Hey, some interesting stuff here about a famous quantum scientist and his dealings with Jung:
Pauli was troubled by the number 137. As physicists pored over the equations that determine the spectra of the chemical elements, a particular combination of physical constants kept cropping up. Referred to as the "fine structure constant", it combined the speed of light (crucial in Einstein's relativity) and Planck's constant (the heart of quantum theory), along with the magnitude of the charge of an electron. By themselves, each of these has to be expressed in some particular units (say, metres per second for the speed of light), but combined, the result is a unitless "pure number". Arnold Somerfeld first worked out its value as 0.00729, equivalent to (roughly) 1/137.Clearly, the answer to life, the universe and everything is not 42.Why 137? Pauli obsessed over it, and he wasn't the only great physicist to do so: Arthur Eddington, Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman all took stabs at it over the years. Meanwhile Jung, with his knowledge of Kabbalah, also found enormous significance in 137. Every letter in the Hebrew alphabet has a number associated with it, and - lo and behold - the letters in the word "Kabbalah" add up to 137. Remarkable - or a meaningless coincidence.
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