Part 12 (1/2)

To date no violations of CPT symmetry have been found in the laboratory-that is, incorrect predictions of equations which can be traced to violating CPT, or what is the same, with violating relativity theory. It underlies every theory of elementary particles and is essential for studying the behavior of its three component symmetries-C, P, and T-in this increasingly bizarre world.

Pauli wrote up his conclusions in a milestone paper to be published in a volume to celebrate Niels Bohr's seventieth birthday the following year, 1955. It was the capstone to a subject he had studied with a pa.s.sion ever since he was a young man-relativity-and it finally set his greatest discovery, the exclusion principle, firmly in its embrace, along with another off shoot of the exclusion principle, spin. He began his paper on a historical note, recalling ”a long and still continuing pilgrimage since the year 1922, in which so many stations are involved.”

It was precisely as he was writing this paper that he dreamed that curious dream about the Chinese woman and the reflections that were not reflections. But at the time he thought no more about it.

The father of the neutrino.

In June 1956, the experimental physicists Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan made an exciting discovery. They succeeded in finally verifying in the laboratory the neutrino, which Pauli had predicted twenty-six years earlier, actually existed. They immediately sent him a telegram. Pauli was at a symposium in CERN, the huge nuclear physics laboratory outside Geneva, at the time. Full of elation he read it out to the audience: ”We are happy to inform you that we have definitely detected neutrinos from fission fragments from observing inverse beta-decay of protons. Observed cross-section agrees well with expected 6 1044 cm2.”

Pauli was acclaimed worldwide as the ”father of the neutrino” and was much called upon to give lectures on the subject. Legend has it that he commented, with quiet satisfaction, ”Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.”

The downfall of parity.

That same month-June 1956-two Chinese American physicists, T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang, sent Pauli an article they had written in which they argued that perhaps mirror symmetry-parity-might not always be conserved. They had studied the scientific literature and were convinced there was very little actual experimental evidence to support it, added to which certain puzzling phenomena in elementary particle physics could be clarified if it was considered to be not generally valid. They suggested specific experiments for testing their proposal. To suggest that the law of parity might not be inviolate was outrageous. Pauli chuckled and put the article aside.

Nevertheless the two presented such a powerful case that other physicists became curious and started carrying out experiments. On January 17, 1957, Pauli wrote to Weisskopf that he was ”ready to bet a very high sum” that the experiments would fail. Little did he know that the previous day The New York Times had carried a front-page report on what it called the ”Chinese Revolution” in physics. A group of physicists from Columbia University headed by a woman, Chien-s.h.i.+ung Wu, had carried out a very beautiful experiment proving beyond a doubt the overthrow of parity in the case of weak interactions.

Weak interactions are interactions between elementary particles-such as electrons, protons, and neutrinos-occurring with a force far weaker than the nuclear force, which binds the nucleus together, or the electromagnetic force between charged particles. On a scale of one to ten, the nuclear force is magnitude 1; the strength of the electromagnetic force, given by the fine structure constant, is 0.00729-which can also be expressed as 1/137;* while the weak force is a mere 0.00000000000001, very weak indeed.

In their experiments Wu and her co-workers monitored the number of electrons emerging from the nuclei of a radioactive isotope (an alternative form) of cobalt undergoing beta-decay. The beta-decay process involved the transformation of a neutron in the nucleus of the radio active sample of cobalt into a proton, electron, and neutrino. To define a direction-in this case up and down-they aligned the spins of the nuclei by placing them in a magnetic field. If parity really was a universal law, if nature really did not distinguish one direction from another, then one would expect precisely equal numbers of electrons to be emitted upward and downward. But this was not what happened. In fact, the electrons came out asymmetrically. In other words, Wu's experiment was not the same as its mirror image. The beauty of this experiment-which scientists found so impressive-was its precision. The apparatus had to be set at the lowest possible temperature, close to absolute zero. This was necessary to eliminate any movement of the nuclei due to heat agitation, which would have ruined the alignment of their spins. Thus Lee and Yang were proved to be right.

So parity had been overthrown in the weak interactions-an event which struck Pauli like a bolt of lightning. He was, he confessed ”very upset and behaved irrationally for quite a while.” He wrote to Weisskopf that he was glad that in the end he had not made any bet. ”It would have resulted in a heavy loss of money (which I cannot afford); I did make a fool of myself, however (which I think I can afford to do),” he said.

He wrote humorously to Bohr about the event (a slip of the pen led him to use the wrong date for the overthrow of parity): It is our sad duty to make known that our dear female friend of many years.

