Dust: What the Bleep Do We Know?

Dust is described by Mary Malone as being "shadow particles" that are conscious. In the documentary What the Bleep Do We Know?, a study was conducted about some similar particles. As most discoveries are, the amazing results were found by accident. The scientists were trying to test the particles to see if they behaved in a linear or wave-like fashion. There was some confusion, and they needed to watch the particles in motion, rather than just after the fact, and particles behaved differently merely from being observed! They were conscious particles, and would change their direction and pattern because they were being watched/thought about. Even the presence of a camera was enough to change their movement. (To learn more about this study, you can rent the movie or go to its website.) This is immediately what I thought of when I learned more about the scientific properties of it from Mary Malone, as it seems to fit the description, although we wouldn't necessarily know if love and experience would also change the pattern. :-) Interestingly enough, Pullman wrote His Dark Materials before this study's results were published in 2003.

These conscious particles seem to be the same as those in His Dark Materials. Mary realizes that the Dust is conscious and even emotional. "They were conscious! The shadow particles knew what were happening and were sorrowful. And she herself was partly shadow matter. Part of her was subject to this tide that was moving through the cosmos. And so were the mulefa, and so were human beings in every world, and every kind of conscious creature, wherever they were" (page 817). Like the particles in the study, they have a consciousness, and that consciousness is connected in everything. Nothing is completely isolated or unrelated or even spontaneous; even the Dust is a product of consciousness, and are therefore conscious themselves. This should be good news in a world of increasing technology and atheists, who feel that they are not connected with the world if there is no God, like Mary Malone. When she realized that character of the Dust, she became "suffused with a deep, slow ectasy at being one with her body and the earth and everything that was matter" (page 817).