The World is Strange

I got into a strange conversation yesterday with what the intellectual atmosphere was like in the 17th and 18th centuries. This was an interesting period in which both religion and science were neither totally subverting the other as the dominant cultural Zeitgeist in the western mind. It's a well known fact that Isaac Newton, who developed calculus and the foundations of classical physics, was an avid practitioner of Alchemy and other occult esoteric practices. 

Maybe it's the nature of inquisitive minds to explore the unknown, to attach themselves to the study of secrets and esoteric hidden knowledge. We now know that most of alchemy is bullshit and that the basis of the science was mostly bunk but nonetheless even though they were working with an incorrect model of reality real chemistry applications were found in it, and in fact most of modern chemistry is in fact derived from previous discoveries made by alchemists beforehand. Isaac Newton was not the only big name in modern science who was involved in the occult.

Oppenheimer briefly dabbled in various esoteric studies. Perhaps the most well known example of course being Jack Parsons who was an avid Thelemite and one of the original founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratories that was responsible for many of the Mars landing missions not to mention the Voyager spacecraft that are now exploring the deepest reaches of our solar system. By far probably one of the most interesting modern crossover conversations was the famous correspondence between Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. 

Carl Jung had derived an interesting concept known as synchronicity. Synchronicity is defined as the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection. This concept is interesting because it kind of toes the line between bunk and not bunk, it's something that certainly shows up in daily life at times, and our pattern seeking brains seem to make connections between seemingly causally unconnected events.

 Pauli had been seeing Jung as a psychotherapist for many years to help with his own mental health issues and had made great progress. After discontinuing being a patient of Jung, Pauli continued to share a correspondence with him, including sharing dreams rich with mathematical symbolism as well as abstract concepts in theoretical physics. Pauli shared his knowledge of theoretical physics with Jung, and in turn Jung shared his knowledge of mysticism and ancient symbolism. 

The Pauli exclusion principle is named after Wolfgang Pauli and he won a Nobel Prize for this discovery. It's one of the pinnacles of modern quantum mechanics. The results of experiments are predictable only once the researchers take averages over many trials. In a letter to Jung, Pauli connected synchronicity with parapsychologist J.B. Rhine’s mind-reading research: “As you yourself say, your work stands and falls with the Rhine experiments. I, too, am of the view that the empirical work behind the experiments is well-founded.”

Enthusiastic about Pauli’s suggestions, Jung responded with the bold proposal of generalizing synchronicity to include acausal relationships without a mental component—that is, purely physical interactions. He did not specify quantum entanglement, but surely that fell into Jung’s expanded definition. I don't ascribe to this worldview necessarily but it is fun to think about.

Both of these people were clearly quite mad in a sense. In this case however I am reminded of the Robin Williams quote: "You're only gifted a little spark of madness, you mustn't lose it." The world is a far stranger place than we probably think it is. I've been called superstitious sometimes but I like to think actually that I kind of use superstition as a sort of joke. (To be fair, most of the experimental physicists I've met or worked with seem to be very superstitious people when it comes to their experiments. Everything has to be exactly a certain way even if it seemingly has little to nothing to do with the actual experiment in actual practice.)

There's an anecdote I remember of the famous physicist Neils Bohr who was also a big name in the early development of quantum mechanics and even sharing some work on the Manhattan project. The anecdote goes as follows: Bohr used to keep a horseshoe on the door of his house. In European (and Indian) superstitions, the horseshoe is believed to be an object that guards the house against the evil spirits. A friend, upon seeing the horseshoe on the door of Bohr's house, asked Bohr as to whether he subscribed to the relevant superstitions. Bohr replied that he didn't believe in them but he was told by the man who sold him the horseshoe that the horseshoe works whether or not one believes in it or not, so he bought it and hung it up.

Sometimes I guess you just have to believe in your own madness. Love is kind of a sort of madness, and could you imagine life without love? Well I can, maybe love isn't real I don't know. I'll leave this piece with a story from when I was in Berkeley.

Berkeley has many different Tibetan gift shops all over the place and one night after a pretty intense experience my friend took me to one that was about to go out of business. The mood in the shop was somber and as I was checking out I saw an evil eye on the wall that you hang on your door or residence. I asked her about it and the older woman replied "Yes, it's supposed to provide protection to your house, but only if you believe in it. It only works if you believe it works." Perhaps there's something to that, there's a lot to say about the placebo effect and its potential use cases and influence. 

Even if something is total bullshit (I always try to keep a critical mind and consider myself to have a pretty high level bullshit meter given my experiences) but maybe if we believe in a placebo it can work in that matter. At the very least, if its cheap and we can hang something like that over our home, it gives that much less anxiety about our home. I wouldn't trade it for a home security system if I was able to get one, but if it provides that much more security or at least less worry and anxiety in that matter, why not believe it works? It just seems practical to me.

Just don't go using homeopathics instead of chemotherapy to get rid of your cancer.