#137, again

Today as I left the dentist’s office, I got on the elevator on the second floor and glanced at my watch. It was 1:37. As soon as the doors opened on the first floor, the first thing I saw through the glass doors were the numbers on the building directly across the road: 1037. I haven’t had a 137 synchro since 2012 and immediately wondered what it meant.

But first, a recap on this number.

Wolfgang Pauli, a physicist and Nobel laureate, was an early supporter of Jung’s theory on synchronicity and investigated the phenomenon as well. He had a rather striking experience with a set of numbers. Pauli was confounded by one of the unsolved mysteries of modern physics, the value of the fine structure constant, which involves the number 137.

A prime number can be divided by 1 and by itself. Or, put another way, a prime number is a positive integer that cannot equal the product of two smaller integers. That makes 137 a prime number and a particularly baffling one. In Deciphering the Cosmic Number: the Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, Arthur I. Miller provides a brief, but fascinating history about the number 137 in the world of quantum physics.

The number became so baffling to physicists that the great Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, said that physicists should put a sign in their offices to remind themselves of how much they don’t know. The sign would be simple: 137.

Not only is 137 “the DNA of light,” as Miller puts it, but also is the number associated with the Kabbalah. In a system that sounds very much like numerology, Miller explains that in ancient Hebrew, numbers were written with letters, and each letter has a number associated with it. “Adepts of the philosophical system known as the Gematria add the numbers in Hebrew words and thus find hidden meanings in them.” In Hebrew, the word Kabbalah has four letters that add up to 137. Not surprisingly, physicists began referring to 137 as a mystical number.

Pauli certainly found this to be the case. He wrestled with its implications most of his life. When he was admitted to the hospital at the age of 58 and learned he would be in room 137, he supposedly said, “I will never get out of here.” And he was right. He died shortly afterward.

The last time I experienced a cluster of 137s was when Rob and I were in Toronto, where I was interviewed for William Shatner’s show,   Weird or What?  I was supposed to talk about the Pauli effect –  i.e., the spontaneous breakdown of laboratory equipment in his presence. This psychokinetic effect was to be presented as a possible theory for what was happening to a woman who believed she was the victim of government mind control. And since we were there to talk about Pauli, it seemed fitting that we experienced a clusters of 137. It was as if Pauli welcomed us to Toronto, then showed us around, and waved good-bye as we left. That photo at the top of the post is from Toronto.

But back to today’s 137s. When I got in the elevator and looked at the time, then exited the elevator and saw my second 137, I wasn’t thinking about Pauli. However, I associate this number with the DNA of light and with synchronicity, and suddenly remembered we have a proposal circulating on creativity and synchronicity. The rapid succession with which the two “sightings” occurred (the 15 or 20 seconds it took the elevator to reach the first floor) bodes well, I think, for this proposal “seeing the light” – getting sold.