FULL ARTICLE

By Travis Diehl

This spring, Charles Ross sat in his studio in SoHo, but his mind was elsewhere: a mesa in eastern New Mexico, where his life’s work, a monumental naked-eye earthwork called “Star Axis,” — part observatory and part pyramid — juts at the cosmos. “If you’re there in the winter when there’s a snowstorm, it’s like the sky is painting the earth white,” he said. “And the thunderstorms. And rainbows several times a week.”

Ross has a degree in math and a yen for physics. He says he can sense celestial alignments, and feel the difference between colors of light in a spectrum. When he needed a well dug for his desert home, he called a dowser.

The artist, 88, belongs to a generation of land artists who shed galleries and cities to work at a scale more common in ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica. In 1975, he had been crisscrossing the Southwest for four years, hunting for the perfect location for “Star Axis,” when a cowboy appeared and handed him a business card.

Ross in the entrance to the Star Tunnel stairs at “Star Axis,” his land art project near Anton Chico, N.M. At the top is the viewing window.

The cowboy’s father, W.O. Culbertson Jr., happened to own the surrounding 62,000 acres. Ross called him up and explained his plans for a sculpture that would help people sense the deep past and distant future, by visualizing the changing position of Earth’s current north star, Polaris. He wanted to see the night sky as Cleopatra might have seen it.

Ross imagined visitors observing Polaris through a metal ring at the top of a long staircase, aligned to the Earth’s celestial axis. “I said, ‘I need about a square mile.’ And I’ll never forget the answer. He said, ‘Well, hell, we’ve got plenty of those.’” The rancher deeded Ross about 400 acres. In exchange, Ross built a bridge over a culvert to help Culbertson’s limo reach his hacienda.

Ross broke ground during the U.S. Bicentennial year. Fifty years and more than $10 million later, he says “Star Axis” will be done by winter. In the final design, the staircase rises 11 stories through a tunnel blasted in the rock of Chupinas Mesa, 6,000 feet above sea level and into a viewing chamber in a concrete, stone and steel pyramid 52 feet tall. A circular window there frames Polaris. As viewers climb each of the 147 stairs, the rim of the window appears to broaden, giving an idea of how far Polaris has and will move in a given amount of time, during the 26,000-year cycle known as precession, the gravitational wobble of the Earth’s rotational axis.

The view from the Hour Chamber in the pyramid of “Star Axis.” It takes one hour for a star to move from one edge of the doorway to the other.

“Star Axis” is a visitor from another time. The sculpture speaks a new-age language of earth and sky; in cosmic terms, the project’s 50-year story is negligible, yet it’s rooted in a moment that produced contemporary artists with epochal aspirations. “The monumentality and the scale of ambition are part of what takes your breath away with the work,” Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, said in an interview. A short film on “Star Axis” is included in a series on artists that the National Gallery produced for America250.

“Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Charles Ross, Robert Smithson: These are the high priests of Land art,” Virginia Dwan, the 3M heiress and New York gallerist who nurtured them, wrote in the 2012 catalog for “Ends of the Earth,” a definitive land art survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Almost all the rest of Ross’s cohort has completed their remote masterworks: Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” 1970, in Utah’s Great Salt Lake; De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” 1977, in New Mexico. The most recent, Heizer’s “City,” in Nevada, opened to the public in 2022 after 50 years. Only James Turrell’s “Roden Crater,” a bigger, slicker observatory, remains unfinished — although Turrell, a slightly younger, West Coast artist, is part of the adjacent but distinct “light and space” movement.

An antechamber at the base of the staircase frames views of constellations to the south, while the staircase climbs north. Ross designed features like this with full-scale mockups. This pyramid portion of the structure rises 52 feet above the mesa.

Ross has declared “Star Axis” nearly complete in the past. A 2002 article in The New York Times put its projected opening date at 2006. This time, he said, is different. The structure is done. Ross and his team will spend the summer cleaning up the grounds and finishing the drainage system that protects “Star Axis” from New Mexico’s monsoons. Ross said the pyramid is so solid that it could slide off the mountain in one piece.

The challenge is ensuring that “Star Axis” endures in the public mind. Ross showed me a long-exposure photograph of “Star Axis” he took in 2000, with stars tracing short arcs through the turquoise night. “You couldn’t do that picture now,” he said, “without retouching out all the satellites.”

Ross at the tunnel entrance to “Star Axis,” called the Avenue, with 147 steps, all pointed at Polaris. Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says works of land art like “Star Axis” are “specks in the scale of the landscape. They’re not monuments to anything except the fragility of our own perception and experience.”

