A local Reiki practitioner claims on his website that his clients receive “spiritual universal energy” during therapy sessions. In fact, one of his published testimonials is from a client who claims this practitioner is able to “connect.” [her] I felt an almost instantaneous supply of energy, moving from chakra to chakra, and “all parts connected.”
To explain why I dismiss claims about “spiritual, universal energy” I feel I need to define energy correctly, but achieving that is like catching water in your fist. It’s very similar to trying. It’s very slippery and you’ll make a mess.
Physicists are nature’s accountants
I learned about energy in school, but in order to write this piece, I decided to look for textbooks, videos, and articles that clearly explain what energy actually is from a scientific perspective. Many of the definitions felt like a cop-out, such as the ability to do work and the fact that the latter is the movement of an object against an opposing force. It’s accurate, but feels like a magic trick. What is this “ability” to do the job? What does it look like? What kind of smell does it have?
I don’t think there is a truly satisfactory definition of energy in the world. If there is, I haven’t found it. The best summary I heard was from the Science Asylum YouTube channel. Energy is a strange and abstract property of the universe. It’s not a flash of light, it’s not a mysterious heat, it’s not a series of little balls filled with cosmic juices.
It’s a number.
And in a closed system like our universe, that number can be tracked by an accountant. Imagine having $1,000,000 in the bank (isn’t that a good thing?) and never receiving or spending a penny more. But we put part of it into a special account called “kinetic energy” (associated with movement) and the rest into another account called “potential energy” (associated with potential for movement) can do. You can keep moving money between these two accounts, but it will always add up to 1 million. That’s what energy is. In a closed system, energy is never created, never destroyed, only transferred or transformed.
The Rube Goldberg Machine of Our Body
Some forms of energy are easier to visualize than others. You can imagine that the energy of the falling apple comes from the gravitational field around the Earth. The apple falls because the earth’s gravity pulls it toward the ground. But what happens to the food energy in that apple? Where does fruit provide the sustaining energy our bodies need?
Apples contain molecules known as sugars. In our digestive tract, these sugars are broken down into the very simple glucose. We all know that glucose holds energy that we can use, but where in this ring of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen is it located?
Glucose is broken down into smaller molecules, and in the process (to simplify the interesting biochemistry considerably) two ATP molecules emerge.
These ATP molecules are the key. They each have three identical group tails called phosphates. The last phosphate is cut off and sent to bind to another molecule. It’s just energy. It is not the phosphate itself, but the transfer from one molecule to another that allows a series of chemical events to occur that gives us the ability to move and stay alive.
Can you really feel mystical energy?
Real energy, such as gravity or the energy contained in food, is studied by scientists to discover its properties and lead to predictions. But returning to the “Spiritual Universal Energy” of our local Reiki practitioners, the word “energy” can be chopped and appropriated. Many alternative medicine practitioners believe that a type of energy, also known as qi, prana, or universal energy, resides within our bodies and can be manipulated without any evidence of its existence. That doesn’t stop them from claiming they can feel it, unblock it, or find balance. However, there is no evidence that this form of energy exists or that its believers cannot even feel it.
Emily Rosa, a 9-year-old girl, worked with her parents and Dr. Stephen Barrett (who runs Quack Watch) to discover a mystical energy field that therapeutic touch practitioners claim was all around her in the late 1990s. We designed an experiment to test whether it is actually possible to detect . They said they could “re-pattern” the human body. Okay, Rosa said. Then you should be able to do it blindly. So each practitioner sat in front of a large screen with a cutout at the bottom, under which they could slide their hands. Rosa held her hand over the practitioner’s left or right hand. This practitioner felt the girl’s energy and had to say which hand was Rosa’s own. She repeated this several times with a total of 21 practitioners, and in the end, the results were as good as flipping a coin. They could not feel Rosa’s energy on her open hand, despite their claims.
Real energy exists all around us, and scientists can measure, harness, and manipulate potential and kinetic energy. But because of the slippery nature of energy, that it is a mathematical property of matter rather than a glowing sphere, and because of our intuition and wishful thinking, it is a concept that lends itself to pseudoscience. Attempting to manipulate this unscientific and mystical energy turns out to be a waste of energy.
Take-home message:
– Energy is not so much a number as it is a property of objects in our universe, rather than an object, so it cannot be easily defined.
– Due to the abstract nature of energy, it has been used in alternative therapies by many believers, but one should be skeptical of claims that “unscientific” energy exists.
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