Attila Grandpierre, Konkoly Observatory

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The Hungarian astrophysicist Grandpierre has postulated that the Sun is a lifelike system.

As he notes in a recent monograph:

"The fellow systems of the Sun, the Earth (e.g. Vernadsky, 1926; Lovelock, 1995), the Galaxy (Gribbin, 1993) and the Universe (Elgin, 2001) were already considered as living systems/organisms. Recently, Grimm (2003) concluded that Gaia System is an authentic living system. The idea that a galaxy is a self-organized system - more an ecology than a nonliving clump of stars and gas - has become common among astronomers and physicists who study galaxies (Smolin, 1997). Some regards galaxies as literally alive: "I have argued that our Galaxy is alive - literally alive, in the full biological meaning of the term…The striking feature of the way in which spiral galaxies maintain a steady state, far from equilibrium…it has been produced by a process of evolution and competition" (Gribbin, 1993, 214)."

Examples of natural self-organizing complex systems are phase transitions like glaciation, magnetism, crystallization, pattern formation of snowflakes (Gleick, 310), avalanches of sandpiles (Bak, 1996), Benard-cells of convective flows, the generation of laser light (Haken, 2000), earthquakes in the mantle of the Earth.

Grandpierre thinks the universal principles informing the Universe are: physical laws (atomic and subatomic matter in its motions and relations, particularly encompassing the insights of QM), biological laws (the "life principle"; Ervin Bauer is his great inspiration here), and noetic laws (consciousness, reason).

If Gaia is a living organism, can be also apply the same logic to the Sun?