PARITY..

had gently pa.s.sed away on January 19, 1957, following a brief suffering caused by experimental treatment. On behalf of the bereaved.

e,,.

(e, , -electron, muon, and neutrino-are three of the many particles that partic.i.p.ate in the weak interactions.).

In real life, of course, our bodies are not symmetrical; our heart is on the left, for a start. But up until then scientists had taken for granted that the laws of physics were mirror symmetrical. Equations had always been drawn up on that a.s.sumption. At the atomic level, at least, it had turned out that this was not invariably the case. Perhaps ”nature is not mathematical and does not conform to our thinking,” Pauli wrote to Fierz. It was as dramatic a revelation as the Pythagoreans realizing that the square root of two was not a rational number.

Pauli firmly believed that principles of symmetry had to prevail. The way to find them lay not only through logic, but in the more irrational dimensions of thought. ”With me the mixture of mysticism and mathematics, which finds its main results in physics, is still very dominant,” he wrote.

Two decades earlier Pauli had argued with Bohr when Bohr suggested that the law of the conservation of energy might not entirely hold in the case of beta-decay. It was to preserve this law that Pauli had proposed the existence of the neutrino. As we have seen, the neutrino had been discovered in the laboratory six months earlier and played a role in Wu's experiment. It is one of the most weakly interacting particles of all.

”[Bohr] was wrong with the energy law, but he was right that the weak interactions are a very particular field where strange things could happen, which don't happen otherwise,” Pauli wrote. He added that physicists should bear in mind something else Bohr had said: ”We have to be prepared for surprises.” Pauli himself was willing to speculate that in interactions much weaker than the weak interactions, not just parity but energy too might not be conserved (that is, the amount of energy involved at the start of a process is not the same as at the end). ”'Be prepared for surprises' not anywhere but specifically with the beta-decay,” he wrote.

Pauli had met Chien-s.h.i.+ung Wu in 1941 when he visited the University of California at Berkeley and described her to Jung as impressive, ”both as an experimental physicist and an intelligent and beautiful Chinese young lady.” Born in Shanghai in 1912, she had come to America in 1936 and worked first at Berkeley before moving to Columbia. Photographs show her formidable intelligence as well as her beauty. She was a perfectionist-just the person needed to attempt the highly precise experiment to test parity.

Pauli wrote to her that ”what had prevented me until now from accepting this formal possibility [of parity violation] is the question why this restriction of mirroring appears only in the 'weak' interactions, not the 'strong' ones.” But what did the strength of an interaction have to do with a law of conservation? The question has still to be answered. ”In any case, I congratulate you (to the contrary of myself),” he added. ”This particle neutrino-on which I am not innocent-still persecutes me.”

”G.o.d is a weak left-hander after all,” he wrote exuberantly to Jung. A neutrino only spins in one direction. If one looked at it in a mirror, it would still spin in the same direction. Most screws are right-handed-you twist the screwdriver in the same direction as the curl of the fingers on your right hand and turn the screw toward your right thumb. Neutrinos are left-handed in that they spin in a direction opposite to their motion, the direction in which you would twist a screwdriver for a left-handed screw. So G.o.d is a left-hander, but a weak one, because he is only a left-hander in the weak interactions-featuring the neutrino-where parity is violated.

The Chinese woman.

Pauli could not fail to notice what a supreme example of synchronicity this was. A Chinese woman had played an important part in his dreams, particularly those involving mirrors and their reflections; and a Chinese woman had carried out the critical experiment that brought about the downfall of parity-that is, of mirror symmetry-in physics. He wrote to Jung of his ”shock” at this ”'Chinese revolution' in physics.”

Fierz told him he had ”a mirror complex.” ”I admitted as much,” Pauli wrote to Jung. ”But I was still left with the task of acknowledging the nature of my 'mirror complex.'”

Pauli's curious dream of 1954 had occurred right after he finished his work on mirror symmetry. He was convinced that ”unconscious motives play a role” in creative thinking, especially in the case of symmetry. ”'Mirroring' is an archetype [and] this has something to do with physics. Physics relies on a connection of an image reflected in a mirror and between mind and nature,” he said in an interview in 1957. He recalled having ”vivid, almost parapsychological dreams about mirroring, while I worked mathematically during the day.” The mathematical work seemed to cause ”some archetype [to be] constellated [that is, to emerge into consciousness] which subsequently made me think about mirroring.” The connection, he concluded was ”a kind of synchronicity, because there are unconscious motives when one is involved in something.”

