part0026

The following article originally appeared in Science Digest and inspired a heated rebuttal from some chap hiding behind a pen-name (I forget if he called himself Dr. Crypton or Dr. Matrix, but it was something like that.) This excited, agitated and emotional chap was very offended by my ideas—or my popularization of the ideas of several prominent physicists—and therefore claimed that I was irrational. If I remember correctly, he said I was "groveling in awe" before "inscrutable gods" or something of that sort. I leave it to the reader to decide whether there are inscrutable gods invoked here or if that polemic was just another example of the hysterical anxieties that beset Rationalists when their dogmas are undermined.

For over 100 years, various heretical scientists have been studying the so-called paranormal—strange events that are attributed to extrasensory perception, precognition or telekinesis. And, every step of the way, this research has been attacked by critics who explain the positive results as "mere coincidence" or (even worse) "sheer coincidence." Now there appears to be a possibility that coincidence may be more important scientifically—and may change our scientific paradigm much more radically—than telepathy would. Coincidence may be more earthshaking than telekinesis. There have been coincidences so dramatic, so symbolic or so wildly improbably that they have aroused feelings of the uncanny in scientists and laymen alike for generations.

Could such things happen by chance alone? There must, it seems to some, be an underlying logic to these bizarre juxtapositions of events in time and space. Among those who have seriously considered the logic of coincidence was Paul Kammerer, the German biologist who was one of the last of the Lamarckian evolutionists. (Kammerer killed himself soon after one of his crucial experiments in support of Lamarckian evolution was found to be a fraud. Einstein, however, was impressed with Kammerer's work on coincidence, calling it "original and by no means absurd.") Other interested scientists have included Carl Gustav Jung, disciple of Freud and one of the great psychologists of the century, who mapped the unconscious mind with an eye to the mystical; and Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel laureate physicist and discoverer of the neutrino who, in the words of Arthur Koestler in The Roots of Coincidence , extended "the principle of noncausal events from microphysics (where its legitimacy was recognized) to macrophysics (where it was not)."

Let us examine a few cases, moving gradually from the only moderately peculiar to the increasingly bizarre.

1. English novelist Dame Rebecca West was writing a story in which a girl finds a hedgehog in her garden. As West wrote this passage, she was interrupted by servants who informed her they had just found a hedgehog in the garden.

2. When Norman Mailer began his novel Barbary Shore there was no Russian spy in it. As he worked on it, a Russian spy became a minor character. As the work progressed, the spy became the dominant character. After the novel was finished, the Immigration Service arrested a man who lived one flight below Mailer in the same building. He was Colonel Rudolf Abel, named as the top Russian spy in the United States at that time.

3. While the Allies were planning the Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944, the following code words were used (and were among the best-kept secrets of t he war): Utah and Omaha , the beaches where the American troops would land; Mulberry , the artificial harbor to be used after the landing; Neptune , the naval operations plan; Overlord , the entire invasion. On May 3 ,1944, the first code word, Utah, appeared as an answer to the London Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle. On May 23, Omaha appeared in an answer to a Telegraph puzzle. On May 31, Mulberry appeared. And on June 2, four days before the invasion, Neptune and Overlord both appeared.

British Intelligence investigated this matter extensively. They found that the man who created the crosswords was innocent of espionage, had no knowledge of the invasion and was as puzzled as they were. Verdict: mere coincidence.

4. When Hart Crane was living in Brooklyn Heights, he decided to write a poem about the Brooklyn Bridge, which he could see from his window. It is the poem for which he is chiefly remembered. Only a year later did Crane discover that the address where he had lived while writing The Bridge was the address at which Washington Roebling, chief engineer on the bridge, had lived.

5. One day in 1909, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were in Freud's study, having an argument about extrasensory perception. It is worth noting that Freud was Jung's hero, virtually his substitute father, at that time. As the argument grew heated, emotions crackled. Suddenly, for no obvious reason, there was an explosive noise from Freud's bookcase.