It’s Not About Him

The day before the summer solstice (June 21, roughly 1 p.m.), Jamie Clements picked me up from the Albuquerque airport. A silver-haired, loquacious Texan, he cut his teeth in the fund-raising world in the 1980s writing nonpartisan solicitations for Karl Rove’s direct marketing company; from 2013 to 2025 he headed the foundation that supports New Mexico’s state museums. He has taken dozens of prospective benefactors to the mesa over the years. In 2026, Ross and his wife, the artist Jill O’Bryan, hired him as chief executive of their nonprofit, the Land Light Foundation.

“Star Axis” was underwritten by Ross’s art sales, and patrons like Dwan. Today, donors can pay a thousand dollars or more to visit with a small group, or sponsor a stair for six figures. Clements told me that it’s tougher fund-raising for the sculpture’s upkeep and staffing than for more typical arts organizations. I joked that maybe that’s because there’s no wall to put donors’ names on. He pointed out that Ross’s name isn’t on the walls either.

Despite the scale of Ross’s project and his centrality to the land art movement, he remains a cult figure. In a world of swaggering personalities, he is relatively humble. The rapper Kanye West filmed an IMAX movie at “Roden Crater.” No such celebrities at “Star Axis.”

A model of “Star Axis” in Ross’s studio in New Mexico shows a cone-shaped excavation blasted out of the Chupinas Mesa, and a staircase that progresses from underground through the pyramid to a viewing chamber.

But Ross isn’t unknown. His drawings and prism sculptures are at the Smithsonian. He has built more than 20 permanent prism installations called Solar Spectrums, which spread the sun into rainbows at different times of day and year, at sites from Tasmania to Tokyo, including a private home for the Walmart heiress Alice Walton and a chapel at the Harvard Business School. “Spectrum 14,” commissioned for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time survey in 2024, exploring connections between art and science, is installed in the museum through Nov. 29.

Yet in the time it has taken to finish “Star Axis,” many of the wells that supported early land art have dried up. Dwan, the patron, died in 2022; a spokesperson for the Dia Art Foundation, which runs “The Lightning Field,” “Spiral Jetty” and Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels” (1973-1976), said the institution has “no plans to add to our constellation of sites at this time.” Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and director of Dia between 1994 and 2006, told me that he helped Heizer form a consortium of institutional backers for his sculpture, “City,” under the nonprofit Triple Aught Foundation.

Heizer and Ross were once studio neighbors, and are still close. While “Star Axis” is smaller and less remote than “City,” the comparison is unavoidable. O’Bryan, Ross’s wife, pointed out that Heizer shows at Gagosian gallery, while “Charles doesn’t have a blue chip,” she said. “He’s with Franklin Parrasch.”

O’Bryan met Ross in 1994 when she became his studio assistant, while completing her Ph.D. in art theory. She splits her time between “Star Axis” and her own art, which includes rubbings of the mesa and intricate conceptual drawings where one hash mark corresponds to one breath. The couple, with their rescue dogs Pi and Tika, spend summers in a New Mexico house made of double-wide trailers with generous studio space. Once it gets too cold to pour concrete, they return to Manhattan.

Like many in Ross’s orbit, O’Bryan seems impressed by her husband’s balance of gentleness and drive. “That was the thing that attracted me to Charles’s particular type of genius,” O’Bryan said, “which is that it’s not about him.”

Govan pushed back on the idea that land art requires plentiful ego. With the typical monument, he said, powerful people “caused workers to build things in honor of gods, heroes, battles won and the usual.” Works of land art like “Star Axis” are “specks in the scale of the landscape. They’re not monuments to anything except the fragility of our own perception and experience.”

On its small scale, getting “Star Axis” visitor ready is a race against entropy. The Museum of Outdoor Arts (MOA) in Denver built an environmentally friendly concept house for the project in 2014 that holds up to six guests a night. Decks, solar panels and motorized windows have all needed repair.

In 2025, two New Mexico lawmakers introduced a bill that would have funded a feasibility study for the state’s acquisition of “Star Axis.” State Senator Pat Woods, one of HB 37’s sponsors, wrote in an email that safety was an issue. He pointed out that a “higher than normal” staircase was meant to be traversed in the dark. “We explained to the committee chair that there was liability but it was a truly unique sight.” The committee chair declined to hear the bill.

Construction Stories

The remnants of construction line the road up the mesa. There’s a shipping container used as a tool shed, with a small cement mixer outside; farther up is a squat yellow bulldozer with plants sprouting from the dirt in its scoop.

Ross assured me the bulldozer was in perfect working condition. It’s military surplus, built for an invasion. A Caterpillar dealer in town sold it to him for its scrap value, he said, because it was so ugly.

One reason “Star Axis” took so long is that Ross designed it himself. He has had help, of course — including on the finer points of engineering and astronomy — and he’s made drawings, but the details seem to live in his head. He doesn’t need permits, O’Bryan told me, because “Star Axis” is technically a sculpture, not a building.

