Stephen Goodfellow
Stephen Goodfellow | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 31, 1953 Southampton, England |
| Residence | San Miguel de Allende, Mexico |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Hull Regional College of Art; Wayne State University |
| Known for | Gravity |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Art, Plasma physics, Cosmology |
Stephen Goodfellow (born 31 August 1953) is a British-born artist, muralist and independent researcher, long resident in the United States, who is known both for his painting and for a series of self-published papers proposing alternative interpretations of gravity, plasma physics and cosmology. His best-known scientific essay, Can Gravity be Induced?, argues that gravitational attraction can arise from plasma configurations rather than from mass alone.
Biography
Goodfellow was born on 31 August 1953 in Southampton, England, and spent portions of his childhood in Nigeria and Denmark before settling in the United States. He completed a foundation course at East Ham Technical College in London (1969) and received a Diploma in Art and Design from Hull Regional College of Art in north-east England in 1974. He subsequently earned M.A. and M.F.A. degrees at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan (1977), concentrating on painting and printmaking.
For much of his career Goodfellow was based in the Detroit area, living for more than three decades in Highland Park, Michigan, and becoming an active figure in the city's Cass Corridor art scene. He later lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan (2008–2011) before relocating to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Work
As a visual artist, Goodfellow is associated with painting techniques he termed "Primary Micropointillism," in which images are built up from small spatters of yellow, red and blue, and a later large-scale variant he called "Macropointillism." His paintings have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Michigan and abroad, and works including Parallel Universe entered the permanent twentieth-century collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts. He also taught at the College for Creative Studies (1998–2008), led workshops at Wayne County Community College, and in 1996 helped develop one of the first online collection databases for a major United States art museum at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Alongside his art, Goodfellow has written a number of independently published essays on physics and cosmology. His 1979 paper Can Gravity be Induced?, which he placed online via CompuServe in 1987, proposes that gravitational attraction can be produced by plasma in a magnetically unified state rather than by mass in the conventional sense. In this account, like-charged particles in superheated plasma are driven apart by magnetic forces, leaving regions of "non-space" or absolute vacuum that he suggests induce gravitational attraction. On this basis he offers alternative models of stellar structure and solar energy production, emphasizing the dominance of electromagnetic forces over gravity in plasma environments. Related writings address topics such as cosmic redshift, black holes, dark matter and the solar cycle. These ideas are outside the scientific mainstream and are presented as independent hypotheses.