Bound w/ Pauli, Influence; price in pounds

The deep consideration of acausality is a somewhat disorientating experience, despite it being very simple in principle; we have evolved to respond to causal events because we exist on a macroscopic scale in which determinism predominates. What does not have an obvious physical cause has historically had one invented, being explained by religion and superstition, yet science has expanded to reduce the spheres in which these operate, providing testable causal explanations for most ordinary phenomena. However, science extends beyond the merely causal, and within quantum mechanics we encounter events which cannot be deterministically described, only reckoned with a statistical probability. Examples that illustrate the principle of acausality include the nature of radioactive decay of an atom, and the famous “two slit experiment”.
This book consists of two parts, the first titled “Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle”, written by C.G. Jung, and the second titled “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler”, written by the eminent quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli.
The first part is longer and more interesting. In it Jung attemps to establish a principle, based on acausality, that will allow the statistical scientific investigation of the acausal, outside of the realm of quantum mechanics, and into the domain of human experience. He seriously investigates the idea of seemingly acausal events, such as highly improbable but meaningful coincidences (and the paranormal), and offers the explanation that an acausal principle is at work outside the dimensions of space and time in which causal events take place.
While Jung admits that his theory is highly improbable, and would require much research to validate, Synchronicity, if true, would cause the most violent revolution in science to date, and therefore is of academic interest, if nothing else. Any concept as unlikely as Synchronicity deserves to be received with scepticism, however one that offers to explain phenomena that cannot be explained by the accepted paradigm also deserves to be scientifically investigated; this is how science progresses.
This is probably the most thought provoking, and potentially world-view changing pieces I have read, and for this reason I would recommend it to those with a interest in philosophy and science. However, it would be difficult to give serious consideration to this hypothesis, or even really understand what Jung is hitting at, if one is not relatively familiar with things like statistics, quantum mechanics, and some of the more modern literature on psychical experiments with random event generators (often driven by atomic decay), much of which has been published by the Society for Scientific Exploration. This, of course, is not mainstream science, and while it needs to be treated with scepticism, it is also healthy to have an open mind, especially when trying to understand things that are not currently understood. Though this is not a problem with Jung, per se, a lot of his work has been misrepresented and used without context or understanding by the pseudo-science community. This should not deter the scientist from acquaintance with Jung's theories.

The seconds part of the book, written by Pauli, is more historical, and is related to the first only tangentially. It is interesting in its own right as an uncontroversial piece on the philosophy of science, but when considered in light of Jung's synchronicity it does also seem to carry an added interest. ( )