The Pauli effect

I. Theism, atheism, and the paranormal

Atheists are generally hostile to the paranormal for the same reason that they are hostile to miracles and the supernatural. For one thing, some kinds of paranormality suggest a mind-over-matter type of dualism that’s at odds with materialism. In principle, atheism can accept dualism. But once you accept dualism, you can no longer reject God, angels, demons, ghosts, or souls as a matter of principle. That makes it harder for atheist to argue against Christianity.

In addition, the paranormal is too much like the “divine foot in the door” for atheism. As Richard Lewontin notoriously put it:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

http://www.drjbloom.com/Public%20files/Lewontin_Review.htm

It’s not that paranormal abilities, if they exist, are confined to God, although we can still debate the ultimate source of paranormal abilities–assuming they exist.

But the problem for atheism is that, once again, if you admit the existence of the paranormal, then you can no longer rule out the existence of miracles as a matter of principle. For miracles, if they happen, are the effect of personal agency. And that’s not quantifiable. That’s not predictable–except by the agent.

Atheists typically contend that the prior probability of a miracle is so vanishingly low that the evidence for a miracle must overcome an overwhelming presumption to the contrary. But other issues to one side, the paranormal plays havoc with that assumption.

II. Wolfgang Pauli

Atheists try to dismiss paranormal claimants out-of-hand as quacks and charlatans. And no doubt a lot of paranormal claims are bunk. However, there are some serious researchers in the field, such as Stephen Braude and Rupert Sheldrake. And in this post I’m going to briefly examine the Pauli effect. Wolfgang Pauli can’t be easily dismissed as a quack or charlatan.

By common consent, he was a scientific genius. A Nobel Laureate in physics. One of the architects of quantum mechanics.  And a contributor to field theory. As a scientist, he’s vastly more distinguished than Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, or PZ Myers.

Moreover, his can’t be dismissed as a religious fanatic. From what I’ve read, he was a secular Jew. For political reasons, his family converted to Christianity, but that was a cynical, pragmatic exercise–in the tradition of Jewish assimilation. As an adult he was not a Christian or observant Jew.

In addition, his scientific colleagues witnessed the Pauli effect. They are credible witnesses.

III. The Pauli effect

Here are some examples of the Pauli effect:

There was something about Wolfgang Pauli. From early on in his career, colleagues couldn’t help noticing that whenever he entered a laboratory, equipment spontaneously broke down. The Pauli effect, as it became known, was obviously impossible; it had to be just a matter of coincidence. But nevertheless is happened again and again. A. Miller, 137 (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), 18.

On one occasion Pauli was present at the observatory when it was discovered that a terrible accident had befallen the great refractor telescope. It was almost destroyed. Naturally everyone chalked it up to the Pauli effect. [Cf. O. Frisch, What Little I Remember (Cambridge 1979), 48-49]

Pauli himself fervently believed in the Pauli effect and began to wonder whether he emanated powers (57).

On another occasion, 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 (175).

That same year the physicist Engelbert Schucking visited Pauli in Zurich. Along with Pauli’s assistant Charles Enz and another colleague they took a tram from the ETH to Bellevue Square, where they planned to have a “wet after-session,” with plenty of drinking. Bellevue Square is a bustling intersection where several tram tracks cross each other in a seemingly random way. Just as they reached the square, two streetcars collided right in front of them with an enormous bang. Schucking was standing with Pauli next to the driver of the streetcar (268-69).

Returning to Otto Stern’s interview with Res Jost, Stern then said: ‘but, of course, it was very nice with Pauli for, although he was thus highly learned, one could all the same really discuss physics with him. And…you know, he was now allowed to enter our laboratory, because of the Pauli effect. Don’t you know the famous Pauli effect? Jost: Did something ever happen? Stern: Alas, many things did happen. The number of Pauli effects, the guaranteed (verbürgten) Pauli effects, is enormously large. C. Enz, No Time to Be Brief (Oxford 2002), 149.

