Francois Tremblay

What really irks me, in a kind of nitpicky way, about many paranormal declarations and discussions is the way they mutilate the terms "energy" and "force" beyond recognition.

They speak of some kind of "mental energy" that can be manipulated. But energy is a property of matter. You cannot directly manipulate energy and make it do whatever you want. Same thing with "force", which is another loaded word. Force and energy are correlated : they are not some kind of mystical concept that can exist by itself and do anything. Energy is force multiplied by distance (or something of the sort : admittedly I flunked physics).

Another thing which is related to this is when paranormalists say that energy can be conscious (remnants of the soul perhaps ?). That is so wrong, I don't even want to refute it.

If you have other conceptual nitpicks like that, I'd like if you could post here. I'd be interested in hearing about it.

[ February 02, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

eh

Perhaps Star Wars is most responsible for the way 'force and energy' have become modern day God concepts. Cool movies though.

butswana

Ack! My brother-in-law is taking classes in massage therapy. He is constantly spouting off some bullshit about manipulating energy forces with his tuned in spirit hands.
He asked me what I thought of a paper he had written for one of his classes. I told him that it was well written, so for composition, I would give it an A-, but for content, a Bs!!! HA!HA!HA!
He tried to justify by infering that since there are electrical currents in our bodies, there has to be more to it. Some shit about Kirilian photography followed. Yuk.

ohwilleke

I was a prize winning physics student on the other hand. One of the more direct definitions of force is force = mass times acceleration (F=ma); and one of the better defintions of energy is that energy is force integrated over time (Integral from zero to T of F(t) with respect to "dt").

In somewhat less precise terms, force is the capacity to do work (i.e. make matter move at a given moment); and the faster you can make a particular bunch a matter move at a given moment, the greater the force. Energy is the cumulative amount of force that can be applied over a period of time. Energy tells you how much ability you have to move matter overall.

There no profound misuse of the terms force and energy when one states that the system known as the body has a certain amount of energy available to do work (i.e. apply force) in the form of healing, and that this energy can be shifted from one part of the body to another.

Does the body really have such energy systems? Well, I rather doubt that it works in the way Taoism and its perogyny describes. But, while the usage may be inaccurate, I don't think that it is deeply off.

Francois Tremblay

I'm not talking about the human body having some kind of paranormal energy. Although it might be possible, it doesn't seem that way. I'm talking about people talking about energy as an independant entity that thinks and act.

[ February 07, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

liquid

I'm an aerospace engineer (studying, mind). Force and energy are the fundamentals of what I do. This sort of misuse really really gets on my nerves (After creationism and free energy its my favourite hate).

If I could be bothered, I could give you all sorts of reasons why notions of spiritual energies and the like are not only bad uses, but bad analogies. However, I don't even think it is worth dignifying them with a comparative analysis.