Orgone Energy

8/11/19

People are funny. If you search for "orgone energy" and "frozen", or "water vortex", those types of things, you will find many pictures of glasses of frozen water, with a frozen column in the middle, and typically some "orgone" device, usually a disc or coaster of some sort. The claim by believers in "orgone energy" is that their device is making some "energy vortex" (and with the typical implication of "buy my device please"). This is nonsense of course, but this is a good lesson in pseudoscience, science, confirmation, and falsification.

Consider these pictures of colored liquid in plastic bottles on my deck railing from 2/2018. These froze just by being outside. These are Gatorade bottles, but it is not actually Gatorade inside, but tap water with coloring added.

Some believers in orgone energy might say, well but these bottles were on wood, and wood is organic and has this energy, etc. Actually, one bottle was on the deck railing, which is synthetic wood, not real wood. The other bottle was on a table and just moved to the railing for the picture. These are "outs" or just-so-stories used by believers to hang onto beliefs.

Some questions I have for believers in orgone energy, are:

• can you actually measure this energy?
• is any "vortex" present without freezing, ie. why does freezing have to be involved?
• does this happen without the orgone disc?
• have you experimented with different liquids, including types of water (distilled), etc.?

But the big question I have, is have you ever seen a cloudy ice cube? Yes? Have you asked yourself why is the ice cube cloudy? Have you asked yourself how does water freeze? The punchline is, water freezes from the outside to in, so any impurities (minerals, sediment, coloring, gasses, etc.) in the water will get pushed towards the middle. The rate of freezing can also come into play. When freezing at slower rates, such as with specialized freezers restaurants might use, water freezes also from top to bottom, lessening the cloudy effect.

In science, we should seek to falsify our hypothesis, not only confirm it. Freezing water and seeing "vortices" is just confirming, not falsifying.

Thanks for reading.