05 — The Soul

137

itself a prime number — and one two scientists could never stop returning to

The number turns out to be prime — indivisible, one of the very numbers this site already spent a chapter on. That alone wouldn't be worth noting. What's stranger is that one of the twentieth century's most rigorous, skeptical minds became privately fixed on this specific number, for reasons that had nothing to do with physics.

Office 137. Hospital room 137.

Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, held an office numbered 137 at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1958 he was admitted to a hospital in Zurich and only afterward learned which room he had been given. He reportedly told a colleague he would not leave it alive. He died there four days later.

Pauli's fixation became part of a real, well-documented friendship with the psychiatrist Carl Jung — the founder of analytical psychology, a field named for the Greek word psyche, meaning soul or mind. The two spent years in correspondence over dreams and what Jung called synchronicity: meaningful coincidence with no causal link between the two events. Their collaboration produced an actual published book, Jung's essay on synchronicity bound together with Pauli's own essay on Kepler, in a single volume neither could have written alone.

None of this is evidence of anything a physicist would recognize as a connection. The fine-structure constant isn't exactly 137 at all — a distinction Pauli, of all people, would have insisted on. Coincidence compounds quietly in any life examined closely enough. What's unusual is that a serious, skeptical man noticed this one and spent years unable to fully let it go.

A physicist and a psychiatrist, a decade of letters, and a number that refused to stay coincidental.