Wolfgang Pauli and the Synchronicity of the One
In December 1958, a man lay dying in a Zurich hospital. He asked his assistant whether he had noticed the number of his room. It was 137. The man was Wolfgang Pauli, one of the creators of quantum mechanics, and the number was the obsession of his later years: 137 is roughly the inverse of the fine-structure constant, a pure number that governs how light and matter interact, and no one knows why it has the value it has.
Pauli believed, or at least hoped, that the answer would not come from physics alone. He had spent a quarter of a century in conversation with a psychologist to find where the physical world and the inner world touch.
The Physicist Who Dreamed
Pauli was born in Vienna in 1900, and his godfather was the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. He was a prodigy and wrote a masterly review of relativity theory at twenty-one. In 1925 he formulated the exclusion principle, which states that no two electrons in an atom can occupy the same quantum state.
The principle explains why matter has structure, why atoms form the periodic table and why we do not collapse into ourselves. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945.
Colleagues also remembered his sharp tongue and the "Pauli effect": the half-joking belief that experiments broke down whenever he walked into the laboratory.
Behind the brilliant public man there was a crisis. In 1927, his mother took her own life. Shortly after, his short marriage collapsed, and he fell into a depression and heavy drinking. In 1932, on the advice of his father, he consulted the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.
Four Hundred Dreams
Jung took Pauli into the care of a student at first, so that the relationship would not be burdened by the fame of the patient. Pauli's dreams came in great numbers and were full of symbols: wheels, circles, mandalas, mysterious teachers.
Jung analyzed about four hundred of them and used them, without naming their author, in his book Psychology and Alchemy (1944), as the case of "a young man of scientific education."
The patient recovered and married again, but the connection did not end. Pauli became Jung's friend and one of the most challenging interlocutors he ever had. Their correspondence, published decades later as Atom and Archetype, runs to hundreds of pages.
Synchronicity
Out of this exchange came Jung's concept of synchronicity. The word names meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained by cause and effect. Jung's best-known example is the case of a patient who was telling him about a dream of a golden scarab beetle when a similar insect tapped on the window of the consulting room. He caught it and handed it to her.
Jung and Pauli published their ideas in a joint book, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, in 1952. Jung contributed his essay on synchronicity. Pauli contributed a study of the astronomer Johannes Kepler and the role that archetypal images played in the birth of modern science. Kepler's cosmology, he showed, was shaped by symbols, such as the triangle and the sphere, as well as by observations.
One World
Both men wished to find what lay behind the division between matter and mind. Jung borrowed an old alchemical term, unus mundus, "one world," from the sixteenth-century writer Gerhard Dorn. It names the idea that a single reality underlies both physical things and psychic images.
Pauli's own hope was expressed in a letter: it would be most satisfactory if physics and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality. The word "complementary" comes from Niels Bohr, who used it in quantum theory to say that a particle and a wave are two complementary descriptions of the same thing.
Pauli also showed a deep interest in the number four, which for Jung was a symbol of wholeness (the quaternity). He noted with pleasure that the description of an electron uses four quantum numbers.
A Note of Caution
These ideas are a fascinating chapter in the history of thought, but they are not accepted physics. Jung's synchronicity is not a scientific theory, and no experiment has confirmed it. The explanation Jung gave for his scarab, a link outside cause and effect, is not required by anything in quantum mechanics.
It is also worth remembering that Pauli was a rigorous scientist. He disliked sloppy thinking, famously dismissing a poor paper as "not even wrong." He would have been the first to object to modern writers who quote the quantum world to justify any belief they like. His interest in psychology was a personal and philosophical quest, carried on beside his physics and not mixed into it.
Closing
Pauli died on December 15, 1958, at fifty-eight. He left a question that is still alive: how do mind and matter relate? The answer may never come as a formula. His life suggests that one can be a ruthless critic of nonsense and still keep an open window for mystery.
Perhaps the best tribute to his friendship with Jung is that neither man gave up his own discipline to please the other, and each found the other a mirror in which to see a hidden side of his own work.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Synchronicity and the Unus Mundus: Jung and Quantum Physics
- Arthur Koestler and the Roots of Coincidence
- F. David Peat and the Alchemy of Creativity: The Subtle Bridge between Spirit and Matter
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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