MB Civic

Various distinct cultural and religious traditions postulate the existence of esoteric energies, usually as a type of élan vital – an essence which differentiates living from non-living objects. Older sources usually associate this kind of energy with breath: for example qi in Taoist philosophy, prana in Hindu belief, or the “breath of life” given by God to Adam in the Abrahamic creation story. Thus energy became closely associated with concepts of animating spirits or of the human soul. Some spiritual practices, such as Qigong or traditional yoga open or increase this innate energy, and the philosophy behind certain martial arts implies that these energies can be developed and focused.A number of New Age spiritual practices and alternative medicine modalities rely upon such ideas, without the more spiritual or mystical elements of traditional beliefs. Instead, they focus on the perception and manipulation of subtle experiences in the body, usually in the belief that conscious attention to the body’s state will draw vital energy to the body, producing physical, psychological, and in some cases spiritual benefits.The approaches known collectively as “energy therapies” vary widely in philosophy, approach, and origin. The ways in which this energy is used, modified, or manipulated to effect healing also vary. For example, acupressure involves manual stimulation of pressure-points, while some forms of yoga rely on breathing exercises. Many therapies, in regards to the given explanation for their supposed efficacy, are predicated on some form of energy unknown to current science. In this case, the given energy is sometimes referred to as putative energy. However “subtle energy” is often equated with empirically understood forces, for example, some equate the aura with electromagnetism. Such energies are termed “veritable” as opposed to “putative”. Some alternative therapies, such as electromagnetic therapy, use veritable energy, though they may still make claims that are not supported by evidence. Many claims have been made by associating “spirit” with forms of energy poorly understood at the time. In the 1800s, electricity and magnetism were in the “borderlands” of science and electrical quackery was rife. In the 2000s, quantum mechanics and grand unification theory provide similar opportunities.Insofar as the proposed properties of “subtle energy” are not those of physical energy, there can be no physical scientific evidence for the existence of such “energy”.Therapies that purport to use, modify, or manipulate unknown energies are therefore among the most controversial of all complementary and alternative medicines. Theories of spiritual energy not validated by the scientific method are usually termed non-empirical beliefs by the scientific community. Claims related to energy therapies are most often anecdotal, rather than being based on repeatable empirical evidence. Acupuncturists say that acupuncture’s mode of action is by virtue of manipulating the natural flow of energy through meridians. Scientists argue that any palliative effects are obtained physiologically by blocking or stimulating nerve cells and causing changes in the perception of pain in the brain. The gap between the empirically proven efficacy of some therapies and the lack of empirical physical evidence for the belief-systems that surround them is at present a battleground between skeptics and believers. The successes of the era of the Enlightenment in the treatment of energy in natural science were intimately bound up with attempts to study the energies of life, as when Luigi Galvani’s neurological investigations led to the development of the Voltaic cell. Many scientists continued to think that living organisms must be constituted of special materials subject to special forces, a view which became known as vitalism. Mesmer, for example, sought an animal magnetism that was unique to life.As microbiologists studied embryology and developmental biology, particularly before the discovery of genes, a variety of organisational forces were posited to account for the observations. From the time of Driesch, however, the importance of “energy fields” began to wane and the proposed forces became more mind-like. Sometimes, however, as in the work of Harold Saxton Burr, the electromagnetic fields of organisms have been studied precisely as the hypothetical medium of such organisational “forces”.The attempt to associate additional energetic properties with life has been all but abandoned in modern research scienceBut despite this, spiritual writers and thinkers have maintained connections to these ideas and continue to promote them either as useful allegories or as fact. Some early advocates of these ideas were particularly attracted to the history of the unification of electromagnetism and its implications for the storage, transference, and conversion of physical energy through electric and magnetic fields. Potentials and fields were viewed after the work of James Clerk Maxwell as physical phenomena rather than mathematical abstractions. Aware of this history, spiritual writers positivistically adopted much of the language of physical science, speaking of “force fields” and “biological energy”. Concepts such as the “life force”, “physiological gradient”, and “élan vital” that emerged from the spiritualist movement would inspire later thinkers in the modern New Age movement.
A Grand Unified Theory, (GUT), is a candidate model in particle physics in which at high-energy, the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model which define the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, are merged into one single interaction characterized by one larger gauge symmetry and thus one unified coupling constant. In contrast, the experimentally verified Standard Model of particle physics is based on three independent interactions, symmetries and coupling constants.Models that do not unify all interactions using one simple Lie group as the gauge symmetry, but do so using semisimple groups, can exhibit similar properties and are sometimes referred to as Grand Unified Theories as well.Unifying gravity with the other three interactions would provide a theory of everything (TOE), rather than a GUT. Nevertheless, GUTs are often seen as an intermediate step towards a TOE. The new particles predicted by models of grand unification cannot be observed directly at particle colliders because their masses are expected to be of the order of the so-called GUT scale, which is predicted to be just a few orders of magnitude below the Planck scale and thus far beyond the reach of currently foreseen collision experiments. Instead, effects of grand unification might be detected through indirect observations such as proton decay, electric dipole moments of elementary particles, or the properties of neutrinos. Some grand unified theories predict the existence of magnetic monopoles.As of 2011, all GUT models which aim to be completely realistic are quite complicated, even compared to the Standard Model, because they need to introduce additional fields and interactions, or even additional dimensions of space. The main reason for this complexity lies in the difficulty of reproducing the observed fermion masses and mixing angles. Due to this difficulty, and due to the lack of any observed effect of grand unification so far, there is no generally accepted GUT model.The fact that the electric charges of electrons and protons seem to cancel each other exactly to extreme precision is essential for the existence of the macroscopic world as we know it, but this important property of elementary particles is not explained in the Standard Model of particle physics. While the description of strong and weak interactions within the Standard Model is based on gauge symmetries governed by the simple symmetry groups SU(3) and SU(2) which allow only discrete charges, the remaining component, the weak hypercharge interaction is described by an abelian symmetry U(1) which in principle allows for arbitrary charge assignments. The observed charge quantization, namely the fact that all known elementary particles carry electric charges which appear to be exact multiples of 1?3 of the “elementary” charge, has led to the idea that hypercharge interactions and possibly the strong and weak interactions might be embedded in one Grand Unified interaction described by a single, larger simple symmetry group containing the Standard Model. This would automatically predict the quantized nature and values of all elementary particle charges. Since this also results in a prediction for the relative strengths of the fundamental interactions which we observe, in particular the weak mixing angle, Grand Unification ideally reduces the number of independent input parameters, but is also constrained by observations. Grand Unification is reminiscent of the unification of electric and magnetic forces by Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism in the 19th century, but its physical implications and mathematical structure are qualitatively different.
Every moment you have a choice – to be at peace or to be in resistance. When you are at peace you attract positive energy and when you resist you create negative vibes that reflect back on your being. It’s a simple choice and yet most people unconsciously choose to live in negativity.