Last year, I bought Deciphering the Cosmic Number: the Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. The book, by Arthur I. Miller, is fascinating and every so often, I pick it up periodically and read for the sheer delight.
Wolfgang Pauli, whom we’ve written about before, was a theoretical physicist 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.
In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, secret 3 is that synchronicity is the granddaddy of all paranormal phenomena, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, remote viewing – and telekinesis. This means that Pauli was a testament to synchronicity. “From early on in his career, colleagues couldn’t help noticing that whenever he entered a laboratory, equipment spontaneously broke down,” wrote Miller. “The Pauli effect, as it became known, was obviously impossible; it had to be just a matter of coincidence. But nevertheless, it happened again and again.”
Over time, most of the scientists with whom Pauli worked knew about the Pauli effect. Physicists at the university in Hamburg where he worked were convinced that Pauli’s presence anywhere near a lab led to a breakdown in equipment. Otto Stern, a fellow physicist, forbade Pauli to enter the lab.
One of the most comical anecdotes about the Pauli effect occurred in the late 1920s, when Pauli met Erwin Panofsky, an art historian and expert on Kepler. They were introduced by a mutual friend at an outdoor restaurant in Hamburg. Miller notes that for Panofsky the meeting was unforgettable for many reasons and one of them was that it “provided him with a personal experience of the famous Pauli effect.” At the end of the three-hour lunch, the three individuals stood up and Panofsky and the mutual friend discovered they – but not Pauli – had been sitting in whipped cream for the entire lunch!
Over the years, Panofsky witnessed other instances of the Pauli effect. Once, when Pauli entered a lecture hall, the chairs of the women sitting on either side of him collapsed simultaneously. In another example, “Pauli was on a train when, unknown to him, the rear cars decoupled and were left behind while he proceeded to his destination in one of the front cars,” wrote Miller.
After Pauli and Jung began collaborating on their research into synchronicity, even Jung witnessed the Pauli effect. During the opening of the Jung Institute in Zurich, which Pauli attended, Jung drew attention to Pauli’s work in bringing together psychology and physics. No equipment broke down, but a vase overturned, spilling water everywhere.
In 1955, at the Zurich Physical Society, Pauli was to give a lecture on Einstein to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the special theory of relativity. Three of his friends met up beforehand for a dinner – minus alcohol. Afterward, they left in their respective vehicles to attend the lecture. David Speiser, a young Swiss physicist, realized his scooter was low on gas and stopped to fill it up. Then it caught fire and although he put out the fire, the scooter was destroyed and he had to walk to the lecture. Arman Thellung, another Swiss physicists, had to walk, too, because he discovered his bike had two flat tires. Ralph Kronig took the tram and although he’d made this journey numerous times, he missed his stop and also had to walk to the lecture.
Marcus Friez, Pauli’s assistant and close friend, contended that Pauli himself believed in his effect. He wrote, “He has told me that he senses the mischief already before as a disagreeable tension, and when the anticipated misfortune then actually hits – another one! – he feels strangely liberated and lightened. It is quite legitimate to understand the Pauli effect as a synchronistic phenomenon as conceived by Carl Jung.”
We’ve heard some personal stories about Pauli effects – stoplights that turn green when you approach, transformer boxes that explode during arguments, clocks that stop at the time a loved one dies, that kind of thing. At the end of one of Rob’s meditation courses, we experienced our own Pauli effect . As we’re chanting I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you – chanting it 108 times – the lights suddenly went out. And the lights were NOT on a timer.
Anyone have similar stories?
