137: From Physics to Kabbalah
Book 137: Jung, Pauli and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller is a story of an odd couple that was intertwined with their obsession with numbers and dreams. One number that they talked and dreamt of was 137 which they used to fumble the secrets of the unconscious and reach what Jung called the no man’s land between Physics and Psychology of the Unconscious is the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times.
Carl Jung was born on July 26, 1875, he was very famous among wealthy men and women who went to him to rectify their malaises. Jung made psychoanalysis hip. Jung was seen washing his jeans outside his mansion. Jung had a year-long waitlist. Jung treated patients in his house outside of which you could see the lawn stretched to Lake Zurich. His house had a huge library and dining room. These were the places where interactions of Jung and Pauli would take place and this book is about that. Both Jung and Freud considered the mind as an object to be studied. Jung was interested in UFOs, Alchemy, Chinese philosophy, etc. ?
Jung had two personalities Basil school boy reading novels and a person doing religious reflections in solitude. Personality one intended towards science other intended towards humanity his second personality always wanted to be free from personality one.
?Jung from the beginning of his life decided everything according to his dreams, he saw one dream where he was digging Ancient animals and had another dream related to Protozoa with its help Jung thought he should either pursue archaeology or medicine. His nearest University did not offer archaeology so he opted to study medicine. Another way would have been to study zoology nearest to his dream but studying zoology meant he would have remained a teacher forever. Dr Eugen Blueler director of Burghlozli Mental Hospital who coined the term Schizophrenia offered Jung a position in that hospital.
Jung was famous for his concept of synchronicity. According to Jung, the phenomenon of synchronicity refers to?the close connection between the archetypal vision of the unconscious and the physical event. Such a connection is not a simple chance but rather a meaningful coincidence.
Jung was obsessed with numbers 3 and 4 – the 4th quantum number and of course 137. Arnold Sommerfield first talked about 137.
Jung – word association test mother, father other words. The more time the patient takes the deeper the connection within the unconscious
Jung met Freud, and although Jung in his first meeting captivated Freud, Jung averred from Freud’s ways. Jung used to make fun of Freud’s parapsychology he once wrote to him “I have been dabbling in spookery again” Calling parapsychology spookery.
Jung added about Freud’s psychology that, “These people use vagina as if it were a telescope that they could use to see the world through it. But this is not its natural function, it is too narrow for that.”
Jung through his psychoanalysis treated the Alcoholism of Joseph Medill McCormick of McCormick Newspaper Dynasty. Jung became more famous and was invited to the US along with Freud. In Maine NY, Jung studied the Egyptian Cypriot and Cretan Collections at the Metropolitan Museum. Tapestries at Pierpont Morgan Library, paleontology collection at American Museum of Natural History.
He met William James Harvard (Brother of Henry James, Writer) who dealt with parapsychology, spiritualism, faith healing].
During their visit to the United States, Jung interpreted Freud’s dreams and vice versa. Jung believed that Freud was in a relationship with his sister-in-law.
An event that defined Jung’s course of psychological Scholarship:
A severely schizophrenic man at Burgholzli saw a vision of a phallus swaying from the sun, its movement created weather. Everyone thought it to be hilarious but Jung realized something he had read in a book on Mithraic mythology. He was sure that the patient would have never read it. So later Jung described it as the collective unconscious. Jung was interested in the psyche to personal development. Archetype is like a real crystal lattice that refracts light … moves from psychoid realm to the conscious. The book Symbols of transformation threw Jung out of the circle of Freud who damned him as an occultist.
Jung asked his patients to repost their dreams spontaneously in his analytic sessions. He wanted them to interpret them as well. Telephoros, Asklepios, Egypto-Hellenic, and Biblical Figures as well as dwarfs and savages bent on killing them, all made their occurrences in dreams. Jung had a red book that he allowed no one to see which had everything about his obsession. After his death when RFC Hull read it he said, “Talk of Freud’s self-analysis, Jung was a walking asylum in himself as well its head physician.”
Wolfgang Pauli famously said if God gave him an opportunity he would ask why 137.
Arnold Sommerfield’s fine Structure of Atom 0.00729 or 137. The mystical number 729/100000 = 0.00729 = 137.17. Arthur Eddington was obsessed with 136/137. Physicist Paul Dirac once met him and saw that Eddington was adamant about hanging his coat on peg 137.
Eddington published his article Paul’s response regarding Eddington was I believe it makes no sense. Pauli wrote to Heisenberg that the real issue to be dealt with is fixing 1/137 and the atomistic of the electric charge. Pauli said that the pre-quantum and quantum physics don’t introduce the charge of electrons in their equation, doing that may resolve the problem.
Why 137?
American Physicist Feynman says 1/137 (in short called 13) has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than 50 years ago and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it immediately you would like to know where this number comes from but nobody knows it's one of the greatest damn mysteries of Physics a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man.
So where did this magic number come from? How did Somerfield who discovered it alight on it?
To get a glance at his thought process we need to take a short mathematical journey. Mulling over the problem of the structure of spectral lines Somerfield took another look at the key equation and Bohr’s theory of the atom as a minuscule solar system. It is
This is an equation for the energy level of the lone electrons in an atom's outermost shell, such as the electron in a hydrogen atom or alkali atoms -hydrogen-like in a structure that they have one electron free for chemical reactions while all the rest and close study. This work on the exclusion Principles are the units in which energy is expressed the equation shows the energy of the electron in a particular orbit designated by the whole quantum number. Z is the number of protons in the nucleus and the minus sign indicates that the electron is bound within the atom the quantity 2.7 x 10 power -11 results from how the charge of the electron e, its mass M, and planks constant h occur in the equation:
It is also the energy of an electron in the lowest Orbit n = one of the hydrogen atoms Z = 1. Sommerfield decided that the mathematics in Bohr’s original theory needed to be tidied up.