Other examples of synchronicity soon cropped up. Two months after the ground-breaking experiment that spelled the end of parity, in March 1957, Pauli's friend, Max Delbruck, an eminent biologist, sent him an article on a one-cell, light-sensitive mushroom known as a phycomyces.

A few weeks later Pauli was talking about psychophysics with Karl Kerenyi, an authority on Greek mythology and a close friend of Jung's. Pauli told him about some dreams he had had in which he was wandering about in the constellation of Perseus. Synchronisms started to spring up. For a start, Perseus contains a binary, or double star, known as Algol. Moreover, in Greek mythology, Perseus fought Medusa while looking at her reflection in a mirror. Shortly afterward Pauli came across an article by Kerenyi on Perseus. It concluded with an ancient Greek pun about Perseus's founding of the city of Mycenae. It had been so named after a mushroom called myces-the very mushroom that had been the subject of Delbruck's scientific paper.

Mirror images.

That same month-March 1957-Pauli had a dream in which a ”youngish, dark-haired man, enveloped in a faint light” hands him a ma.n.u.script. Pauli shouts, ”How dare you presume to ask me to read it? What do you think you are doing?” He wakes up feeling upset and irritated.

Writing about the dream to Jung, Pauli suggested it revealed his ”conventional objections to certain ideas-and my fear of them,” most notably his belief that parity could never be violated.

In another dream a couple of months later he is driving a car (though in real life he no longer had one). He parks it legally but the young man from the previous dream suddenly appears and jumps in on the pa.s.senger side. He is now a policeman. He drives Pauli to a police station and pushes him inside.

Pauli is afraid that he will be dragged from one office to the next. ”Oh no,” says the young man. An unfamiliar dark woman is sitting at the counter. In a brusque military voice the young man barks at her, ”Director Spiegler [Reflector], please!” Taken aback by the word ”Spiegler,” Pauli wakes up. When he falls asleep again the dream continues.

Another man comes in who resembles Jung. Pauli a.s.sumes he is a psychologist and explains to him in great detail the significance of the downfall of parity on the world of physics.

For Pauli the dream reflects his long-held belief that the ”relations.h.i.+p between physics and psychology is that of a mirror image.” In the dream he appears first as his narrower Self who understands both physics and parity, then as his own mirror image-the psychologist who knows nothing about either. Spiegler-the reflector-is responsible for bringing out the psychologist and is attempting to bring the two together. But now that parity has been violated, there is no longer any mirror symmetry.

Looking at the question in terms of archetypes Pauli finds the loss of mirror symmetry not so shocking. Before the downfall of parity, he feels physicists and psychologists had not been looking deeply enough into matter and mind. They had considered only ”partial mirror images.” Full reflections and more profound symmetries can be obtained only by going deeper into the psyche. The CPT symmetry that Pauli himself discovered-exchange of particle and antiparticle, symmetry of right-left, and time reversal-is exactly that profound symmetry because it talks about mirror symmetry on the grandest of scales. It a.s.serts that our universe cannot be distinguished from a mirror universe in which all matter is replaced with antimatter, all positions are reflections, and time runs backward.

Thus Pauli worked out that parity could be restored in a new and profound way by taking into account a fuller symmetry-CPT, which reveals the full symmetry of phenomena.

Over the years scientists have discovered some of the stunning implications of Pauli's CPT symmetry. One is the following. In experiments on certain elementary particles it seemed that the combined symmetry of CP (matter/antimatter and parity) was violated. As one was violated and the other not, the two together-the product C P-is violated. (As in mathematics where +1 1 = 1.) This is therefore a loss of symmetry. For CPT to remain valid, time reversal (T) would have to be invalid too, which would make the combined symmetry of the three-CPT-valid. (As in 1 1 = +1.) In the late 1990s, scientists actually produced direct proof of the violation of time-reversal invariance on the subatomic level, that is, when time was made to run backward the laws of physics concerning this specie of weak interaction did not remain the same. From this they were able to show that the transformation of matter into antimatter is not symmetrical in time. The cosmic implications of this are enormous. It helps explain a question that intrigues physicists: why the universe is made up of matter rather than antimatter, even though equal amounts of both were created in the big bang.