Every summer for 50 years, Ross has journeyed to New Mexico, hired local laborers and gotten to work. The first task was to dynamite a cone and tunnel from the mesa. Boulders flew into the pasture, Ross said, and when the dust cleared, he found the dynamite schematic had come to rest on top of one, with a small stone keeping it in place. “I thought, I’ve got to say yes to that.” He collaged the schematic into a drawing.

Ross showed me up a narrow spiral staircase in the Hour Chamber in the fore of the pyramid. X’s on the wall marked where a railing will go. From inside, it takes a star one hour to cross the triangular doorway. The walls here are as thick as 12 feet.

The stone slabs — mostly pink granite donated by a Texas company — are lifted into place with a crane. The middle is filled in with rocks and concrete. Thick steel rods run every three feet.

Ross got lucky: The remote site is barely within range of the nearest concrete batch plant. Any farther and the concrete would harden before it arrived. Ross estimates “Star Axis” contains around 120 trucks’ worth.

“When we were working on the walls up around the big excavation,” Ross said, “guys were on scaffolds about 10 feet below the top working on the stonework. There’s one big old longhorn who liked to come up in the morning after everybody was working. He’d sneak up to the edge and stick his head over the side and scare everybody along the scaffold. You’d just see these horns coming at you. He thought that was so much fun.”

A Rendezvous with Polaris

The way Ross tells it, steadily but surely, he was pulled to Polaris. Born in Philadelphia, Ross was studying math at Berkeley in 1960 when he took a sculpture class. His math grades plummeted: Art was his calling. He finished an M.A. in sculpture in 1962.

He made sets for the Judson Dance Theater and dabbled in performance, including a happening where he, fully clothed, and a woman, nude, were bound together with plastic wrap. His mathematically informed lattice sculptures from that decade resemble twisted CD towers in the Minimalist idiom of Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt.

Then, he said, he saw in a dream the plans for a prism. He cleared out his studio and devoted himself to light. From the prisms, Ross grew interested in the Egyptian pyramids.

He was taken with speculation that the Great Pyramid was once painted with the colors of the spectrum. He discovered that the entrance to the Great Pyramid was oriented toward Thuban, the north star in the age of pharaohs, 4,500 years ago. That led him to precession. In 1971, he drew the first plans for “Star Axis.”

On the afternoon I arrived, O’Bryan oriented me to the site. When we reached the viewing chamber at the top of the stairs, her husband was waiting on an angled bench built into the walls. I took a seat on another “You’re leaning against the angle of the sun on the equinox,” O’Bryan said. It was pretty comfortable. Ross started humming. The low tone reverberated around the hard, sharp room.

In the light of day, “Star Axis” appears homemade, even humble. The masonry reflects the ad hoc way the sculpture has come together, season by season, with successive generations of workers from a nearby town. Ross mocked up many of the chambers on site at full scale, with lumber, so he could feel how the angles affect the body.

But “Star Axis” is a precisely engineered instrument. Woodruff Sullivan, the astronomer who, along with Mallory Thorp, helped match each stair to a point in the precession cycle, vouched for Ross’s math. “If it was not important, and especially if it was wrong, I would not be interested in collaborating.”

On the summer solstice, the tip of the pyramid’s shadow traces the near edge of the bowtie-shaped “Shadow Field.” On the winter solstice it follows the opposite side. “Every tree, every pole, every building also draws this shape,” Ross pointed out. “But here you can see it.”

While Ross’s attention to detail is often stunning, he’s more interested in conveying a bodily impression of cosmic time. My encounter was certainly more esoteric than scientific.

Around 10 p.m., the waxing crescent moon cast shadows on the mesa; the shade of the solar pyramid jutted into the crushed white caliche at its base.

By 1 a.m., the moon had set and the stars asserted themselves; the Milky Way ribboned overhead.

A path curls southwest down the side of the mesa to the tunnel entrance. Two sphinx-like sandstone and concrete buttresses gathered me into the structure, through a triangular doorway 47 degrees at its apex

As I climbed the steps through the mesa and into the pyramid, the window at the top of the staircase appeared to expand. I felt drawn up the tunnel, slowly, toward the stars. The wind outside sounded like ocean surf, evoking visions of mariners with their sextants.

I didn’t see the crisp coin of night sky depicted in photos of the piece. The tunnel edges looked webby and murky. But the human eye is not a camera. Ross also pointed out that the staircase is calibrated to someone of average height, which I am not.

I’m not sure I traveled through time, beyond the normal rate. But I felt focused and present. Rather than leave my body behind, I felt grounded within the epochal cycles of the stars, and the 50-year arc of one man’s stellar devotion.

Sunrise on the year’s longest day began as an orange gash over a long purple mesa. The darkness soaked back into the desert. For a few seconds, the east face of the pyramid glowed tangerine. On the other side of the mesa, two yellow bulldozers and a crane sunk into the dirt, their foam seats eaten away. These machines helped build Ross’s sculpture; this summer, one item on his punch list is to sell them.