His brilliant idea was to include relativity in the new mathematical formulation, making the mass of the electrons behave according to e is equal to mc square in which mass and energy are equal. In this new equation, the additional quantum number K indicated the additional possible orbits for the electron and allowed the possibility for an electron to make additional Quantum jumps from orbit to orbit. It therefore also all out the possibility of the atom having an additional spectral line and a fine structure.
The first term in the equation for E and K outside the brackets was the same as in Bohr’s original equation. But whole extra terms had appeared inside the large brackets
Multiplying the term was an extraordinary bundle of symbols that no one had ever seen before. In this expression, e is the charge of the electron H is the plank constant and C is the velocity of light. ?With further deliberation the new equation became
This extraordinary equation in which 2 pie e square by h c is replaced by one by 137 perfectly described the fine structure of spectral lines as observed in experiments.
Not just scientists but many others have grappled with 137. For a start 137 can be expressed in terms of Pi. Some complicated ways of doing this all of which end up with 137, are
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We can also write 137 as a series of Lucas numbers which are connected with Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Ratio
Fibonacci numbers is a sequence of whole numbers in which each number starting from the third is the sum of the two previous one the sequence begins 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 610, 937 and so on 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 equals to 2.
If we take the ratio of successive numbers in the series 1 / 1 = 1.00, 2 / 1 = 2.00 3/2 = 1.5. 5/ 3 = 1.66 and so on to 987 / 610 equals 1.618033 we reach 1.6180339837 the Golden Ratio which has been the guideline for architecture since the days of ancient Greece. It appears on the pyramids of ancient Egypt, the Pantheon in Athens, and the United Nations building in New York City.
Fibonacci numbers were discovered by the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci in the 12th century. It was Kepler who discovered the relation to the Golden Ratio. Then Edward Lucas a French mathematician used them to develop the Lucas numbers in the 19th Century.
Lucas numbers are like Fibonacci numbers but begin with 2: 2, 1, 3, 4, 7, 11, 18, 29, 47, 76, and 123 and so on. Like the Fibonacci series, the Lucas series also produces the Golden Ratio.
?Fibonacci and Lucas numbers pop up all over the place, from how rabbits reproduce to the shape of mollusks shell, to leaf arrangements that sometimes spiral at angles derivable from the Golden Ratio.
Because all these numbers are related any formula for 137 in terms of the Golden Ratio can be rewritten in terms of Fibonacci and Lucas numbers, though whether this is anything more than merely an abstruse relationship between certain numbers is not clear.
If one tries hard enough, 137 can be deduced from devilishly complicated combinations of magic numbers such as
Sadly, all these are pure coincidences with no scientific basis. And still, 137 continues to tantalize. 137 has become something of a cult.
According to one website, “the final structure constant holds a special place among Cult numbers. Unlike its more mundane cousins 17 and 666, the find structure constantly seduces otherwise sane engineers and Scientists into seeking mythical truths and developing farfetched theories.
Even Heisenberg had a go, fired by Eddington's numbers speculation. Heisenberg tried to postulate Why 137.
Surprisingly 137 also crops up in a different context. In the 1950s, Pauli developed a close friendship with Gershom Scholem, a prominent scholar of Jewish mysticism. When his former assistant Victor Weisskopf went to Jerusalem. Pauli urged him to meet Scholem, though he gave no hint of his interests in Jewish mysticism. Scholem asked Weisskopf what the deep unsolved problems of physics were. Weisskopf replied, “Well, there’s this number, 137.”
Scholem’s eyes lit up, “Did you know that 137 is the number associated with Kabbalah?” he asked. In ancient Hebrew numbers were written with letters and each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a number associated with it. Adepts of the philosophical system known as the Gematria add the numbers in Hebrew words and thus find hidden meanings in them. The word kabbalah in Hebrew has four letters and they add up to 137.
It is an extraordinary link between mysticism and physics. Two keywords in the Kabbalah are wisdom which has a numerical value of 73 and prophecy 64. 64 + 73 equals to 137. God himself is 1 which can also be written as one zero -10 one and zero equals to 10. Take 10’s constituent prime numbers 3 and 7 and add the original one: together they can be written 137.
In the bible the key phrase ‘the god of truth’ in Hebrew letter adds up to 137 so does the ‘surrounding brightness’ in Ezekiel and the Hebrew word for crucifix
It turns out that according to Gematria a number content of the letters in the Hebrew word for 137 adds up to 1664 this happens to be the numerical value for a portion of the well-known passage from Revelations 13.18.
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast.” The rest of the passage reads that the number is that of a man and his number is 666
Homing in on the yet more arcane, a group of numerologists noticed that the number 82943 appeared at key places in Aztec and Roman text and went on to argue that it was a key to a “new universal consciousness” their confidence in this assertion was bolstered when they discovered they could relate it to the fine structure constant and the number of the beast -666 too.
?And more way out still 137 is the foundation stone of a fiendishly complex biblical mathematics referred to by followers of the Bible wheel as a holographic generating set it is based on 3 geometric forms a cube A divided into 27 sub-cubes, a hexagon B divided into ?27 + 37 + 73 = 137.
From this generating set with its Pythagorean geometric aura aficionados of the Bible wheel claim to be able to generate biblical passages and probe mystical numbers by multiplying a b and c in various ways.
Thus 137 continues to fire the imagination of everyone from scientist and mystics to the occultists and people from the far-flung edges of society.
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