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By Root 847 0

Robert Fludd, with whom Kepler had clashed. Kepler had stood up for the number three as the key number necessary to explain the workings of the universe. Fludd, conversely, asserted that it was four. “I, myself, am not only Kepler, but also Fludd,” Pauli was to write many years later. For Pauli had been in exactly the same quandry. “Once (in Hamburg) my path to the Exclusion Principle had to do precisely with the difficult transition from 3 to 4, namely with the necessity to attribute to the electron a fourth degree of freedom (soon explained as “spin”) beyond the three translations…. That was really the main work.” Bohr and Heisenberg had asserted firmly that there could only be three quantum numbers for an electron. But Pauli, almost despite himself, realized there had to be four.

A few years later he was to come across the same numbers again in Carl Jung’s psychology, based as it was in alchemy. He was adamant that “in neither case was it by any means Mr. C. G. Jung who suggested it to me, nor was there an advance conscious intention for me to grapple with figuring out the problem of three and four. Consequently I am rather certain that objectively there is an important psychological and, perhaps, natural philosophical problem connected with these numbers.”

Pauli’s study of Kepler and Fludd

Pauli’s study of Kepler and Fludd, “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler,” published in 1952, is the definitive work on the two and indicative, incidentally, of Pauli’s creative ability as a historian of science. His goal, as he wrote, was not so much to enumerate facts as to explore the “origin of and development of concepts and theories.” Scientists such as Einstein and Poincaré had insisted on the importance of intuition in creative thinking. Logic alone cannot lead to the discovery of scientific theories, they said. But neither man suggested a way to bridge the gap between intuition and the precise concepts required of a scientific theory.

Pauli’s inspiration was to look into the practice of science in the Middle Ages, when alchemy, astrology, myths, the Kabbalah, and magical symbolism were all accepted modes of thought. It was a time of enormous change, when thinkers were daring to question the authority of the Church in understanding nature and the process of learning itself was becoming secularized. As scholars debated what questions they should ask about the world around them, brilliant men were developing the fundamental methods of science. Gradually a strongly rationalistic, logical science developed, forcing the more irrational, mystical elements into the background, where perhaps they remained in the unconscious of modern scientists.

Kepler was sure there was an order and harmony in the world and struggled to find a means to comprehend it. Straddling two worlds, he suffered great personal anguish in his quest to find the proper place for God. Again and again his research came up with precisely the symmetries and harmonies he was expecting, yet it always seemed to result in a universe without a God. Robert Fludd, meanwhile, remained firmly entrenched in the Middle Ages and in the end the two had to clash. It was a collision between two opposing intellectual worlds, leading each of them to produce a one-sided and incomplete understanding of nature. The forces of mysticism were at the time still overwhelming while science as we know it today was still in its infancy—but a beacon of light.

Early travails

Johannes Kepler was born on May 16, 1571, in the town of Weil-der-Stadt in Germany. His father was a swashbuckling soldier of fortune who fought for anyone willing to pay for his services, even the Catholics, which disgraced the Keplers in the eyes of the Protestant families of Weil. He vanished in the course of a mercenary adventure. Kepler’s mother, Katharina, was said to be quarrelsome and generally unpleasant, just like her husband.

A sickly child, Johannes grew up in what he described as a virtual madhouse surrounded by his squabbling parents and grandparents and six siblings,