A long-exposure photograph from the base of the staircase shows the circular paths of the stars as the Earth rotates around its celestial axis.

FULL ARTICLE:

Ray Exworth spent six decades creating one of Britain’s most extraordinary bodies of sculpture – and almost nobody has seen it. Hidden inside a labyrinth of sheds on a remote Cornish smallholding, his vast, obsessive constructions have remained locked away from the world, visited only by a fortunate few. Even his wife Susie, 92, was largely kept out. “I could not visit without an invitation!” she recalls.

Exworth, who died in 2015 aged 84, had just one major exhibition in his lifetime, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1975. Since then, the man who might belong among Britain’s most notable artists has disappeared almost entirely. His works – sprawling, intricate and wildly ambitious, assembled from an array of salvaged materials – have remained exactly where he left them: filling seven studio sheds and a scattering of shipping containers, unseen.

A new book by photographer Jem Southam, Ray’s Sheds, provides unprecedented access to Exworth’s stunning work for the first time. Southam believes only 20 people have seen inside Ray’s sheds. His book is not only a detailed document of a exceptional art practice that may never otherwise see the light of day, but an intriguing inquiry into what it means to be an artist – and what the purpose of art is – when it is never publicly seen.

Exworth was born in 1930 in Ipswich, the eldest of five sons. His father, Southam tells me, was a highly skilled but not well paid sandcaster, who would also make toys for his sons during the war. “Ray got his marvel at the skill and craft of making things from his father,” Southam says.

The family’s home was hit in a bombing raid and burned down in 1941; then their next home was also bombed. These traumatic wartime experiences left a mark on Exworth – his sculptures return again and again to childhood memories and objects: clowns, dolls, and even the garden at the family home his father rebuilt from scratch once they were able to return. Exworth made an exact one-to-one replica of the garden from memory, a 60ft by 30ft floor-based sculpture complete with forks, spades, lettuces, flowering roses and bamboo beanpoles – all made of beaten lead. The work, one of three similarly massive lead pieces by Exworth, doesn’t appear in Southam’s new book – it’s so huge that it’s stored away in a container on the smallholding.

Southam first met Exworth in the 1980s. One day Southam received a phone call from the artist inviting him to come and take photographs of his work. “I don’t know how he had heard about me, but I went slightly reluctantly to his tiny cottage. He took me through the tangled garden to the first shed – and as soon as the door slid open and I looked inside, like anyone else who has been there, my jaw dropped. What was inside was astonishing. I knew I was in the presence of a remarkable artist.”

The first shed Southam encountered was known as the circus shed – a space vividly depicted in Southam’s photographs in the book, a sculptural environment (Exworth never referred to them as “installations”) stacked and piled from floor to ceiling with pieces crafted from whatever Exworth could get his hands on – plaster armatures, layered with newspaper and rags, metal, wood, textiles, glass, string and wax, all refined and finessed with ingenuity and skill. Full-size ringmasters, performers, horses, magicians – and a juggler with a frozen cascade of balls in the air are among the myriad figures in the wonderland. For the juggler’s balls, Exworth repurposed steel nails from wooden builders’ pallets, hammering them out and welding them together to create an arch, a painstaking problem-solving process that would have taken months. Exworth worked on The Circus six days a week for an entire decade.

Exworth got the idea, Southam says, while working at the Meteorological Office (as part of his national service in the RAF), when he would pass through Piccadilly Circus regularly, at day and night. “Somehow that morphed into a real circus – wherever he started from, his imagination took over.”

Even Susie remembers being “awestruck by his work” the first time she entered the sheds, several years after Exworth started working in them. “I could not equate the man I knew in our daily life with the man he became when he entered the shed to work.” The photographs capture the low lighting and depth of the space, an unprecedented exploration of the endless mountains of works, some still in progress, partially covered in sheets.

Across the seven sheds, each with their own atmosphere and theme, are life size, lifelike figures and animals, as well as miniatures, tableaux of found objects, ladders, old papers, boxes, buckets, complex assemblages of forms and materials, some indecipherable and unfinished. The workshop shed shows the scale and breadth of Exworth’s technical acuity and thinking – everything from drills, jigsaws, sanders and glass cutters to grinders, putty and tiny paintbrushes.

"He was a genuine artist. To him, making work was more rewarding than presenting it"

Southam initially made 12 exposures on a plate camera for Exworth, for a grant application. The two became friends – but for the next 30 years, “no matter how much I tried, he would never let me in the sheds with a camera again”.

