I am fascinated by the nature of creative thinking - the mind’s ability to transform information from everyday experiences into the most sublime works of art, literature, music and science.
What does it mean to be creative? Is there anything that links the thought processes of the world’s greatest artists - like Picasso - and the world’s greatest scientists - like Einstein? And if so, what is it? Can it make us more creative? This has been the subject of my research for several decades. Read more…
Cosmic Numbers: Jung, Pauli and the Quest for the Secret of the Universe
This is my next book which is in the good hands of Norton publishers in New York City, scheduled for publication in February 2009. In it I explore how Carl Jung analysed the dream imagery of one of his most famous patients, the ground-breaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli’s unconventional and wild life brought him to the brink of a mental breakdown. He obsessed over how he had made his greatest discovery, feeling that he had tapped into something beyond physics.
It’s the story of two mavericks - Pauli, a scientist who - unlike his peers – was fascinated by the inner reaches of his own psyche and not afraid to dabble in the occult; and Jung, the famous psychoanalyst who nevertheless was sure that science held answers to some of the questions that tormented him. Both made enormous and lasting contributions to their fields. But in their many conversations over dinner and wine at Jung’s Gothic mansion on the shores of Lake Zurich, they went much further, striking sparks off each other as they explored the middle ground between their two subjects.
It’s a tale of an extraordinary friendship between two equally brilliant yet very different men. Jung’s and Pauli’s was a truly unique meeting of the minds. It was, as Jung wrote, to lead both of them into “the no-man’s land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious…the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times.”