137 - Arthur I. Miller [91]
In his writings Wilhelm had discussed the significance of “magical pictures of trees in rows,” relating the image to hexagram 51—“The Arousing” (Shock, Thunder)—in the I Ching. In this hexagram the two trigrams—the top and bottom sets of three lines—consist of two broken lines (like two doublets) on top of an unbroken one, which seems to push them violently upward, as if in the awakening of a life force. The text reads:
The superior man sets his life in order
And examines himself.
It was a message Pauli was determined to take to heart.
Synchronicity
The riddle of the electron
IN ANCIENT TIMES, matter was thought of as being the mother of all things. From this alchemists derived the notion of the prima materia (prime matter), which is uncreated and which therefore contains the attributes of God. In modern physics, conversely, matter has become entirely ephemeral in that it can be created and destroyed, as in the spontaneous creation and annihilation of pairs of antiparticles and particles. One of these antiparticles is the antiparticle of the electron, the positron, which possesses exactly the same properties as the electron except that it has a positive instead of a negative charge. When particle and antiparticle come together they disintegrate in a flash of light. In 1932 the positron—first predicted by Paul Dirac in the famous Dirac equation—had been discovered in the laboratory.
This supported Pauli’s view that there was no foundation for a view of life based on the pre-eminence of matter. Einstein symbolized his discovery that mass—that is, matter—and energy were equivalent in the equation E = mc2. Here solid mass is replaced by energy, which has no form. Energy is indestructible and outside of time, and as a result the total quantity of energy always remains the same. This is known as the law of conservation of energy. But one of the astounding results of relativity theory is that there is no law of conservation of mass.
Although energy is timeless, it appears in space and time in particular ways. In quantum physics the energy of a spectral line is proportional to its frequency, that is, the number of oscillations of light per time interval. Imagine you have isolated a single hydrogen atom whose lone electron occupies a stationary state above its ground state or lowest level. The atom is said to be in an excited state. In nature the preferred mode of being is equilibrium. The lone electron will eventually drop to its lowest level and emit light. This can be measured in the laboratory as a spectral line. Observing the atom over a long time results in a very narrow spectral line with a precisely determined energy. Information has been lost, however, because the scientist doesn’t know when the electron made its transition to the lowest level. Conversely, observing the atom in its excited state over a short time results in a broad spectral line whose precise energy cannot be determined—there is a spread of energies. But at least now the scientist knows the precise time at which the transition to the lowest level was made.
In other words, the more precisely you know the energy of a spectral line which sparks when an electron jumps from a higher to a lower orbit in an atom, the less precisely you can measure the time that it took to make the transition. There is an uncertainty relationship between energy and time, similar to the one between position and momentum that Heisenberg discovered.
Pauli referred to these two axes—energy and time—as “Indestructible energy and momentum” versus “Definite Spatio-Temporal Process” and saw them as complementary aspects of reality, in that a little of each is always present to a greater or lesser degree.
Pauli’s dreams had convinced him that there was a relationship between the frequency of spectral lines,