Stephan Martin

Duane, thanks for your courage in sharing your personal direct experience of a living universe. I know many others who have had experiences in this direction, including myself and other scientists. For a while, the psychologist Charles Tart was keeping an archive of scientists’ transcendent experiences, and he feels that this type of data from…[Read more]

Ursula makes a good point in highlighting the life/matter bias that has deep roots in our contemporary worldview. Ideas that matter/earth is sinful, fallen, ‘dirty’, etc… have a long history in western culture, and one that contemporary ecological philosophers such as Freya Matthews (For Love of Matter) and others have addressed by…[Read more]

Duane – thanks for the reference to the SciAm article on our Growing, Breathing Galaxy. I’ve requested it via interlibrary loan and will be happy to share it when it arrives.It seems that there may be two threads emerging in the discussion here: one about the on-going “livingness” on the universe, in terms of its dynamism and continual emergence…[Read more]

Hi Duane, Glad to be joining the conversation at this point. A helpful approach to understanding whether the term metabolism applies to the universe might be to apply it to nested and emergent biological systems and see at what point (if any) the term breaks down as we apply it to larger scales. I think biologists would all agree that cells and…[Read more]

Hi Duane,Glad to be joining the conversation at this point. A helpful approach to understanding whether the term metabolism applies to the universe might be to apply it to nested and emergent biological systems and see at what point (if any) the term breaks down as we apply it to larger scales. I think biologists would all agree that cells and…[Read more]

Hi Orla,What terrific courses you are teaching and involved with!  Since I teach college astronomy primarily, it’s relatively easy to organize the course around an evolutionary cosmic perspective, and I often show “Journey of the Universe” early on to give the students the context and direction we’re moving. With your environment course, a big…[Read more]