Gwyneth Paltrow explains why water just doesn't like bad vibes

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2014/jun/05/gwyneth-paltrow-water-bad-vibes

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All things must pass, and this week's outmoded celebrity shtick is walking on water. Maybe it felt significant, awesome and somehow very "now" back when Jesus did it. But in June 2014 it feels increasingly like the cold open to a Robbie Williams concert.

These days, the truly messianic entertainer is no longer satisfied with appearing to walk on the stuff: the very molecular structure of water must be changed – bent to the will of the star, effectively by their charm. In a minute, we'll remember how Madonna formally lobbied the British government to begin using a magic Kabbalah potion not dissimilar to water as a means of neutralising nuclear radiation. But first, let's immerse ourselves once more in Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle mailout goop (itself likely to be cited as a key apocalyptic harbinger when our descendants aim to establish how they came to be living in the bowels of the earth and distilling drinking water from their own urine).

This week, Gwyneth has mostly been thinking about hip New York restaurants, bold fashion prints and quantum mechanics – though her communiqué majors on the latter. "I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter," it begins. "I have long had Dr Emoto's coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water."

I think you'll agree there's a lot to enjoy in that sentence – primarily the fact that this Dr Emoto publishes his research in a coffee-table book. It makes me realise what an impact The Origin of Species could have made had Charles Darwin only thought to present it in a photo-rich format that could take its place as a glorified coaster, alongside books with names such as Poverty Style: A Journey Through Third World Bohemia, and The World's 23 Most Important Infinity Pools.

Fortuitously, Gwyneth's quack-in-chief Dr Habib Sadeghi is on hand to explain this whole water science. The good doctor was last seen explaining "conscious uncoupling" to the world – but it turns out he's equally at home giving tutorials in quantum physics, which is encouraging. It makes me hope that one day the scientists at Cern will use their power for good, and turn their wasted opportunity of a collider into a supergreens juicer, or a machine to discover the elusive celebrity self-awareness particle.

According to Sadeghi, the lesson of quantum physics is that physical matter does not exist, and that "everything is just energy in different states of vibration". Thereafter, he wants to talk about the aforementioned Dr Masaru Emoto, who apparently did some experiments with water in the 1990s. Over to Sadeghi: "Emoto poured pure water into vials labelled with negative phrases like 'I hate you' or 'fear'," we learn. "After 24 hours, the water was frozen, and no longer crystallized under the microscope: it yielded gray, misshapen clumps instead of beautiful lace-like crystals. In contrast, Emoto placed labels that said things like 'I love you' or 'peace' on vials of polluted water, and after 24 hours, they produced gleaming, perfectly hexagonal crystals. Emoto's experiments proved that energy generated by positive or negative words can actually change the physical structure of an object."

Innit. "Consider the fact that your body is over 70% water," continues Sadeghi, "and you'll understand how quickly the vibration from negative words resonates in your cells. Ancient scriptures tell us that life and death are in the power of the tongue. As it turns out, that's not a metaphor."

That feels confusing. After all, I imagine quite a few people have called Sadeghi an idiot, and he seems to be going from strength to strength.

Still, there you have it with Where Gwyneth's At on science – though as indicated, Dr Emoto was not the first coffee-table-book author to make these claims about water. Admittedly, Madonna kept the science out of her seminal tome Sex – in fact, it would be several years after she was photographed being spreadeagled by Vanilla Ice before she felt ready to reveal her sideline as one of the pre-eminent scientific minds of the age.

By that time, she was under the spiritual tutelage of Rabbi Philip Berg, the former insurance salesman who founded the Kabbalah centre in Los Angeles, and whose book Immortality suggested devotees could literally change their own cell structure and make themselves not only spiritually but physically immortal. (Berg died last September, nine years after a stroke had forced his total withdrawal from public life.) Working on the principle that his $4-a-bottle Kabbalah water could cure Aids and cancer, Berg had established a "23rd-century" New York research institute, which I like to imagine as defying the laws of physics, perhaps being spatially compressed into an answerphone and a PO box. The scientist in charge of this mysterious facility would occasionally be summoned to LA to present its findings before chosen disciples, including Madonna. The latter was present when Berg's pet scientist showed before-and-after photos of water molecules which had been Kabbalistically blessed. He concluded: "We have reversed entropy and reversed the second law of thermodynamics." Not only that, but he revealed he had poured his magic solution into a lake within the Chernobyl exclusion zone, and completely neutralised it of radiation.

A vintage Sunday Times story indicates just how far Madonna was willing to go in promoting this discovery. To wit, both Madge and her then husband Guy Ritchie lobbied the British government and the nuclear industry at the highest levels. "It was like a crank call," one Downing Street civil servant briefed, before palming Her Madjesty off on the DTI. "She relentlessly pursued people," recalled a mandarin there. As for Guy Ritchie, his letters to BNFL reportedly appended pseudo-scientific "papers" which were transparent cobblers.

Anyway, Lost is Showbiz doesn't want to conclude without a quick query thrown up by goop's layout. You see, Gwyneth positions her waterfail directly above an opportunity to purchase artisan-crafted Guatemalan huaraches from a label that apparently uses some of its profits to provide clean drinking water to the native children of that central American country. Yet in the circumstances, why has madam neglected to inform goopsters whether the charity water is angry or empowered? Who has spoken to it? Has one of Gwyneth's many gurus spent a month telling it that it's fabulous, or is it just the sort of negatively charged civilian H2O that presumably explains why indigenous Guatemalans find it so hard to break out of their cycle of underachieving urchinry? Like many stylishly intellectual first-world carers, I don't think I really want to get involved in $89 espadrilles before I know the answer to those questions.

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