It was only after Exworth died that Southam approached Susie to ask if he could make a photographic record of the work in the sheds, as a way of preserving it. The book took 10 years to make – Southam first shot everything he could on a digital camera, which allowed him to squeeze into the tight corners of the packed sheds, “but I was dissatisfied with the pictures because they didn’t really show what it felt like to be inside these spaces, surrounded by this work”. He returned with a huge, 8x10 Victorian box-like camera and tripod, “with an extremely wide, almost freakish lens” that allowed him to capture the spaces in a more encompassing way.

Southam’s book includes around 60 pictures, as well as accounts of his personal experiences with Ray and in his sheds. There are many more works Southam couldn’t photograph or hasn’t included – such as 700 charcoal drawings Exworth made of the pair of blackbirds that visited the couple’s backdoor every day.

David Heseltine was Exworth’s long-term friend and former colleague at Falmouth School of Art – where Exworth was head of sculpture from 1959 to 1974. Heseltine remembers him as “well read and his art historical knowledge exhaustive. He found genius and inspiration in Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein, although his creative vision ran counter to the work of many of his contemporaries, who he thought lacked compassion.”

When Exworth eventually quit teaching to devote himself entirely to his practice, he seems to have had few ambitions beyond quietly tinkering away on his own in his sheds, working on his wild visions – that perhaps transported him back to happier times.

“He was reclusive and, although described as irascible to the Arts Council purchasing committee, he was sensitive, compassionate and passionately interested in people and all aspects of life,” Heseltine says. “He had absolute certainty about his vision, but an amazing humility about what it achieved.”

Ray’s Sheds, Heseltine adds, “is of course much more than an archival record and hugely important to Ray’s legacy. Given that the sculptures are almost immovable and that Ray was more concerned about making than promoting them, the book will be vital in introducing Ray’s work to a much wider audience, in acknowledging his importance, his contribution to 20th-century British art and establishing his rightful status as one of the truly original sculptors of our time.”

The book is also about the unique, unwavering dedication of an artist solely to his craft without pretension. “For me, he was a really genuine artist – solving problems about how to make things. He was engaged in the activity of making, and found that far more rewarding than presenting it. Ray was just engrossed every day in how to move forward and make something.”

As for Susie, she still goes into the sheds frequently – because, she says, “there is a strong feeling of Ray’s presence in each one”.

FULL ARTICE

By Susan Lahey

When people talk about consciousness, or the mind, it’s always a bit nebulous. Whether we create consciousness in our brains as a function of our neurons firing, or consciousness exists independently of us, there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation for where it comes from or where it lives. However, new research on the physics, anatomy, and geometry of consciousness has begun to reveal its possible form.

In other words, we may soon be able to identify a true architecture of consciousness.

The new work builds upon a theory Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D., first posited in the 1990s: the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR). Broadly, it claims that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells.

Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).

Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.

Across the Universe

To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV program Closer To Truth that it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.

Other scientists had an easy way to discard this theory. Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only worked in very cold, controlled environments. Take quantum particles out of that environment and the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles. The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore, consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain, the thinking went. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the universe.

But then came discoveries in quantum biology. Turns out, living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled.

Photosynthesis, for example, allows a plant to store the energy from a photon, or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it can be stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get to the reaction center, it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment. In the end, the exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s carrying. In order to find the correct path before the particle’s energy is used up, scientists now say the exciton uses the quantum property of superposition to try all possible paths simultaneously.

New evidence suggests microtubules in our brains may be even better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One of the scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted an experiment with a computational model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. They were testing whether the energy transfer from light in the microtubule structure could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it indicated quantum coherence.

Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules. In a recent interview, Tuszynski reports that, across 22 independent experiments, the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. This is thousands of times longer than coherence would be expected to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this year.

Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.

Tuszynski notes that his team is not the only one sending light into microtubules. A team of professors at the University of Central Florida has been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those experiments, Tuszynski says, they observed re-emission of this light over hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical human response time to any sort of stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains. Shining the light into microtubules and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is a proxy for the stability of certain … postulated quantum states,” he says, “which is kind of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having coherent quantum superpositions that may be associated with mind or consciousness.” Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.

While this is a long way from proving the Orch OR theory, it’s significant and promising data. Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the boundaries, partnering with people like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra to explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to identify in the lab in their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes many scientists very uncomfortable.

Still, there are researchers exploring what the architecture of such a universal consciousness might look like. One of these ideas comes from the study of weather.

The Architecture of Universal Consciousness

Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical physicist at Oxford who specializes in chaos and climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes the laws of physics must be fundamentally geometric. The Invariant Set Theory is his explanation of how the quantum world works. Among other things, it suggests that quantum consciousness is the result of the universe operating in a particular fractal geometry “state space.”

That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a lane or route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that are also stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter of Palmer’s book, The Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our experience of free will—of having had the option to choose our lives, as well as our perception that there is a consciousness outside ourselves—is the result of awareness of other universes that share our state space. The idea starts with a special geometry called a Strange Attractor.

