Conundra Poem by Denis Mair

You can read Greg Matloff's posts about the possible sentience of stars on the Centauri Dreams blog. Matloff also conjectures that the dark energy which increases the cosmic expansion rate may belong to a cosmos-wide field of proto-consciousness.(Wiki) In the heliocentric Hipparchian and Ptolemaic systems of astronomy, the epicycle (meaning a circle moving on another circle) was a geometric model used to explain the variations in speed and direction of the apparent motion of the planets. Epicycles worked... because any smooth curve can be approximated with a sufficient number of epicycles. However, they fell out of favour with the discovery [after Copernicus] that planetary motions were largely elliptical from a heliocentric frame of reference, which led to the discovery that gravity obeying a simple inverse square law could better explain all planetary motions. When Copernicus transformed Earth-based observations to heliocentric coordinates, he was confronted with an entirely new problem. The Sun-centered positions displayed a cyclical motion with respect to time but without retrograde loops in the case of the outer planets. In principle, the heliocentric motion was simpler but with new subtleties due to the yet-to-be-discovered elliptical shape of the orbits. Another complication was caused by a problem that Copernicus never solved: correctly accounting for the motion of the Earth in the coordinate transformation [i.e., wobbling]. In keeping with past practice, Copernicus used the deferent/epicycle model in his theory but his epicycles were small and were called 'epicyclets'.(Wiki)