During Speiser’s time in Zurich a multiple Pauli effect happened, as Thellung recounts: “In commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the special theory of relativity, on 26 May 1955 in the evening, Pauli gave a talk on Einstein to the Zurich Physical Society. Before, Kronig (who was in Zurich on his yearly visit), Jost, David Speiser and I met for dinner at the “teetotal restaurant Zurichberg,” near the tram terminus near the Zoo. On the way from the restaurant to Pauli’s talk the following happened: Speiser, discovering that the gasoline tank of his Lambretta [scooter] was empty, went to a filling station. There the Lambrett suddenly caught fire. It was extinguished with the water from an ewer but was not usable anymore, so that Speiser had to walk. I found my bike with flat tires and, hence, also had to walk. Kronig, finally, went by tram–a stretch he had traveled many times already–but he forgot to get out at Gloriastrasse, and noticed it only many stops later (492).

George Gamow, himself an eminent physicist, gives the following description of the Pauli Effect:

A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Paul’s presence once occurred in Prof J. Franck’s laboratory in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Frank wrote about this to Pauli at his Zurich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Paul wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr [in Copenhagen] and at the time of the mishap in Franck’s laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Göttingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli Effect!

The same anecdote, slightly differing in detail, was sent to me by a reader who had not read Gamow.

I put this question to Prof. Werner Heisenberg, the doyen of modern quantum-physicists, who had been a lifelong friend of Pauli’s. Heisenberg wrote back:

As for the “Pauli Effect,” Pauli himself took it half seriously, but only half. I could of course tell you anecdotes about this effect, or particular cases which I have witnessed myself.

Arthur Koestler, “Anecdotal Cases,” Alister Hardy, Robert Harvie, & Arthur Koestler, The Challenge of Chance (Random House 1974), 192-93.

IV. Assessing the Pauli effect

i) I’ve give a sampling of cases. This includes the specific details of some cases, as well as general reference to other cases in kind. It would be nice to have more cases with specific details. But this furnishes prima facie evidence for the Pauli effect.

The Pauli effect could be chalked up to mere coincidence. However, given the apparent frequency and improbability of these incidents, at what point does a “coincidence” cease to be an isolated event and become a pattern?

ii) The Pauli effect seems to be a case of subliminal telekinesis. In its random destructiveness, the Pauli effect is reminiscent of poltergeistic activity.

V. Pauli’s opinion of the paranormal

Fierz wrote: “Pauli himself thoroughly believed in his effect. 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” C. Enz, No Time to Be Brief (Oxford 2002), 226.

Considering Pauli’s “very rejecting conscious attitude towards horoscopes and astrology”… (464)

Experience has indeed shown me that what you call an “event of conjunction,” is in general favorable for the occurrence of…the “synchronistic” phenomenon (150).

The existence of this phenomenon [archetypal symbols] is known to me for about 12 to 13 years from personal dreams which evolve completely uninfluenced by other persons (422).

First he observes in relation to Rhine’s experiments on the statistics of guessing cards at a distance…“Personally, I have a much stronger relation to such happenings, in which an external event coincides with a dream, than to the behavior of statistical series…This whole kind of experiment, in which all irrational factors are excluded and the unconscious has no possibility to act, obviously could not proceed differently…For, here the reproducible is concerned, and not the unique” (425).

Pauli suggested that the decline in the success rate of Rhine’s subjects was due to the “pernicious influence of the statistical method,” by which he meant that the statistical approach only dealt with large numbers of successful and unsuccessful tests. The size of the sample was so huge that the fact that some subject has achieved an extraordinarily high success rate simply disappeared in the welter of figures and “the actual influence of the psychic state on the participants” became imperceptible.