After the fall of parity, as Pauli commented with quiet pride to Jung, ”The 'CPT theorem' was on everybody's lips.” ”To many physicists CPT was a fixed point around which all else turned,” T. D. Lee recalled of that turbulent era. It also seemed to be a way to bring together Pauli's interests in physics and psychology. He had ”no doubt that the placing side by side of the points of view of a physicist and a psychologist will also prove a form of reflection.” The startling ”mirror” symmetry of CPT related elementary particles in a new and profound way. So why should the apparently dissimilar views of a physicist and a psychologist not mirror each other as well?

Pauli and T. D. Lee (whose theoretical work had brought about the downfall of parity) quickly developed a rapport. Pauli was intrigued by Lee's research on how elementary particles transform into one another. On one occasion Pauli visited Lee at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. They planned to go out for dinner that evening with their wives. There was valuable scientific equipment on site and a guard was posted at the gate. As he was leaving in his car, Lee handed the guard his identification card. An uncomfortably long time went by. Lee inquired whether there was a problem. The guard apologized. He had somehow misplaced the card, he said. In all his years on duty it was the first time it had ever happened. Lee laughed. It was a first for him, too. The guard finally located the card; it had fallen through his fingers under a table. Pauli exclaimed gleefully from the back seat, ”It's the Pauli effect!”

From mirror symmetry and archetypes to...UFOs.

The violation of parity-that it was, in fact, possible to distinguish between left and right in atomic physics-struck a chord in Jung's ongoing fascination with unidentified flying objects (UFOs), an interest which, as Jung admitted, ”might strike some people as crazy.” At the time-the 1950s-many people were fascinated by UFOs and a number of highly successful books had been written. During their long dinners at Jung's huge house on the lake, Pauli and Jung often discussed the subject. Jung begged Pauli to make inquiries about flying saucers among his scientific colleagues. Pauli's theory was that they were either hallucinations or secret experimental aircraft invented by the Americans. He had nothing but scathing comments on the many ma.n.u.scripts that were sent to Jung on the subject.

Taking up Pauli's quip on the violation of symmetry-that ”G.o.d is a weak left-hander, after all,” Jung declared that ”the statements from the unconscious (represented by UFO legends, dreams, and images) point to...a statistical predominance of the left-i.e., to a prevalence of the unconscious, expressed through 'G.o.d's eyes,' 'creatures of a higher intelligence,' intentions of deliverance or redemption on the part of 'higher worlds' and the like.”

Jung was convinced that at this moment in history the unconscious was in a stronger position in relation to the conscious-a dangerous situation. The way to resolve this imbalance was through the redeeming Third-an archetype of some sort or other, a latent symbol. The UFO legend was perhaps this latent symbol. It was lurking somewhere in the psyche where it was trying to elevate the collective unconscious to a higher level. This would ultimately resolve the conflict of the unconscious and the conscious by paving the way for a dialogue between them, finally permitting the Self to emerge in the process Jung called individuation. The Third provides asymmetry and tips the balance toward the conscious. Putting it in physics terms, Jung thought that certain key elementary particles in the weak interactions played the part of the Third, while the law of parity of an object and its reflection paralleled the opposition between conscious and unconscious and right-wing and left-wing in the political sense.

Jung saw ”an almost comic parallel” in the tumult in physics caused by the weak interactions. It was precisely the same as when tiny psychological factors ”shake the foundations of our world.” ”Your anima, the Chinese woman,” he wrote to Pauli, ”already had a scent of asymmetry.”

For Jung the UFO legend indicated that the Self was ultimately Spiegler, ”The Reflector,” representing both a mathematical point and the circle, universality, ”G.o.d and mankind, eternal and transient, being and nonbeing, disappearance and rising again, etc.” ”There is absolutely no doubt,” he concluded, ”that it is the individuation symbolism that is at the psychological base of the UFO phenomenon.”

All the same, as far as Jung was concerned, UFOs were not merely symbols but very real, as evidenced by the many historical sightings recorded in the books, magazines, and newspapers piled high in his study.

After one of their lengthy late evening conversations on the subject of UFOs, Pauli had a sighting, though not of a UFO: As I was walking up the hill from Zollikon station after leaving your house, I did not actually see any ”flying saucers,” but I did see a particularly beautiful large meteor. It was moving relatively slowly (this can be explained by factors of perspective) from east to west and then finally exploded, producing an impressively fine firework display. I took it as a spiritual ”omen” that our general att.i.tude toward the spiritual problems of our age is in the sense of , in other words is more a ”meaningful” one.

(In ancient Greek, is the window of opportunity in which something meaningful can be achieved.).