The Implications of Suspending Disbelief of Energy Healing

If we accept the central premise, we should be raking in Nobel Prizes

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My 3-year-old asks a lot of good questions. "What is a rainbow?" "What is a star?" "What is the sky?" "How do fireworks work?", and recently the dreaded "How do babies get in mommies’ bellies?"

He also asks a lot of bad questions ("Why do mailboxes die?"), but let's ignore those.

Each question always comes with a series of follow-ups, usually a single word: "Why?"

He asks me all these questions, but he rarely questions the shows he watches. To satisfy kids' incessant questioning, you would think everything in kids’ shows would need deep, well-thought-out explanations. Basically, every kids show should be the hardest of hard-science fiction (I would pay a lot of money to see a kid’s show written by Greg Egan).

Instead, kids’ shows are full of incredible stuff that's never explained. Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood is full of animals that talk. Spidey And His Amazing Friends features people running up walls, turning into dinosaurs, and teleporting. Ms Rachel features an adult woman able to muster an inhuman amount of energy and enthusiasm for children's songs. My kid has never questioned how any of this is even possible.

This defies all known laws of science.

My Magic Pet Morphle is full of creatures with magic powers. Morphle can not only change shape, but become objects of vastly different weights. Where does the extra mass come from?

Imagine if this ability were real! Explaining such a power would require dramatically rethinking physics. It seemingly violates the first law of thermodynamics—that energy/matter cannot be created or destroyed. Scientists would bring every tool they have to bear on understanding how this is possible—physicists would use high-energy detectors, biologists would use imaging and take cell samples to understand what it is about Morphle's physiology that gives him these powers, and the Nobel Prize committee would wait in the wings to hand out the next decade’s worth of prizes for the scientists who would completely rewrite our understanding of the universe based on what we learned from Morphle's powers.

Understanding Morphle's powers wouldn't just be a scientific curiosity. If we could understand them well enough, it could open up new frontiers in technology: the ability to create limitless matter or energy could create energy abundance, ushering in a post-scarcity utopia. But instead, Morphle uses his powers to stop two morons from stealing ice cream.

We don't need creatures powerful enough to break the known laws of physics for these two. They're regularly outsmarted by a child.

Before I get accused of being a Neil deGrasse Tyson-like killjoy, let me say: I understand how shows work. I understand you're supposed to suspend disbelief and buy into the central premises. What I'm pointing out is that, with kid shows (and many adult shows), we're not just accepting the central premises as real, we're also not supposed to think about the implications of the superhero powers or miraculous technology too deeply. Otherwise, we would have to conclude everyone in the show is pathologically incurious given the constant demonstrations of a power that, if understood, would transform society and overturn our fundamental understanding of reality.

Accepting the Central Premise in Real Life

This dynamic isn't confined to fiction. There are plenty of claims of extraordinary abilities in real life that, if real, would upend our understanding of the universe and lead to dramatic new directions for technology. So let's play the same game of accepting the central premise but taking the implications seriously.

There are various types of energy healing that claim practitioners can sense, manipulate, and heal using energy. For example, Reiki supposedly involves channeling energy to break away bad energy that blocks the good energy from flowing in a healthy way, "helping virtually every known illness and malady". Practitioners claim to feel the energy and blockages, and to be able to provide healing at any distance.

Let's assume that's all true. Holy shit! Nothing in human biology suggests we can manipulate energy in this way, or that there are plausible "energy blockages" that are vital to our functioning that could be cleared in this way. We're sitting on something that could easily revolutionize our understanding of physiology, medicine, and possibly physics! All we need to do is study it!

While some Reiki resources approvingly point to electromagnetic fields as what practitioners are manipulating, others talk of a "universal energy" or qi that is drawn from the universe. So there are two possibilities: 1) It's some known force, so we can measure it, leading us to an understanding of what is going on physiologically, immediately leading to dramatic new theories in physiology and new medical treatments or 2) It's an unknown force, in which case we have a Morphle-level power on our hand, something proving known physics wrong. Our current extremely well established "Core Theory" of physics makes it clear if there are undiscovered forces or particles out there, they are too weak to interact with matter (otherwise we would have detected them in high-energy particle experiments). If Reiki's energy is a new fundamental force, this isn't just an astounding finding about the physiology of humans, it means the laws of physics as we know them are wrong in a surprising and fundamental way.

That would be amazing. Any scientist working in these areas would jump to be the first to discover such a thing and get their name in the history books! That's the stuff that made Einstein a household name! All we would need is a convincing demonstration that there was something going on here to get physicists and other scientists interested.

Any lay-person with Reiki powers could set up a convincing demonstration to get the ball rolling. A child could do it. I say this because a child did come up with a reasonable and simple experiment to test energy healers to see if they could detect people's energy fields like they claim they can. 9-year-old Emily Rosa conceived of a simple experiment: she had the practitioners put their hands through a screen, and the experimenter flipped a coin to choose which of the practitioner’s hands to put their own hand above. The practitioner was asked to sense which of their hands was closest to the experimenter. The energy healers couldn't do better than chance.

But, if we're buying the central premise here, presumably Emily Rosa screwed up. We just need to do the right version of the experiment. If Reiki is as detectable and reliable as the practitioners claim—with those being acted upon easily able to feel it, even if they are being acted on at a distance—this should be easy.

Once we've established something hard to explain going on, we can work with physicists or engineers to try to detect whatever energy is being manipulated—thermal cameras, oscilloscopes, gaussmeters, ultrasonic detectors, SQUIDs, etc.

I'm leaving out here the claims that Level 2 Reiki practitioners supposedly can send energy backwards in time in ways that are detectable (at least by the human being acted upon). So if we weren't able to convince anyone with the right equipment to help us out with the experiments above, we could always self-fund the experiments after making a few millions with sports betting: just tell someone they would feel Reiki before the game started if the local team was going to win.

Given how amazing it would be if we figured out how Reiki works, why aren't any reputable scientists working on it? You would think it would be like magnetism before Maxwell—a force scientists were puzzled to explain and so it was the focus of intense research and theorizing. Instead, we get a scattering of mostly poorly designed experiments looking for marginal therapeutic effects. The reason, I suspect, is that just like kids’ cartoons, we're supposed to buy the central premise of these sorts of things but not think about their implications too deeply.

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