"There," said Jung, "that is an example of a so-called catalytic phenomenon."

"Oh, come!" Freud exclaimed. "That is sheer bosh."

"It is not," Jung answered, seized by an uncanny certainty he could not explain. "You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point, I now predict that in a moment there will be yet another loud report!"

Boom! It happened just as Jung predicted. Freud was aghast, and Jung was gripped by an inexplicable guilt.

6. Sequel to the above: In 1972, Dr. Robert Harvie, a psychologist at London University, was reading aloud to a friend Jung's account of the experience. When Harvie came to the second explosion in Freud's bookcase, a lamp inexplicably fell over with a loud crash.

7. Second sequel: Margaret Green, of London, was riding a train and reading Arthur Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence. When she came to Koestler's account of Freud's noisy bookcase, the window of the train suddenly smashed as if somebody had thrown a rock at it. Note that even if there were a rock thrower, it is eerie that he launched his missile just at that time, as if to prove "the roots of coincidence" are everywhere.

8. I was discussing the Harvie and Green sequels to the Jung-Freud incident with my wife in a restaurant. I thought it was amusing that I had discussed this and written about it many times without triggering anything explosive. At that point, my wife spilled her water. The waiter rushed over to mop the table—and accidentally knocked over my water.

9. Jung had a patient who was telling about a dream in which an Egyptian scarab beetle appeared. This was of great interest to Jung, since he believed dreams often contain images from the collective unconscious, and the scarab beetle was sacred to the ancient Egyptians. At that point, something banging against the window caught Jung's attention. It was a scarab beetle, a species rather rare in Zurich, where Jung lived.

10. Jung himself later had a dream about Liverpool, England, that he considered so important that he analyzed it and wrote about it at length. (Liverpool was a pun on pool of life, he decided, and signified rebirth.) Years later, Peter O'Halligan, of the World Coincidence Center in Berkeley, analyzed the dream more carefully and decided the details fitted only one street intersection in Liverpool. At that place was the cafe where the Beatles first performed. And on the same spot, later, was the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, where my play llluminatus appeared. A large part of the play takes place aboard a yellow submarine, inspired by a Beatles song. And Jung himself is a character in the play.

11. Novelist William Burroughs, while living in Tangier in 1958, had a conversation with a Captain Clark, who mentioned that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That day. Captain Clark had his first serious accident. In the evening, while thinking about this. Burroughs flipped on the radio and heard a bulletin about a crash of an airliner. The flight number was 23 and the pilot was also a Captain Clark.

12. Sequel: Burroughs later decided to write a screenplay about the Prohibition Era gangster Dutch Schultz. In researching it, he found the number 23 over and over again. Schultz had put out a contract on a rival, Vincent "Mad Dog'' Coll, and Coll was shot on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan when he was 23 years old. Schultz himself was shot to death on October 23, 1935

13. When my play llluminatus opened on the Liverpool street so strangely linked with Jung-beetle-Beatle coincidences, the premiere was November 23. British playwright Heathcote Williams made a guest appearance as a walk-on. Later, Williams and I talked about other writers we knew, and Burroughs was mentioned, along with the 23 coincidences he had collected (only a few of which are mentioned above). Williams told me that when he met Burroughs this subject came up, because Williams had mentioned that he was 23 years old at the time. When Williams returned to his flat that night (he had recently moved), he noticed for the first time that the building across the street was number 23.

14. After Koestler's Roots of Coincidence was published. Professor Hans Zeisel, of the University of Chicago law school, wrote to Koestler about a whole chain of 23s that had haunted his life: he lived at Rossaurerlaende 23 in Vienna, he had a law office at Gonzagagasse 23, his mother lived at Alserstrasse 23. Once Zeisel's mother was given a novel, Die Liebe Der Jeanne Ney, and took it with her to Monte Carlo. In the book, a character wins a great deal by betting on 23 at roulette. Zeisel's mother decided to bet on 23 at roulette. Twenty-three came up on the second try.

