Deciphering The Cosmic Number, Arthur I. Miller, c. 2009

You can find my review of this book at the Amazon.com site. 

I have just started this book, and it has me hooked.

The sub-title is "The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung."

Over the years I've read a bit (a very little bit) about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. I really had no idea what they wrote about (in the big scheme of things); every time I started reading about them, I got bored.

But it is amazing: here, in a few short pages, a physicist is able to concisely bring me up to speed on Freud and Jung.

I found the book on a serendipitous walk through the Harvard Book Store semi-annual warehouse sale. What a find.

I never understood how / why Anais Nin got involved with Jungian ideas. I mistakenly thought she had met him but apparently not. But it looks like everyone else of that period was seen by Jung -- at least all the beautiful, neurotic women.

"... whether there might be a relationship between the imagery in alchemical texts, the imagery experienced by patients in the mental state between dreaming and waking, and Freud's analysis of dreams...Jung was looking for something deeper ... -- to understand the imagery that had never been conscious, the imagery in the deep or collective unconscious." -- p. 47. Call me a kook, but I am convinced that "a collective unconscious" exists.

Looks to be a great book. It's the kind of book I like to read slowly, savoring every page, but it looks like one could read it in a couple of days.  Highly recommend it for those interested in Jung, Pauli, and metaphysics.

Pauli, p. 178:

Paulis queried the relationship between sense perceptions and the abstract thinking necessary to understand the world around us. How do we generate knowledge from these sense impressions that bombard us? Sensations enter our minds and knowledge emerges. But what happens in between?

We could argue that we have nothing in our minds with which to organize incoming sense perceptions and stumble about learning from experience. But in that case how do we arrive at an exact science such as mathematics from the results of inexact measurements? The alternative is to assume that we are born with certain organizing principles already existing in our minds. Pauli argues that it is archetypes that function 'as the long sought-for bridge between the sense perceptions and the ideas and are, accordingly, a necessary presupposition even for evolving a scientific theory of nature.' 

They are in other words, catalysts for creativity.

It would be interesting to hear what Pauli would have had to say about spectral lines and bar codes (p. 180-181).

Conservation of energy, but no conservation of matter. Positron -- electron --> energy, only (p. 183-184).