It's a question I've been thinking about. Clearly, aesthetics has much to do with it: that NASA images don't carry copyright guarantees its colourful images of nebula and starfields regular front pages. More substantially, cosmology is one of the ways we ask metaphysical questions these days - where we come from, what we are, etc. You just can't do that with, say, solid state physics, so it's bound not to appeal as much - though as a science, it too has come on leaps and bounds. And perhaps there's something deeper going on in cosmology too.
A key element in cosmology concerns quantum physics, and it's that latter aspect which is explored in 137: Jung, Pauli and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I Miller. It tells the story of the great quantum physicist and the great psychologist's relationship over several decades. Pauli turned to Jung when his life was falling apart. Jung's analysis helped steady him, but the various ideas inherent in analytical psychology came to fascinate Pauli too, so that Jung came to regard him as a co-worker in the field. Eventually, they published together, though Pauli kept Jung's analysis of his dreams, and their exchange about ideas such as synchronicity, mostly from the public gaze.
Miller shows that Jung provided insights into how Pauli arrived at his great contributions, notably the exclusion principle. It required the introduction of a fourth quantum number, spin. This was highly counterintuitive since it can't be visualised, though made sense in Jung's language of archetypes and alchemy as the 3 becoming 4, the symbol of quaternity representing a state of greater wholeness than a trinity.
The broad idea seems to be this. A Jungian account of scientific intuition suggests that an imaginative leap forward occurs when an archetype constellates, that is to say an archetypal potential is instantiated in a solution to the problem concerned. Hence, the feeling of exhilaration so common in the accounts of scientific discoveries: it's not just that a problem is solved but that a truth is felt to have been revealed too. Hence too the routine thought, in physics at least, that qualities like beauty, simplicity and synthesis are important guides: they have a profound human appeal, as well as producing verifiable results.
The notion of 3 becoming 4 is rather esoteric. So perhaps a less exotic example would be the issue of complementarity - an archetype common enough in mystical ideas (light and dark, life and death, and so on), but also integral to quantum physics (particle and wave, matter and anti-matter, and so on). It wasn't just Pauli who made such associations.
Just how the physical relates to the psychological is, of course, contentious. No doubt, many would regard even the suggestion as as much rubbish. And I'm sure that quantum physics challenges its mystical interpreters as much as any adherent to a materialist philosophy of nature: the mystics are keen on notions like non-locality, for example, but tend not to be so keen on the violently destructive nature of the subatomic world; and materialism appears hardly to have noticed that matter is no longer pre-eminent in physics - it comes and goes - and that it's energy that is conserved.
When deciding where on the spectrum from mystical to materialist you fall, this quote of Pauli is very helpful: 'In my own view it is only a narrow passage of truth (no matter whether scientific or other truth) that passes between the Scylla of a blue fog of mysticism and the Charybdis of a sterile rationalism. This will always be full of pitfalls and one can fall down on both sides.'
