Dan Brown has yet again lived up to his reputation in the literary fields by publishing the phenomenal book titled "The Lost Symbol". The book indeed escalated the interest of the public for its extravagant plot and concepts involved. Yet amongst the concepts involved in the said book, one caught the most interest: the mention of pseudoscience. Pseudoscience, by definition, "is any belief system or methodology which tries to gain legitimacy by wearing the trappings of science, but fails to abide by the rigorous methodology and standards of evidence that demarcate true science. Although pseudoscience is designed to have the appearance of being scientific, it lacks any of the substance of science". In the book, Mr. Brown has tread the far end of pseudoscience and discussed one concept of it, that is: the human mind has the capability of influence movements,phenomena, etc. In simpler words, telekinesis of some sort. In the book, an experiment was performed to test this. One of the characters observed the freezing of water in a neutral energy environment to which no other brain waves can affect the environment. That particular character performed trials wherein as the freezing process is undergoing, the character thinks of something relaxing and beautiful and the consequence of this is that the ice was crystalized smoothly. On the other hand, there were trials where negative thoughts were being involved and as a consequence, the frozen water did not have a beautiful crystalline structure. To summarize it, thoughts have a power to affect physical objects and the more people think about the same thing, the likelihood of that happening would increase.
If this is in fact true, then this will disturb the natural laws of science and the beliefs science has established. To exemplify this, the early civilization thought that the earth was flat and shaped like a coin. What if this was the reality? Think of it this way. One day one person proposed that the earth was round and everybody was convinced. Starting that day, in everyone's mind, the earth was round. And because of those thoughts, the earth accordingly became round. What if the earth was really the center of the solar system? and everybody was just convinced by Copernicus that the earth revolves around the sun?
If this is proven true, then a lot would dramatically change. New beliefs would then arise, and most probably the whole world will collapse. On the other hand, if this concept of pseudoscience is proven true, it has the potential to be a useful tool for progress. The effect would merely be dependent on how humans would affect it. As said by Ben Parker of spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility.
