137 - Arthur I. Miller [3]
But while his friends and colleagues competed to win science’s glittering prizes, Pauli was a different kind of character. He seemed almost indifferent to success. His scientific work was not enough to give him satisfaction and his personal life too fell deeper and deeper into chaos as he trawled the bars of Hamburg, sampling the nightlife and chasing after women.
In 1932 a prize-winning film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came out, starring Frederic March as the tormented doctor. Pauli’s life too seemed to have fractured.
The solution was obvious. He turned to the world-famous psychologist Carl Jung who, as it turned out, lived not far from him just outside Zürich.
Pauli was thirty-one. Jung, his senior by twenty-six years, was firmly established and hugely famous. He was the toast of the wealthy ladies and gentlemen of European and American high society, who came to him hoping to solve their various psychological malaises.
At the time the world was still living through the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street crash; two years earlier in Germany the Nazis had won 37 percent of the vote in a key election and Adolf Hitler was on the way to becoming chancellor; Japan had recently invaded Manchuria; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just been elected president of the United States. But none of this much affected Jung and his wealthy patients. They were interested in more arcane and intimate matters.
Along with Sigmund Freud, Jung had opened up the concept of the mind as something that could be studied and understood—and also healed. But the approaches of the two legendary psychoanalysts could not have been more different.
Right from the start Jung wanted to shed light on those deep recesses of the unconscious that were beyond Freud’s method, which dealt only with the areas of the unconscious generated by events in one’s daily life. Yet Jung was far more than just a psychologist. His interests ranged far and wide across Chinese philosophy, to alchemy and UFOs. He saw the same patterns underlying radically different ways of thinking across the world, and he was convinced that these patterns arose from the mind. He called them archetypes, essential elements of the pysche. Thus he developed the concepts of the collective unconscious and of archetypes, which are today taken for granted.
He then came up with the concept of synchronicity, which he always considered one of his most important ideas. He was sure that bonds as strong as those that linked Eastern and Western thinking could also link the apparently cold rational world of science with the supposedly irrational world of intuition and the psyche.
One area that brought all these interests together was numbers. Jung was fascinated by certain numbers—three and four—that popped up again and again in alchemy and also in religion, and in the power of numbers to predict occurrences in life, as codified in the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes). But it was not until he met Wolfgang Pauli that all this began to coalesce.
PAULI, a kindred spirit, was also fascinated by numbers. His infatuation with numbers had begun when he was a physics student, when his mentor Arnold Sommerfeld used to extol the wonders of whole numbers with all the fervor of a kabbalist. Among them was 137.
It was Sommerfeld who discovered this extraordinary number in 1915, while trying to solve one particular puzzling feature of atoms: the “fine structure” of spectral lines, the characteristic combination of wavelengths of light emitted and absorbed by each chemical element—the fingerprint or DNA, as it were, of each wavelength of light. It was dubbed the “fine structure constant” (which in fact equals 1/137, though for convenience physicists refer to it as 137).* From the moment 137 first popped up in his equations, he and other physicists saw that its importance went far