You may have heard of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a hurricane in another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more complex concept developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. Lorenz was trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a particular climate condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three differential equations that could be used to identify the “state space” of a particular weather system. For example, if you had a particular temperature, wind direction, and humidity level, what would happen next? He began to plot the trajectory of weather systems by plugging in different initial conditions into the equations.

He found that if initial conditions were different by even one one-hundredth of a percent, if the humidity was just a fraction higher, or the temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be wildly different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one direction, forming loops and spins, seemingly at random, while another creates completely different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started to plot them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating within the boundaries of a particular geometric shape known as a strange attractor. It was as if they were cars on a track: the cars might go in any number of directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and they stayed on the track. The track was the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.

Palmer believes that our universe may be just one trajectory, one car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor. When we imagine “what if …?” scenarios, we’re actually getting information about versions of ourselves in other universes who are also navigating the same strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track, he explains. This also accounts for our sense of consciousness, of free will, and of being connected with a greater universe.

“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in state space,” Palmer tells Popular Mechanics. If his ideas are correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a kind of holistic geometry for the universe.”

Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell us what consciousness is, but perhaps they tell us where consciousness lives—what kind of a structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal, disembodied concept. If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that somewhere is a complicated state space, we can find it. And that’s a start.

FULL ARTICLE:

Architecture serves as the timestamp of an era and the largest of ecological footprints.

Architect James Ramsey ’99 spoke at a talk for the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities on Nov. 10, 2022 at the Humanities Quadrangle. The talk showcased recent innovation in architecture through Ramsey’s work on the New York City Lowline and prompted conversation on the anthropocene and the current climate crisis.

“Someday everything we ever build will be gone,” Ramsey told the News. “Can we use architecture and design to sort of communicate impermanence? Or for that matter, communicate to someone viewing these pieces of art or installation the sense that things are transitory; [that we are] miniscule … in the face of deep geological time.”

Having studied both physics and architecture as a Yale undergraduate before ultimately deciding to major in the latter, James Ramsey has an eye for problem-solving and innovation. From commissioned modernist homes and art museums to the New York City Lowline and an upcoming elephant sanctuary in Kenya, Ramsey’s work covers a wide range.

During his time at Yale, Ramsey said he was particularly inspired by the design of the Beinecke Library. He pointed out another “cool architectural moment on campus,” a passageway on the side of Davenport College.

“You have this really subtle architectural transition from Gothic to … Georgian style,” Ramsey said. “And little by little as you walk through it, it’s almost like walking through a time machine.”

Ramsey says he was influenced by Shigeru Miyamoto — one of the game designers of Super Mario Bros. — as well as two of the professors he had during his time at Yale: Stanley Insler and Harvey Weiss.

“[Insler and Weiss] were able to take their experiences of hyperspecialization, but also … their broad knowledge about a great many fields and use those to draw disciplines and realizations together in a way that we’re able to … create these broadly applicable general comments about the world around us and … humanity,” Ramsey said.

The coexistence of hyperspecialization and broad applicability can be seen throughout Ramsey’s projects. While the fundamental techniques of architecture are very precise, they’re fluid in the sense that they transfer to a variety of problems.

The Lowline — an underground park being built in the Lower East Side of New York City — utilizes the design of a Cassegrain telescope to relocate solar energy by transporting it underground. This technology can then be used to grow subterranean vegetation.

“I thought the incorporation of different timescales; human, geolical, cosmological was really interesting,” Anna Lenaker, ENV ’24 told the News. “And I really enjoy thinking about nature as something that consumes human structures.”

During the question and answer portion of the talk, many questions pertained to the potential for the Lowline technology to make advancements in counteracting climate change.

Charnice Hoegnifioh ’24 had thoughts on how such technology could also contribute to concerns regarding food security.

“Seeing how a major part of … his experimentation was testing out … different species of plants, it made me wonder if … there could be other applications of redirecting [concentrated] sunlight from outside to create underground or subterranean … farms and agricultural centers that can be used to really bolster the world’s food supply,” Hoegnifioh said.

Ramsey’s experience and expertise in seemingly disparate disciplines — physics and architecture — epitomizes the mission of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities as stated on their website: “To foster communication, mutual understanding, collaborative research and teaching among diverse scientific and humanistic disciplines.”

“It’s important to hold on to and maintain all of your kooky, disparate interests and curiosities that you have and not think of them in a totally pragmatic way,” Ramsey says, “The more you can grow your base of knowledge and your understanding of disparate fields, the broader the palette is that you can then bring into solve problems … in any field — design or otherwise.”

FULL LETTER:

To world leaders:

We are artists, musicians, actors, performers, poets, filmmakers, dancers, writers, and creators. We are storytellers and dreamers. We are messengers of emotion and amplifiers of hope. And we are adding our voices - loud, clear, unrelenting - to the global call for a Fossil Fuel Treaty.