Added to this, the mechanical nature of the experiments meant that the participants eventually got bored. As their interest in the experiment decreased, so did their psychic power, thereby blurring the initially exciting valid results,  A. Miller, 137 (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), 191-92.

i) In addition to the Pauli effect, Paul also seems to be saying he had precognitive dreams. An example of synchronicity.

ii) And the same time, Pauli is discriminating in his evaluation of paranormal claims.

VI. The occult and the Pauli effect

Directly after describing the second dream Paul writes: “Thereupon I woke up very shaken. The dream was an experience of numinous character which influenced my conscious attitude in an essential way. It then motivated me to resume work on Kepler” C. Enz, No Time to Be Brief (Oxford 2002), 417.

According to this characterization the “stranger” is a ‘double-layered’ dream figure, ‘on the one hand, a spiritual figure of light [with] superior knowledge, on the other hand a chthonic spirit of Nature’…he is, in a certain sense an “anti-scientist,” where under “science” here the methods of the natural sciences have to be understood in particular, above all those that today are taught at Institutes of Technology and Universities. These latter he perceives…as the place and symbol of his oppression, to which (in my dreams) he sometimes also sets fire. When he is paid too little attention, he manifests himself by all means, e.g. through synchronistic phenomena…He longs for redemption, but his liberation will come only in a form of culture… (463-64).

A few days later Pauli dreams that he is rooted to the center of a circle formed by a serpent biting its own tail. A. Miller, 137 (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), 133.

This is the first time the veiled woman has entered Pauli’s dreams. She has done so because the serpent has created a protected area where she can safely appear (134).

A short time later Pauli dreams that an unknown woman is standing on a globe, worshipping the sun  (137).

Then one night Pauli has a terrifying nightmare. People circulate around a square formed by four serpents….In the center of the square, a ceremony is going on to transform animals into men. Two priests touch a shapeless animal lump with a serpent, transforming it into a human head (141).

Pauli, too, consulted the I Ching for advice “when interpreting dream situations” (182).

i) His dreams, with their menagerie of idolatry, alchemy, and numinous snakes, makes me wonder if he wasn’t under occult bondage to some degree.

ii) Consulting I Ching, a classic occultic text, is, itself, a case of dabbling in the occult. Indeed, using I Ching to interpret his dreams could well be a vicious cycle. Occultic dreams interpreted by reference to pagan divination.

iii) This, in turn, raises the question of whether his paranormal abilities (assuming he had any) had their source in the occult.

iv) His dream about the “stranger” is clearly autobiographical to some degree. Pauli as a scientific antihero who enjoys preternatural insight into the workings of nature, yet yearns for redemption. The self-portrait is part Faustian, part Mephistophelean, part alchemical. Incidentally, Thomas Mann, author of a classic adaptation of the Faust legend, was a personal acquaintance of his.

This illustrates the degree to which Pauli’s imagination and subconsciousness was permeated by the occult.

v) To some extent this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy, where–like Faust–Pauli’s scientific achievements were the result of a devil’s pact. Not that Pauli was consciously in league with the dark side.

VII. Pauli’s worldview

From what I’ve read, Pauli seems to draw parallels between the paranormal and other phenomena. He places the paranormal within a larger set of dualities.

What knowledge is gained and what other knowledge is irrevocably lost is left to the experimenter’s free choice between mutually exclusive experimental arrangements. This situation is designated “complementarity” by Bohr. The impossibility of controlling the interference of the act of observation with the system observed is taken into account by the impossibility of atomic objects in a unique way by the usual physical properties. Thus the precondition for a description of phenomena independently of the mode of their observation is no longer fulfilled, and physical objects acquire a two-valued, or many-valued and therefore symbolic character.

The observers or instruments of observation which modern microphysics has to consider thus differs essentially from the detached observer of classical physics.

…western psychology has set up the idea of the unconscious, whose relation to consciousness exhibits paradoxical features similar to those we meet in physics

W. Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy (Springer-Verlag 1994), 40, 42

In spite of the logical closure and mathematical elegance of quantum mechanics there is on the part of some physicists a certain regressive hope that the epistemological situation we have sketched may turn out not to be final, this is in my opinion due to the strength of traditional thought-forms embraced in the designation of “ontology” or “realism.”

