Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli had a penchant for hurling evil zingers at other scientists By the age of 20, Viennese physicist Wolfgang Pauli had acquired the reputation of being a wunderkind, a child genius. His PhD supervisor Arnold Sommerfeld had recruited him to write an article about Einsteinian relativity for a scientific encyclopedia. The …
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Chance Encounters with a Mystic, Gnostic Muse
Serendipitous discussions in a coffee shop with Jungian scholar Kathleen Damiani about Neoplatonism, David Bohm, and other topics When Carl G. Jung coined the term synchronicity to denote meaningful acausal connections, he looked for examples in his life and in the lives of his patients. Cases in which a certain object or image manifested itself …
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Is it Magic or is it Quantum?
An Entangled Parable of Acausal Connections One of the most surprising aspects of quantum entanglement is access to shared information between widely separated particles, enabling them to coordinate their state parameters (for example spin or polarization states) over great distances. Bell’s theorem, proposed by (Northern) Irish physicist John Stewart Bell in 1964, offers a litmus …
Grooving in Infinite Dimensions
The Unlikely Journey of Musician Max Born, from Fellini to Folk Songs, Including Recollections of his Famous Nobel-Prize-winning Grandfather In sunny Mallorca, Spain a gifted singer-songwriter, with a proclivity toward eastern philosophy (Buddhism) and alternative medicine (yoga, natural remedies), pens clever lyrics about quantum physics and relativity, among other topics. His topical albums, such as …
Enter for a Chance to Win a Personally Autographed Copy of SYNCHRONICITY
In the month of July, I am running a special promotion on Twitter that offers a chance for a free, personally autographed copy of my latest book: Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect Here’s how it works: Follow @phalpern on Twitter. Pre-order a copy of Synchronicity. It can …
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Mileva Einstein’s Desperate Plea To Carl Jung: Help Me With My Son!
Mileva Maric Einstein, Albert Einstein’s wife, wrote in 1936 to famed Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung for advice about their younger son Eduard Einstein, diagnosed with schizophrenia. Of the three children of Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric Einstein, only one, Hans Albert, the eldest son (and middle child), ended up with a happy life and a …
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A Brief History of Time Travel
How the prospect of visiting the past or future captivated the imagination of writers and scientists The tradition of time travel and time travel paradox stories dates back centuries. In the 19th century, classics such as Rip van Winkle by Washington Irving, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain, Looking Backward by …
The Pauli Effect: How Disaster Accompanied a Quantum Physicist Wherever He Went
To the world, Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli was an esteemed theoretical physicist, a Nobel laureate. To the depth psychology community associated with Carl G. Jung, his name was little known, at first, but his extraordinary, vivid dreams, packed with symbolism (according to Jung), and anonymously conveyed to preserve patient privacy, were widely discussed. (Once Pauli …
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What’s So Funny About Neutrinos?
How Nature’s Elusive Lightweight Particles Have Been the Targets of Humor for 90 Years Neutrinos arrived as the neat solution to a vexing problem in particle physics. In the radioactive process called beta decay, in which atomic nuclei transform themselves by emitting beta particles (energetic electrons), researchers discovered that a measure of energy and momentum …
When “Einstein 2.0” Met “Freud’s Successor”
Wolfgang Pauli was a brilliant, forthright physicist, who made his mark in many different fields. He was known from an early age as a wunderkind whose insights into general relativity, quantum physics, and other fields were phenomenal. His treatise on relativity, written at the age of 20, was a brilliant summary of Einstein’s masterwork. By …
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Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect 