If you want to know what I’m doing, start here. Then go here, here and here.
Here is another excerpt from Synchronicity – This one has to do with Wolfgang Pauli’s exclusion principle. FASCINATING. And also pretty much completely incomprehensible to me, except on a reaaaaallly literal-image level. Then I get it. Kind of.
Wolfgang Pauli was born in 1900 into a well-to-do Viennese family…As a young child Pauli excelled at school but was frightened by fairy tales. At 18 he enrolled at the University of Munich, where, two years later, Werner Heisenberg was to meet him.
I spotted a dark-haired student with a somewhat secretive face in the the third row. Sommerfeld had introduced us during my first visit and had then told me that he considered the boy to be one of his most talented students, one from whom I could learn a great deal. His name was Wolfgang Pauli and for the rest of his life he was to be a good friend, though often a severe critic.
Pauli could indeed be ruthless in his scientific criticism for he had a profound insight into physics and his intuition was quick to spot false trials, shaky arguments, and errors of assumption … Even Einstein himself was not immune from critical attacks. However, when the young man produced a book-length review of the theory of relativity, Einstein wrote:
No one studying this mature, grandly conceived work could believe that the author is a man of 21. One wonders what to admire most, the psychological understanding for the development of ideas, the sureness of mathematical deduction, the profound physical insight, the capacity for lucid systematic presentation, the complete treatment of the subject matter, or the sureness of critical appraisal.
… Of all Pauli’s contributions to physics the best known is his exclusion principle, an addition to Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics which makes an interesting resonance to the general notion of synchronicity. Synchronicity, we will suggest in this book, arises out of the underlying patterns of the universe rather than through a causality of pushes and pulls that we normally associate with events in nature. For this reason synchronicity has been called by Jung an “acausal connection principle”. But an acausal connection is exactly what was promposed by Pauli in his exclusion principle.
The Pauli principle may be clear enough to the physicist when expressed in mathematical terms but conceptually it is rather abstract. Possibly the best way to understand it is to rely on a simple image.
Pauli arged that, at the quantum level, all of nature engages in an abstract dance. Moreover all the elementary particles and quanta of energy can be divided into two groups depending on the type of dance they execute. Electrons, protons, neutrons, and neutrinos, along with other particles, form one group (and engage in an asymmetric dance) while the other group includes mesons and photons of light (and forms a symmetric dance.) [From Sheila: Huh?]
It turns out that, in the former case, the nature of this abstract movement or dance has the effect of keeping particles with the same energy always apart from each other. [Sheila’s pondering: This alone would account for the whole “opposites attract” theory of human love relationships. At least it seems so to me.] However, this exclusion of particles from each other’s energy space is not the result of any force which operates between them nor indeed is an act of causality in the normal sense, rather it arises out of the antigymmetry of abstract movement of the particles as a whole. Hence the underlying pattern of the whole dance has a profound effect on the behavior of each individual particle. [Okay. Now THAT I understand.]
For example, it is the exclusion principle which causes electrons in an atom to stack up in a series of energy levels and makes one atom chemically distinguishable from another. It is the Pauli principle which gives rise to the rich chemistry of nature, and without it, the whole universe would seem more or less featureless…
The antigymmetric dance of the Pauli principle is in constant battle against the force of gravity and the various stages of this battle result in the collapse of a star through the white dwarf, neutron star, and black hole stages.
So Wolfgang Pauli’s most famous contribution to physics involved the discovery of an abstract pattern that lies hidden beneath the surface of atomic matter and determines its behavior in a noncausal way.
More coming up on the fascination relationship of Pauli and Jung.