Because our world - our home and our muse - is on fire. From soaring temperatures to flooded cities, from poisoned air to displaced communities, the climate crisis is not a distant warning. It is a present catastrophe.

The science is clear: fossil fuel production lies at the heart of these cascading crises. Phasing out coal, oil and gas production fast and fairly is the only way to save ourselves from this destruction.

Oil, gas and coal are not just energy sources. When extracted from the ground, where they belong, they become weapons of mass destruction, destabilizing our climate, endangering our lives, and silencing entire cultures. They are suffocating the very world that inspires our art. And yet, governments continue to fund them, expand them, and delay the bold action we so desperately need.

We say: no more fossil fueled disasters. We cannot create against a backdrop of destruction. We cannot just perform while the planet burns. We refuse to let beauty fade in the name of profit. We call for a world where music can be played under open skies, where paintings are not washed away by floods, where stages, galleries and studios are filled with life, not smoke, not sorrow, not fear.

The Fossil Fuel Treaty offers a path forward; a bold, coordinated global plan to end fossil fuel expansion, phase out existing production in an equitable manner, and invest in a just and sustainable future. This is not an abstract demand. It is a lifeline to safeguard our planet as well as our ability to shape it, to sing it, and to reinvent it with our hands, voices and souls. We commend the growing bloc of governments leading this bold effort, and call on other world leaders to join them.

We, as artists from diverse disciplines and regions, are united by a shared purpose: to protect the beauty, the life and the love that inspire our work. Just as our art is rooted in creativity and expression, our response to the climate crisis must be grounded in science, justice, and on the urgent need to take action.

So we call on every artist - whether you paint murals or create melodies, write novels or scripts, perform on stage or in the streets - to use your voice, your art, and your platform to shake the world awake by joining the call for a Fossil Fuel treaty. A fossil-free world powered by sun, wind, justice and collective will is a world where art can flourish, where cultures can thrive, and where we can keep singing, dancing, and dreaming freely together.

We believe in a world where the only thing burning is passion. Where the only thing spilling is love. Where the only thing rising is the chorus of those bold enough to demand better.

This is a call to save humanity and the stories we have yet to tell. Let’s make history, not just through our canvases or lyrics, but through our collective power.

FULL ARTICLE:

By Paul Hockenos

Home and commercial solar arrays provide nearly a fifth of Australia’s electricity generation, with panels atop one in every three homes. To extend those panels’ usefulness, owners are increasingly buying home batteries not only to store their power for later use, but to sell electrons to the grid at times of high demand. The arrangement enables grid operators to more effectively manage the mismatch between midday solar generation and real-time consumer demand, a process known as balancing. It also lowers market energy prices because utilities that draw on batteries can avoid building expensive new power plants and power lines.

Australia laid the groundwork for this transformation last year by offering homeowners and small businesses a 30 percent discount on residential batteries, which resulted in 430,000 battery installations in less than a year, three times more than expected. A recent expansion of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program is expected to boost the number of installations to more than 2 million by 2030. If they agree to install a smart meter, battery owners can sell energy to the grid and put cash in their pockets: between $80 and $1,600 a year, depending on how the program is structured.

In a dozen other countries, mostly in Europe and North America, grid operators are writing checks to homeowners for the right to lease their batteries. “We’re moving toward a world where homes don’t just consume energy — they store it, optimize it, and contribute back to the grid,” says Joe Frodsham of the Texas-based energy storage manufacturer Renon Power. A critical mass of home batteries scattered across a region and networked together through so-called virtual power plants, or VPPs, he says, marks “the shift from energy storage as backup to energy storage as an active grid asset.”

Last year, the amount of U.S. home battery capacity enlisted in virtual power plants grew by 153 percent. Unlike a net metering system, which sends unused energy from rooftop solar panels directly into the grid in return for an energy credit, a VPP requires a storage system and software that tells the battery to send energy to the grid when it needs more power, like on a hot summer day. Compensation for tapping a homeowner’s battery is paid by either a local utility or a VPP program, of which there are now more than 500 in the U.S. and thousands in Europe.

This rapid expansion of home batteries and advanced software that aggregates thousands of decentralized energy sources is “transforming not only the way electricity is generated, but also how it is traded, delivered, and consumed,” concludes a 2022 International Energy Agency report. These assets, the report said, “can provide valuable services to the grid when incentivized with appropriate technologies, policies, and regulations.”

Currently, fewer than 10 percent of Australian homeowners who have solar arrays have signed contracts with energy providers. But experts believe the model has immense potential to expand, thanks to a global “battery revolution” that has, in a matter of years, seen battery prices plummet and their storage capacity shoot up even as their size has shrunk. Today, a 10 kilowatt-hour unit — which can simultaneously run a few household appliances and some lighting and electronics for 24 hours — can snugly fit under a staircase or into a garage corner. Between 2010 and 2020, battery density increased by more than 700 percent, and between 2010 and 2023, the price of lithium-ion batteries plunged from about $1,400 per kilowatt-hour to less than $140 per kilowatt-hour — one of the fastest cost declines of any energy technology in history.

