Jean E Burns

Jean E. Burns
Born	1934
Residence	San Leandro, CA, United States
Nationality	USA
Known for	thermodynamics, entropy, zero point energy, time, consciousness, paranormal, spirituality
Scientific career
Fields	Physicist

Jean E. Burns (born 1934) is an American physicist and consciousness researcher based in San Leandro, California, where she works under the name Consciousness Research. Her work centers on the relationship between consciousness, free will and the paranormal on the one hand and presently known physical laws on the other, together with questions about thermodynamics and the nature of entropy. She is an associate editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Biography

Burns holds a PhD and is a physicist by training. She has spent much of her career as an independent researcher exploring how mental phenomena might relate to physical law, publishing numerous papers in the fields of consciousness studies and parapsychology. She serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and in 2003 she co-edited, with James E. Alcock and Anthony Freeman, the collection Psi Wars: Getting to Grips with the Paranormal (Imprint Academic), which also appeared as a special double issue of that journal.

Scientific contributions

Burns's research spans three main areas: the nature of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics; consciousness and free will in relation to known physical laws; and parapsychology, or the relationship of psi phenomena to known physical laws.

In thermodynamics, Burns has argued that the increase of entropy in gases and liquids can be accounted for by the randomizing effect of vacuum radiation on the momentum distribution of molecules over a broad range of temperatures and pressures. On this view, entropy increase depends on a physical mechanism rather than being an absolute requirement, which she suggests would explain reports that some quantum systems, such as those at very low temperature, do not appear to follow the second law.

In the study of consciousness, Burns has reviewed a range of models that relate consciousness to physical laws. Examining the possibility of free will regarded as a physical effect produced by non-physical means, she has argued that every such model would require a radical extension of presently known physical laws to account for its action. She has also proposed that mental action might operate not only at the conscious level to produce free will but also at the unconscious level, selecting between brain programs that supply the details of physical actions.

Burns has likewise reviewed psi phenomena in relation to known physical laws, concluding that a radical extension of those laws would be needed to explain them.

To address these questions she proposed a model in which mental action is produced by the ordering of otherwise random quantum fluctuations. In this model the small effect of quantum fluctuations on a molecule's momentum is magnified when molecules interact at the end of a mean free path, allowing the direction of travel of a water molecule in the brain's intercellular medium to be changed. By her estimate, the ordering of roughly 4,000 molecules would suffice to open enough ion gates to initiate a physical action. Applying the same model to psychokinesis (PK), she calculated that about 10,000 ordered molecules would be needed to produce a detectable response in a small, sensitive microphone, and that the impact of about 2×10⁵ ordered molecules could account for previously reported PK deviations of a tumbling cube. She has proposed the microphone prediction as an experimental test of the PK portion of the model.

Abstracts

• 2006 - "The Arrow of Time and the Action of the Mind at the Molecular level" (Read in full)
• 2002 - "The Effect of Ordered Air Molecules on a Tumbling Cube" (Read in full)
• 2002 - "Quantum Fluctuations and the Action of the Mind" (Read in full)
• 2002 - "Tumbling Cube and the Action of the Mind" (Read in full)
• 2002 - "Vacuum Radiation, Entropy and the Arrow of time, Momentum" (Read in full)
• 1999 - "Volition and Physical Laws" (Read in full)

External links

• Jean E. Burns profile at the Parapsychological Association