The postulates…have been formulated most clearly by Einstein, for instance, recently in the following form: “There is such a thing as the real state of a physical system, which exists objectively, independently of any observation or measurement…” this ideal, so pertinently characterized by Einstein, I would call that of the detached observer (47).

Einstein of course conceded the logical consistency of the new wave mechanics; but he regarded the statistical laws of the new theory as incomplete. “One can’t make a theory out of a lot of ‘maybe’s’” he often said, and also “deep down it is wrong, even if it is empirically and logically right.” A mode of thought in terms of pairs of opposites [i.e. wave and particle], visualisable images depending on the choice of experimental arrangements, a priori probabilities–these Einstein could not accept.

Yet these views and concepts which he rejected are essential constituents of the so-called “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics, founded by Bohr, which I also follow, in common with most theoretical physicists…“Physics is after all the description of reality” he said to me, continuing, with a sarcastic glance in my direction “or should I perhaps say physics is the description of what one merely imagines”? This question clearly shows Einstein’s concern that the objective character of physics might be lost through a theory of the type of quantum mechanics, in that as a consequence of its wider conception of the objectivity of an explanation of nature the difference between physical reality and dream or hallucination might become blurred (122).

As regards the situation of cognition, modern psychology has established that all understanding is a long drawn out process initiated by processes in the unconscious, long before the contents of consciousness can be rationally formulated: On the preconscious level of cognition the place of clear concepts is taken by images with strong emotional content, not thought but beheld as if painting them (125-126).

What is it that mirrors and what is mirrored? (139).

The mere apprehension of the dream has already, so to speak, altered the state of the unconscious, and thereby, in analogy with a measuring observation in quantum physics, created a new phenomenon (153).

In conclusion, I should like to discuss briefly the controversial question of “extrasensory perception” (ESP), which constitutes a borderland between physics and psychology, and can just as well be called “parapsychology” as “biophysics”…More recent investigations of such phenomena give fresh actuality to the old question of how the psychic state of persons taking part in the experiment fits into the course of external events. Can the phenomena of ESP be artificially influenced, positively or negatively? Results so far agree in showing the so-called “fatigue (decline effect),” which points to the importance of the emotional factor in the experimental subject (163).

If we supplement these statements with biographical background information about Pauli, I think we can interpret his position as follows:

i) He sees a parallel between how a quantum physicist affects what he’s observing, and how a “psychic” affects what he’s observing. In both cases, there is no “detached observer.” Rather, the individual has a dialectical influence on reality–as both reflector and reflection.

ii) Likewise, he sees a parallel between introspection and quantum mechanics. When we remember a dream, reflect on a dream, interpret a dream, that has an autosuggestive influence on our subconsciousness. That feeds back into our subconsciousness. When we remember a dream or analyze a dream, that may, in turn, influence what we dream about the next time.

Likewise, the quantum physicist is isn’t merely an outside observer, but a participant who exerts an influence on what he observes. His involvement simultaneous changes the object of observation.

iii) There’s an idealistic quality to quantum mechanics, especially on the Copenhagen interpretation, which dovetails with telekinesis: mind over matter. This is what always bothered Einstein about quantum mechanics.

iv) Pauli’s dreams weren’t all nightmares by any means. Some of his dreams graphically modeled problems in modern physics. Some of his dreams were a source of scientific inspiration for further theorizing or discovery. 

v) Pauli speaks of Newton "deanimating" the physical world. Cf. "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler." In a sense, Pauli's view of quantum mechanics and the paranormal reanimates nature. 

Pauli’s life and work illustrates the instability of a secular outlook–as well as the tragic fate of a life adrift, without the guidance of divine revelation or saving grace of the gospel.