A Meaningful Coincidence

Most of us have had the eery experience of thinking of a person we haven’t seen—or even thought about—for years, and then having that person show up at a local supermarket.  One time I was driving across Kentucky, planning to meet an old friend at a restaurant we both knew in Louisville.  As I drove, the name Jerzy Kozinski came to my mind for no perceptible reason and wouldn’t go away.  My academic field was far from his, and I had never read anything by him, so I was puzzled.  But as my friend and I were having lunch, he said, “As Jerzy Kozinski puts it . . . .”  He had never mentioned Kozinski before in my presence.

Carl Jung wrote a good deal about “meaningful coincidences,” such as the one that took place when he was counseling a lady who spoke of a dream she had had the previous night about an Egyptian scarab.  Just then there was a banging at the window.  Jung opened it, and in flew a beetle of the European species that most resembles the scarab.

I used to teach a graduate seminar in the works of Miguel de Cervantes, back when such a monumental volume as Don Quixote could be assigned and the better students would actually read it.  At the same time I was devouring popular books on modern physics, and eventually it occurred to me that, while the two parts of Don Quixote appeared in 1605 and 1615, Albert Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity were produced by him in 1905 and 1915, respectively, 300 years later in the two cases.  Was that a mere coincidence or a meaningful coincidence?, I wondered.

Let’s look at what each of them was saying.  Just for one example, as he is about to charge a flock of sheep and kill a number of them, Don Quixote says, “I tell you, Sancho, and it is therefore true,” that the sheep in question are the two armies involved in a great battle he has read about in one of his chivalric novels.  For his part, Einstein denied us the delusion that time is an absolute thing, so that we can imagine that all entities in the universe are acting at the same moment.  So maybe Don Quixote isn’t so far off in projecting into the present a battle he presumes took place in an earlier age.

Then, what about his statement that something is true because he declares it to be true?  (Sounds like a lot of today’s politicians, doesn’t it?)  Einstein also set in motion something the quantum mechanics people have had a deuce of a time wrestling with, namely the question of when and where a potential event becomes “real.”  The Copenhagen interpretation insisted that it only becomes real when a conscious being actually observes it.  Einstein and others fought that idea with claw and fang, but without much success.

I had the great privilege of holding a brief conversation with John Wheeler, who worked with Einstein at Princeton and later gave a name to the black hole phenomenon.  Wheeler had to leave for an appointment, but handed me offprints of a couple of his recent articles.  One was entitled, “Delayed Choice Experiments in Physics.”  He took off from the strange experience of some astronomers who found themselves viewing what appeared to be two identical galaxies in the same region of space.  The odds against this are so overpowering (notice that I didn’t say “astronomical”?) that they knew it could hardly be true.  As it turned out, they were viewing a single galaxy whose light was being bent by the sheer mass of an intervening galaxy and going around both sides of it.

The mind-boggling part is what came out of this.  They realized that they could set up their instruments so that the light from the far galaxy would come around the left side, the right side, or both sides, and that whichever one they chose was the way it had happened billions of years ago.  In other words, they were able to choose in their day what they wanted to have happened in the distant past, and that was the way it happened.  Wheeler eventually concluded that physicists were stuck with the idea that reality only takes place in the mind of a conscious observer.

The even weirder things now going on in membrane theory with its “multiverse” are grist for someone else’s post.

Now, back to Don Quixote.  How far off is he in declaring that he decides what is real?  The fact is that he has concluded before Wheeler & Co. that reality takes place in the mind of the observer.  Unfortunately, he still has to pay for the skewered sheep.

My point, though, is that the appearance of the two parts of Cervantes’s novel and Einstein’s theories of relativity 300 years apart may in fact be a meaningful coincidence.

However, don’t try to declare your checkbook balanced when the bank’s perception of your account balance differs from yours.  For some reason, the Copenhagen interpretation doesn’t work at that level, more’s the pity.  There may be hope, though, in M theory, in which there are millions of universes in which that checkbook is balanced.