Star Bright?
This artist-scientist book explores the possibility that one of the metaphysical approaches to panpsychism proposes that a proto-consciousness field prevades the universe. That mystery that we call consciousness is produced by the interaction of this field with matter.
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Both C Bangs and Greg Matloff have been influenced by an early mentor, the late quantum/plasma physicist, Dr Evan Harris Walker. Greg’s collaboration with Harris was related to astronautics and C incorporated his equations and diagrams as sacred writing into her paintings referencing illuminated manuscripts.
The 1937 novel, Star Maker, by British author/philosopher, Olaf Stapleton investigated many aspects of the technological future, some of which influenced the work of space scientists and engineers. Greg decided to investigate Stapleton’s more controversial premise that the anomolous motions of some stars are caused by stellar volition. This work was presented at a symposium of the British Interplanetary Society and was published in the peer-reviewed January 2012 issue of JBIS (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society). Follow-on work is included in Paul Glister’s Centauri Dreams blog and the Baen Press digital science magazine. Greg will present this work at an IAA (International Academy of Astronautics) symposium and C will present a video of the artist/scientist book there.
A Soviet-era Russian astronomer noted that stars of about the Sun’s surface temperature and cooler revolve around the center of our galaxy a bit faster than their hotter sisters. Called Parenago’s Discontinuity, this effect has been observed using data from Hipparcos, a European space observatory, in main sequence stars as distant as 260 light years and giant stars more distant than 1000 light years. A local explanation for this discontinuity seems to be unlikely. The discontinuity occurs at the place in the stellar temperature spectrum where molecules begin to be found in the spectra of the coolest stars.
Basing his thoughts upon a theory of consciousness developed by Sir Roger Penrose and Dr Stuart Hameroff and incorporating work of quantum physicist, Dr Bernie Haish, Greg presented a simple model for panpsychism: the proto-consciousness field interacts with matter at the molecular level through the Casimir Effect, which is a pressure on molecular bonds caused by fluctuations in the universal vacuum. This is far from unreasonable: a stabilized fluctuation in the “quantum foam” is suspected to be the origin of the Big Bang and is therefore the most creative agent in the universe.
As a follow-on to Hipparcos, the European space agency, has launched a new space observatory named Gaia. Over the next few years, Gaia will observe positions and motions of about 1 billion stars in our galaxy, which hopefully will support the conscious-star conjecture discussed here.
Uni-directional stellar jets will also be observed soon in greater detail. These jets are one way that conscious stars could control their motions. A more controversial suggestion is a weak psychokinetic (PK) force. Even though previous attempts to verify the existence of such “motion by the force of will”, were hampered by possible self-serving motives of the best-scoring human subject, it may be time to reopen the investigation of weak PK effect.