Appendix A: anecdotal accounts of synchronicity

Toward a signal model of perception
Synchronicity 'experiments'

First posted June 25, 2009

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Presented here is a collection of anecdotal accounts of what some may believe are episodes of synchronicity, along with my comments. I have not sought to arrange these accounts in any particular order.

We must frankly admit that none of these incidents could be shown, using standard statistical tools, to result of non-random covert connections.

Pauli's pull

The physicist George Gamow gave a humorous example of the Pauli effect in his book Thirty Years that Shook Physics (Dover reprint 1985):

"It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold. A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli's presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck's laboratory in Gottingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zurich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the mishap in Franck's laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Gottingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli effect!"

Similarly, the physicist Abraham Pais relates in his book Niels Bohr's Times (Oxford 1991), that Pauli was very proud of the "Pauli effect" whereby, beginning in 1922, "something would go wrong whenever he entered a laboratory." Pauli "would tell with glee how his friend Otto Stern, experimentalist at Hamburg, would consult him only through the closed door leading to his working space."

Wolfgang Pauli, a founder of quantum mechanics, seems to have come to believe in a phenomenon that his former therapist and friend, Carl Jung, dubbed "synchronicity," though he was careful about his phrasing.

His number came up

The novelist William S. Burroughs was fascinated by the number 23, recounts Robert Anton Wilson, a writer and mystic. "According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark's ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23."

"Burroughs began collecting odd 23s after this gruesome synchronicity," Wilson wrote in the May 2007 issue of Fortean Times.

No scientist would consider Wilson, with his peculiar numerological theories, as a credible source, nor the Fortean Times as a reputable forum.

I have no interest in promoting any form of numerology, but I would say that such a scenario might reflect Burroughs' own mind. We don't know what he'd been thinking about or doing before this symmetrical coincidence set, but in our model reality signals at later times reflect interference of signals at an earlier time. The "meaningful coincidences" are similar subsignals triggered by a previous interference.

Traveling in Tennessee

One morning several years ago my son and I were driving from Knoxville in order to do some hiking in Tennessee mountain country. We had decided to take a scenic route and were barely aware that that route intersected a major interstate highway that linked to Knoxville. As we go to the intersection -- having slowed down after a wrong turn -- a man came down the embankment from the interstate. My son recognized him and we stopped to talk. The man, who my son had met with the day before, had had some difficulties and was hitch-hiking back to Ohio. My son was able to wish him well, say goodbye and give him some money for his journey.

I don't recall what the two of us had been discussing in the car, but I do recall thinking that that intersection of events was no random coincidence.

Safe conduct

A friend I have known for years recently confided this experience: He had gone with a group to go whitewater rafting in Pennsylvania. But there was no room for him on the raft and he rented a one-person kayak so he could accompany his friends.

When hitting some rapids, he capsized and spilled out of his vessel; his friends were nowhere in sight.

My friend is neurologically impaired and so was in quite a predicament, even though the water was not over his head.

At that point, a man appeared and from my friend's vantage point, "it looked like he was walking on water." The man helped my friend out of the stream and then took his leave. My friend was worried about the kayak, because ordinarily such an untended floatable shoots downstream. But, he turned and noticed it floating idly nearby.

My friend was clearly much taken with this experience.

My collage days

A few years ago I regularly indulged my artistic bent my artistic bent by composing collages in ways that I considered interesting and original.

On a number of occasions the "echoes" were quite strong, and occasionally gruesome. In fact, one collage was followed by an extraordinarily gruesome event that reflected the collage quite obviously (to me), and I have decided not to give details out of concern for the feelings of the survivors.

My thinking is that the juxtaposition of images that individually or collectively contain high E-values can have a profound impact on one's virtual world.

In fact, I became reluctant to make more of these and threw out almost all the ones I had made.

The collage technique underscores the interference effect. That is, the images form a superposed set, a collage, that influences the reality formulator, usually within 24 hours.

A cold day in hell

This could fit into the 'experiments' appendix, except that I was too irritable to consider what I was doing a detached experiment.

On the evening of January 23, 2009, I was in the San Diego Public Library glancing through a book on superconductivity, which occurs at extremes of cold. I noticed the word "transpire" used as a synonym for "occur" and was irritated at this unusual and unprofessional usage. In fact, I was so annoyed that I did "numerology" on the word and several anagrams of the word. But once the anger passed, I threw the paper with these scribblings in the trash bin.

The next morning, I encountered an internet story from the Independent about two young fishermen who survived shipwreck inside a floating icebox used for storing fish. They were enormously thirsty when rescued from the shark-infested South Pacific waters and had survived by drinking rainwater deposited by a typhoon that had failed to capsize their icebox.

Bad company

A year or two after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, I wrote a web page about the divisibility of numbers by a 9 or an 11.

The following summer afternoon I was enjoying a picnic put on by a spiritually inclined group. In the adjacent picnic grove was a gathering of members of the Pagans motorcycle gang, including women and children.

The Pagans are considered an outlaw gang and are known for their Nazi and occult symbolism.

They weren't raucous but rather subdued. They gave off "strange vibes."

My estimate is that the association that I and others have with the numbers 9 and 11 went into a reality projection of people who many, including myself, think of as engaging in evil.

I have noticed that when doing math, the projections, or "echoes," can be quite vivid.

Two Pied Pipers

When working on this page, I switched over to take a look at the news and noticed that Michael Jackson's heart had stopped and a short time later he was reported dead. I'm wondering if this sudden evil report is an echo of the "collage days" anecdote, which talks about the artist and gruesome happenings; in light of the singer's troubled public image, the Pagans anecdote might also have been a contributor.

After learning about Jackson's death, I stepped out of the library for a bite to eat and upon returning noticed a sign on the door advertising a rock performer who would sing for children that evening. The performer is a friend who is a member of the spiritually inclined group I was with at the picnic (though I don't recall that he was at the picnic). In fact, I later overheard some of his performance but did not attend.

The two singers who entertain children represent two spiritual paths offered in life, on the one hand represented by the hedonistic Pagans and on the other by the spiritually inclined group I was with (we like pleasure but strive against self-defeating pleasure).

Would all this mean that I think I caused a man's death? This type of thinking is akin to the questions that can and cannot properly be asked in quantum mechanics. The best that can be said is that the interference effects are followed by a possibly synchronistic report. The report very often is about an event that precedes the interference, just as would be expected in the discussion in my main article.

What do you know?

I had been studying differential equations the morning of April 23, 2009, and later jotted down a thought that impressed me taken from a book by Werner Heisenberg (Physics and beyond). He had written, according to my notes, that there were no determinants that could give the position of an emitted radium electron, that the quantum information gave all the knowledge there was.

Later, I visited a church where the speaker had the unusual first name, Knowledge.

I have many, many more personal anecdotes. But I don't have the notes of them and they are only randomly stored in my memory. So some of the more entertaining and perhaps compelling ones aren't here. If I happen to get around to it, I may add some more.