137 - Arthur I. Miller [6]
The two men also discussed at great length the notion of consciousness, considered by most scientists at that time to be sheer nonsense—“off limits.” Today it is a burgeoning field of research using concepts from quantum mechanics, some of which Pauli had speculated on.
MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS ago I was intrigued to discover that Pauli and Jung had co-authored a book entitled The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. I tracked it down and read it with growing fascination. I was gripped by the new aspects of both men it revealed. As a physicist I knew about Pauli and his contributions to science and of course was well aware of Jung. But the two together, the rational Pauli with the iconoclastic Jung?
I was determined to find out more about their story. Nevertheless, many years passed before I finally had the chance. I began my research in Zürich where I studied their letters, housed in the library of the very famous technological university, the ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule). I visited the areas where Pauli had lived, the restaurants and bars where he used to go, and the streets he used to walk, and stood outside his home in Zollikon, just outside Zürich. It was a large, nondescript, suburban detached house surrounded by trees, not the grand house I had imagined.
In Hamburg I walked the streets where Pauli had lived, worked, and played. Some of the bars he frequented in the Sankt Pauli red-light district are still there and still carry the same edge of violence.
At La Salle Pauli at the huge nuclear physics research laboratory CERN (Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire), outside Geneva, where Pauli’s library is housed, I looked through his books, marked in his own handwriting with his code for important passages, both books he read before meeting Jung and during the time he knew him.
Jung’s Gothic mansion, two stops on the train from Zollikon, was, I had heard, no longer open to visitors. Nevertheless I sent a letter there, addressed simply to “The resident of 228 Seestrasse.” A few days later I received an email from Jung’s grandson Andreas, inviting me to visit. A gracious and friendly man—and the spitting image of his grandfather—he showed me around Jung’s vast and splendid residence. I was thrilled to step inside the spacious high-ceilinged library where Jung and Pauli used to sit, first as patient and analyst and then as friends, mulling over the mind, the times in which they lived, and the civilization they knew. I looked around the dining room and put my hand on the table where they had dined. Outside the grand windows the lawn stretched down to Lake Zürich. It was the same view that the two friends used to admire as they chatted over fine wine and fine tobacco.
The table in Jung’s dining room, the seventeenth-century alchemical books in his library, and Pauli’s own books, with his markings, brought home to me the intensity of their common quest. For Pauli realized that quantum mechanics—despite its grandeur, and in the face of his distinguished colleagues—lacked the power to explain biological and mental processes, such as consciousness. It was not a complete theory. As he put it, “Though we now have natural sciences, we no longer have a total scientific picture of the world. Since the discovery of the quantum of action, physics has gradually been forced to relinquish its proud claim to be able to understand, in principle, the whole world.” To Pauli the only hope was an amalgam of quantum mechanics and Jung’s psychology.
Jung’s and Pauli’s was a truly unique meeting of the minds. It was, as Jung wrote, to lead both of them into “the no-man’s land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious…the most fascinating