#137 – and Connecting with Coincidence

On February 4, the 12th anniversary of this blog, I joined a Zoom meet-up organized by Bernard Beitman. It consisted of participants from different countries who write about, research, or study synchronicities . This  monthly meet-up is part of Beitman’s Coincidence Project, which studies the nature of synchronicities. We shared our ideas and observations about synchronicity, then were paired off with one of the other participants  for synchronicity activities.

Toward the end of the meet-up, the woman in charge of Zoom announced that Beitman’s podcast, Connecting with Coincidence, would begin again soon for the second season. His first season  consisted of 137 episodes.

I exclaimed, “Wow! That’s the DNA of light!”

“It is?” someone asked.

In Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, author Arthur I Miller talks about the number 137 – a prime number – and its significance for Pauli. He describes it as the “DNA of Light.” And that’s a perfect description of Beitman’s 137 podcast episodes of Connecting with Coincidence.

Wolfgang Pauli was a theoretical physicist who was nominated by Einstein for a Nobel. He won the prize in 1945 for the “exclusion principle,” which involves spin theory and the periodic table of chemical elements and atomic structure. Thanks to Einstein, who called Pauli his successor, Pauli was offered permanent positions at Columbia and at the Institute for Advanced Study.  In 1946, he was granted U.S. citizenship and could have stayed in the United States just as Einstein had chosen to do. Instead, Pauli returned to Zurich partly because he missed his good friend Carl Jung. The two eventually began collaborating on a study of synchronicity.

Pauli was also known for his connection with the number 137,  one of the unsolved mysteries of modern physics, the value of the fine structure constant . It’s a prime number – a number that 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.

The number became so puzzling to physicists that the famed 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.

This number confounded Pauli for much of his adult life. When at the age of 58, he entered the hospital for routine surgery and discovered he would be in room 137, he reportedly told a friend: “I won’t get out of here alive.” And he didn’t. He died before he could be released.

So whenever 137 comes up for you, think of it as the DNA of light. Take note of what you were doing or thinking before it occurred.