problem”: Pauli to von Franz, November 10–12, 1953: PLC5 [1672].
the number of signs in the zodiac: Pauli to von Franz, November 10–12, 1953: PLC5 [1672].
“a problem with thorns and horns”: Pauli to von Franz, November 10–12, 1953: PLC5 [1672].
“every conceivable combination of chess”: Pauli to von Franz, November 10–12, 1953: PLC5 [1672]. This dream, as well as Pauli’s subsequent vision, is also in von Franz (1970), pp. 108–109, where she referred to Pauli as “a modern physicist.”
“such experiences with physics problems”: Pauli to von Franz, November 10–12, 1953: PLC5 [1672]. This is characteristic of highly creative thinking—illumination after a period of unconscious thought. For further discussion see Miller (2000), chapter 9.
“‘must be dynamically expressed’”: Pauli to von Franz, November 10–12, 1953: PLC5