Coincidance - Principia Discordia

152 COINCIDANCE
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-inlaw
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 worldmosaic
. . . 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 synchronkity. 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.
TWO CONNECTIONS
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