Science on one side, woo-woo on the other. Is that how this works?
The science mind noticing woo-woo words tends to feel vaguely sorry for the woo-woo mind.
Just what are those woo-woo folks up to? “Energy” and “law of attraction” and “vibration” and “manifesting”? Seems exotic. Maybe extravagant. Maybe it’s just some positive thinking which is fine if you like that stuff. Harmless but ineffective.
Such assessments of woo-woo world are performed most easily from inside the confines of old-fashioned Newtonian physics. Let’s say this a few different ways.
We all know old Newt, the billiards-ball bodies-in-motion version of reality. We learned this in grade school. Fine as far as it goes. It was very helpful for a while, but I would say that it’s best understood now as a side hustle.
Old Newtonian physics has used its momentum to drift into this century as an entrenched cosmology that doesn’t admit it’s a cosmology, let alone entrenched. That’s kinda the problem.
We like to dress old Newt up with a bit of quark-and-quanta fashion but since none of us regular people have really understood quantum physics for the last century this just looks like someone wearing a Hawaiian shirt in a snowstorm. Awkward.
Old Newt, in other words, involves pretending that our default worldview isn’t old Newt.
Old Newt is a two-step dance maneuver: 1) being old Newt and 2) pretending we’re not old Newt.
The dance is looking a little creaky, a little old timey.
The bodies-in-motion worldview of old Newt, lately the old one-two, takes a lickin but keeps on tickin. Well, why wouldn’t it? It had three, four centuries to pick up speed and once it was up to speed it was itself a body in motion. One century of a different momentum hasn’t entirely stopped three or four centuries of the old momentum.
It’s all going to be fine. We don’t have to be all on one side or the other. There are plenty of woo-woo experiments that can be performed from inside old Newt. Thought experiments, feeling experiments, all of it inside science, even inside old Newt science. That’s what we’ll be talking about soon.
It’s gotta be fun and uplifting, because if there’s one thing that’s essential to all manner of woo-woo these days, it’s that the vibe matters.