The physicist had only to enter certain rooms, and test tubes would shatter, power would cut out, vacuum seals would begin to leak.

In fact, Pauli is most famous for uncovering a second phenomenon which he considered an example of synchronicity, a so-called macropsychokinetic phenomenon known universally as the Pauli Effect: the mysterious failure of technical equipment in the presence of certain people. Pauli himself was cursed with the Pauli Effect. The physicist had only to enter certain rooms, and test tubes would shatter, power would cut out, vacuum seals would begin to leak. While this may seem like something of a myth, so frequent were these occurrences that the physicist Otto Stern, Pauli's good friend and fellow Nobel laureate, forever barred him from entering his lab. Along similar lines, Pauli was keenly interested in the fine-structure constant, which characterized the strength of electromagnetic interaction and was denoted by the fraction 1/137. Harald Atmanspacher, in his essay "The Hidden Side of Wolfgang Pauli," points out, "The number 137 haunted Pauli all his life, and he did not get weary of stressing that its theoretical understanding would be crucial, but missing so far." It was cancer that killed Wolfgang Pauli; though he never did come to understand the fine-structure constant, he did die in a hospital in Zurich, in Room 137.

West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief by Steven Kotler