Climate experts hope that grids can be cheaply and effectively balanced by hundreds of thousands of batteries distributed across cities, suburbs, and rural areas — some in electric vehicles, others on the walls of garages or cellars, and some in utility-scale storage parks, which still provide the lion’s share of solar-energy storage everywhere in the world. Ideally, aggregating the capacity of decentralized batteries — whether they are charged by solar panels or directly through the grid during off-peak hours — will replace dirty gas peaker plants.

Large battery projects, says a May report from the energy think tank Ember, “are increasingly cost-competitive and faster to build than new gas power plants.” And their carbon footprint is about 87 percent smaller than an average-size gas peaker. Home batteries offer similar advantages. When home battery systems are programmed to charge during times of high renewable output and discharge during peak grid demand, studies show they can reduce average household emissions by 2.2 to 6.4 percent.

Last year, the amount of U.S. home battery capacity enlisted in virtual power plants grew by 153 percent.

Programs in Puerto Rico and California that paid homeowners for their stored energy were a “key driver of the growth,” according to policy and research analyst Madeline Turner of San Diego-based Ohm Analytics. California’s VPP program, according to Canary Media, “has shown that its fleet of home batteries can be relied on much like a traditional power plant.” During a two-hour test last July, roughly 100,000 home batteries delivered about 539 megawatts of energy — more than the output of a large gas peaker plant.

In the U.S., an installed 10 kilowatt-hour system costs roughly $8,000 to $13,000. A 30-percent federal clean energy credit ended in 2025, although customers can still benefit until 2027 from tax incentives by leasing a battery system from a commercial solar or battery company. California offers an additional baseline rebate of around $150 per kilowatt-hour.

In Puerto Rico, which has a particularly rickety power grid, 70,000 home batteries are helping to reduce the risk of blackouts.

Residential storage markets function differently from country to country, and in the U.S. from state to state, as do their payment schemes. In Germany this spring, Octopus Energy’s PowerDrive bundle began providing customers with a smart meter and an EV charger that enables electricity to flow in two directions, allowing it to manage its customers’ EV charging in exchange for up to 10,000 free miles of driving, plus an annual bonus of up to $409 if the EV is plugged in, at home, for 300 or more hours. Octopus makes money selling the power stored in customers’ EVs when demand peaks and prices spike. The nation’s EV ownership rate is just under 3 percent, though, so the total impact of vehicle-to-grid technology is quite small.

Since 2022, the U.K. has had a system that pays homeowners for reducing demand when the grid is stressed — whether by high demand or a lack of wind, which provides about 30 percent of the U.K.’s total electricity generation. Battery owners have the advantage of being able to rely on their batteries during these periods. In Puerto Rico, which has a particularly rickety power grid, some 70,000 home batteries are helping to reduce the risk of blackouts, according to the grid operator.

Germany’s largest VPP is Statkraft, whose software links a multitude of decentralized energy resources including a few large fossil-fueled power plants, biogas and hydroelectric plants, thousands of solar and wind farms, and thousands more residential and commercial batteries. It markets its tidy bundles of energy on short-term European power exchanges.

With the growing demand for power, and long waits for grid connections, utilities are prepared to pay storage owners for the right to lease their batteries. But because the demand for and price of energy on a macro scale is different than the needs of a single household, most VPPs won’t optimize price fluctuations to benefit a household budget. Rather, they will optimize those fluctuations to benefit their own business model. A homeowner may prefer to charge their battery overnight, when the price of power drops, and discharge it in the late afternoon, when prices surge. But a VPP will charge and discharge the battery as needed to balance the grid — even if prices are unfavorable to the homeowner.

The primary drawbacks of joining a VPP, says Toby Couture of E3 Analytics, a Berlin-based energy think tank, are the household’s loss of control over when and how much power a third party can call upon (though most plans allow battery owners to set a reserve level), uncertain financial returns, and some additional wear and tear on the battery from extra cycling. A 2025 study found that EVs enrolled in a VPP program degraded 9 to 14 percent faster over a 10-year period. Another drawback is the high purchase price of home batteries, although some countries and several U.S. states offer subsidies.

Australia’s policies, which have reduced regulatory hurdles and challenges to integrating residential power, have made it the frontrunner in bidirectional storage, and similar policies in other countries could propel the clean energy transition forward. Where two-way battery storage makes financial sense to grid operators and battery owners, whether large or small, virtual power plants will likely expand in places where regulatory conditions allow, experts say. This is the logic of a battery revolution that is just beginning to transform our electricity markets.