15. This whole area, as if it weren't bizarre enough already, took on even more exotic aspects after a celebrated experiment by Robert Harvie and biologist Sir Alister Hardy that attempted to demonstrate the reality of telepathy so totally that the last skeptic would be overwhelmed. The experiment, conducted in London in 1967, involved 110 trials with 20 subjects in each. Using every possible safeguard to ensure rigorousness, Harvie and Hardy obtained marvelous results. The subjects, trying to guess or "telepathically" read target cards they could not see, scored well above what might have been expected from chance.

Then, as a control, Harvie and Hardy randomized the response sheets. That is, instead of just comparing the responses of 20 people who were trying to "see" an invisible target card, as in the experiment proper, Harvie and Hardy made up groups of 20 response sheets from different people in different trials. This, they hoped, would prove that chance alone could not account for the results of the telepathy trials.

What we have here is worse than telepathy from the orthodox view-point. Randomizing should have produced fewer correlations, according to one application of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that disorder always increases in random processes. Here, randomizing produced more order instead of less.

Hardy and Harvie could only suggest that probability and coincidence needed to be reexamined.

Actually, this reexamination had begun as early as 1919 in a book called The Law of Series , by Dr. Paul Kammerer. As a biologist, Kammerer not only studied strange coincidences but developed a taxonomy of them. For instance, his brother-in-law went to a concert at which he had seat number 9 and cloakroom ticket number 9. By itself, that would be a "series of the first order," in Kammerer's terminology. The next day, however, the brother-in- law went to another concert and got seat 21 and cloakroom ticket 21. That makes a "series of the second order."

Kammerer went on to list and give examples of series of the third order, fourth order, etc. He also provided a morphology involving powers (number of parallels in a coincidence) and a typology (coincidences of numbers, names, events).

He concluded that coincidence represents an acausal principle in nature, as distinguished from the causal principles science had hitherto studied. He compared the acausal coincidental principle (ACOP, we shall call it for short) with gravity, noting that gravity acts on mass, while ACOP acts on form and function. He concluded, in words that foreshadowed some current speculations in quantum physics, "We thus arrive at the image of a world- mosaic . . . which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together."

Jung eventually collaborated with Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli in developing a theory of coincidences that they called synchronicity. Pauli was attracted to the subject because he himself was haunted by malign coincidences that his fellow physicists jokingly called "the Pauli effect." As a theoretical, as distinguished from an experimental, physicist, Pauli did not spend much time in laboratories. It happened however that—more often than mere chance could explain—whenever Pauli was in a laboratory something got smashed or broken. It was not that he was clumsy; these accidents usually happened many yards away from him.

What Jung and Pauli suggested was that there are two kinds of connecting principles in nature. The first connecting principle is ordinary causality, which is what science usually studies. Causality is structured linearly in time: if A causes B, then A must occur in time before B. The other connecting principle is acausal, as Kammerer believed (though neither Jung nor Pauli appear to have read his book). The ACOP (acausal coincidental principle) Jung and Pauli called synchronicity because they assumed it was at right angles to causality and structured in space, not time. That is, the synchronicities (from the Greek, syn, together, and chronos, time) happen at the same time.

The relation between synchronous events, according to Jung, is basically psychological. The logic, in other words, is the logic of the deep psyche, which Jung (and Freud) had found in dreams and myths.

Barbara Honegger, a leading student of these matters, has pointed out a basic defect in the Jung-Pauli theory. ACOPs are by no means only synchronous. They are often separated by days or even years.

A new light was shed on ACOPs in 1964 by the Scots physicist John Bell. Bell's theorem holds that if quantum physics is accurate, particles that were once in contact continue to influence one another, no matter how far apart they move. This influence is instantaneous, according to Bell, even if the particles are at opposite ends of the Universe.

