h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>Well you could give Newton all sorts of demonstrations of atom smashing. <<

In his time? Can you give an example?

Sorry in a bit of a rush...

>> But it does seem very very strange to have people who can't measure something that other people experience and then say that it doesn't exist. Kind of like Newton saying that subatomic particles don't exist. <<

It depends what you mean by "doesn't exist". If you try to couch it in terms of some specific kind of energy or substance, then no it doesn't. Chi is just an emergent property resulting from the interactions of billions of neurons, neurotransmitters and a complex mixture of hormones. Just like as despondence, melancholy, happiness, hunger, love, empathy and dog knows how many other ways you can categorise the experiences of our conscious minds. Can't really measure any of those either.

Look at a tomato, say, and try to measure how much 'redness' it contains, and you won't find any. Doesn't mean you can go about denying there's any such thing as 'red'.

I would have been rather stupid of Newton to just have taken somebody´s word for the existence of subatomic particles.

I´m sure some people doing martial arts might feel a buzzing in their muscles that they want to call chi. However chi according to the chinese is supposed to be an external force, with different specific qualities. Something without which you can´t live. So saying it exists based on feeling a tingling after excercise is rather wrong.

>> So saying it exists based on feeling a tingling after excercise
>> is rather wrong.

Unlike saying it is "an external force, with different specific qualities", which is a load of utter woo

I´m just going on what the chinese say. They have certain ideas for what chi is, and so a tingling feeling hardly qualifies to be called chi.

if chi is an external energy that has an effect on us, could it not be a early chinese explanation for different energys like weak binding force, strong, attraction/ repultion etc.......just a different name

It doesn´t have any of the qualities that those have.

I don't think chi is considered an external force, but something that exists in everything. There's a difference.

You can also think of oxygen, which exists both inside me and outside me but I wouldn't describe that as solely external.

I think we also have to be careful with interpreting Chinese thought. Not all cultures take the world as being only able to be understood from the literal. Most cultures can live with the literal and the figurative.

Sorry, don't have time yet to reply to the earlier responses to my queries.