Dinner@Dana: Deciphering the Cosmic Number

Is there a number that can both quantify the unconscious and explain the existence of our universe?

This question has been considered by many great minds, including the ground-breaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. They formed a friendship around an obsession with the numbers 3, 4 and 137, which appears in a formula that determines how strongly atoms interact with light and is the ‘sum’ of the letters of the Hebrew word kabbalah.

While Pauli was fascinated by the inner reaches of his own psyche and not afraid to dabble in the occult, Jung looked to science in search of answers to the questions of psychology that consumed him. The union would lead the pair to a hazy and unexplored no-man’s-land between physics and psychology.

Join Arthur I Miller as he reflects on his book charting their ambition and struggle to decipher the ‘cosmic number’.

Speaker:

Arthur I Miller, author and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL

This event is organised by: Café Scientifique