This makes a nasty problem for physicists because Bell's conclusion directly contradicts Einstein's special relativity, which holds that any influence between particles must require an energy transfer, and energy cannot move instantaneously. Energy only moves at the speed of light or less. Bell's theorem provides a possible mechanism at the quantum level for the acausal interaction of apparently unrelated events. Whether it can be applied beyond the strange world of subatomic particles is a question so far without a firm answer.

Four experiments have confirmed Bell's math; two have cast doubt on it; research is continuing. Meanwhile, some physicists have started reflecting on how to reconcile Bell with Einstein, if both are right. Dr. Evan Harris Walker has suggested that the "influence" in the Bell connection does not involve energy and hence does not contradict Einstein. The influence, Walker proposes, is consciousness itself.

Dr. Jack Sarfatti offers a different interpretation. The medium of the Bell interconnectedness, he says, is not consciousness but information. Now, information is very abstract in communication theory: it is the negative reciprocal of entropy, which means roughly that it is the opposite of disorder. It is almost what we call system or organization in daily speech. Information, Sarfatti proposes, is not bound by the same laws as energy and not subject to Einsteinian limits.

This would explain a great many of the ACOPs collected by Jung, Kammerer, Koestler and others; it might even explain the Hardy-Harvie experiment, in which randomizing led to more order rather than more disorder. And it throws all of the data of parapsychology into a new perspective: instead of separate paranormal abilities such as ESP, precognition and telekinesis, there might just be one ACOP—acausal coincidental principle—appearing to us in many forms to which we give those names.

Another angle on the problem comes from Dr. David Bohm's hidden- variable theory, developed from some ideas of Einstein's. According to Bohm, below the quantum level there is a subquantum world of hidden variables. This is a metaphor. Bohm does not mean below in the ordinary sense but, in a logical sense, what Bohm means is that the space-time world observed in physics is an epiphenomenon, a phenomenon caused by another phenomenon; underlying it is a spaceless, timeless realm from which the events of ordinary reality emerge. Bohm uses this theory to explain, or transcend, the notorious indeterminacy of the quantum realm (where ordinary causality breaks down), but it could also explain the acausal coincidences we are discussing.

Whether we take Bell's interpretation of quantum mechanics or Bohm's, we seem to arrive at a world in which all things are very intimately connected, no matter how far apart and seemingly unconnected they may appear in ordinary space and ordinary time. This may sound like Buddhism or other mystic teachings, but other quantum theorists have come to similar conclusions by other avenues. Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger decided, as early as 1945, that the only sane explanation of quantum wave mechanics was that "The mind . . . is something we simply cannot conceive of as plural."

Barbara Honegger has a model that united all these approaches with current neurology. The brain, in a general way, has two hemispheres. The left hemisphere seemingly does all the talking (except in dreams and schizophrenia); it is the seat of the conscious ego. The right hemisphere is often called the silent hemisphere because it talks much less. It is also very active in hypoexcitation (deep yogic trance), in hyperexcitation (LSD trips, wild dancing, etc.) and while listening to music.

Honegger believes that the right hemisphere ego consciousness is continually trying to assert its existence and communicate with the left hemisphere ego, which Western adults think is their only ego. The right- side ego usually communicates via dreams, as noted by Freud and Jung, but if the left-sided ego remains deaf to these messages, the right hemisphere creates Freudian slips or hysterical symptoms to get the ego's attention. And, if nothing else works, it produces an ACOP. It does this, Honegger suggests, by means of connecting principles such as those suggested by Bell and Bohm. According to Honegger, we should analyze such ACOPs the way Freud and Jung analyzed dreams to see what unconscious messages they contain.

Of course, recent evidence suggests that the right brain-left brain dichitomy is not as absolute as once believed; Honegger's model is only the latest, not the last, word on this subject. But the growing convergence of data from coincidence hunters and the latest theories in quantum physics suggest that the model that will tie all this together will be much more revolutionary than proof of ghosts or of UFOs or even of thought transference would be. We seem to be dealing with a force that is, as Kammerer said, as universal as gravity and without limitations in either space or time.