Deciphering The Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, Arthur I. Miller, c. 2009

I can't remember reading this book which I have had for some time; if I did read it, and I think I at least started it, I do not remember enjoying it.

I am now reading it (again?) and thoroughly enjoying it. My mind was prepared for it this time around. I think the Louisa Gilder book helped me a whole lot.

I am about halfway through, but don't want to start notes on it now; it will interrupt the flow. Hopefully, I will remember to come back here and update notes.

The point of the post: if you enjoyed Louisa Gilder, I think you might enjoy Miller's book on Pauli and Jung.

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An aside: I assume folks who are not interested in physics would look at this book and remark how dull it must be. Let me quote a passage:

Perhaps the Zurich academics were surprised that no one else's wife was involved. In those circles extramarital affairs were command and most marriages quite open. Schrodinger, for example, had had a legendary number of liaisons. He usually traveled with both his wife and current girlfriend. Schrodinger's wife, meanwhile, was infatuated with the elegant mathematician Hermann Weyl, whose own wife was having an affair with Scherrer.

Fifty shades of grey. 

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Prologue

Is there a number at the root of universe? Is there a primal number? Some have been convinced that the answer might be the very weird number 137.....precisely describes the DNA of light and on the other is the sum of the Hebrew letters of the word "Kabbalah."

Chapter 1: Dangerously Famous

Biographical sketch of Carl Jung

Chapter 2: Early Successes, Early Failures

Biographic sketch of Wolfgang Pauli.

Pauli moves from Vienna to Munich, 1918. War zone in Munich.

1920: peace returned to Vienna.

Pauli is Sommerfeld's deputy assistant -- among the students whose homework he had to correct was a  young man called Werner Heisenberg.

Meanwhile, Niels Bohr: arrived in England from Copenhagen in 1911 at the age of 26; fascinated with work of Ernest Rutherford at Manchester University -- the early model of the atom was unstable. Bohr set out to solve the problem.

Pauli meets Bohr in 1922, Bohr-Festspeiele (the Bohr festival) in Gottingen.

The discovery of 137 -- p. 40.

Chapter 3: The Philosopher's Stone

In progress.