The Multidisciplinarian

Shelley, raising an eyebrow, asked me if I knew anything about energy. She was our departmental secretary at Boeing. I pictured turbomachinery, ablative dissipation, and aircraft landings. Yes, I said, some aspects. She handed me a pamphlet from Adam, an engineer in Propulsion. He was moonlighting as an energy consultant. That’s what the cover said. California law was clear. Boeing couldn’t stop him from doing whatever he wanted on his own time.

The pamphlet explained how energy flowed between people and from crystals to people, but only natural crystals. I flipped a few pages. You could convert a man-made crystal to a natural one by storing it under a pyramid for 30 days. Thirty. Giza pyramids? Or would cardboard do? Would crystals know about days? Would they choose a number tied to the sun? Twelve months in a year. Or the moon? Or a number that changed over geologic time? A billion years ago, when days were 18 hours long, did man-made crystals take 40 days to cure?

Shelley asked what I thought. I said I thought he wanted in her pants. He was an engineer, trained in physics and reasoning. He worked with wind tunnels. Adam knows better and thinks you don’t, I said. Shelley shook her head. She knew I was being charitable. Adam believed that stuff.

On a ski trip with Garrett Turbine employees, Melissa insisted we heat water on the stove. Microwave ovens, she said, rearranged the molecular structure of water. Unsafe. Melissa designs auxiliary power units for jets.

They’re not dumb. They can engineer turbomachinery that doesn’t end in a water landing. People rarely run a single epistemic operating system. Rules are brutal in the wind tunnel. Models either converge or they don’t. Reality testifies. In the personal realm, reality can be more forgiving. You can hold nonsense for decades without a compressor stall.

Some of it looks like motivated belief. Whatever his intentions toward Shelley, something about identity and control was at work. Crystals cast him as holding esoteric knowledge. The thinking followed the role.

Engineers also learn to trust models. That works when physics pushes back. Less so when nothing ever does.

Success doesn’t help. The GE90 turbine’s in-flight shutdown rate is about one per million flight hours on the triple seven. Do that well for long enough and humility thins. An ER doc once told me surgeons are often right and never uncertain. Trained for one, rewarded for the other.

Some ideas live where no one checks them. There’s no Flight Readiness Review for microwave theories. No stress test. The questions about days and crystals never get asked.

What, then, do microwaves do to water? Start with the physics. Microwave ovens radiate photons that excite rotational modes in polar molecules like water. For quantum reasons, the hydrogen atoms aren’t evenly spaced but sit to one side, like Mickey Mouse ears. The molecule is electrically neutral, but its charge is uneven. That polarity makes water responsive to oscillating electric fields.

Melissa translated water’s dipole moment into “warped molecules.” What actually happens is boring. The hydrogen-bond network jiggles, breaks, reforms, then settles back into the same statistical distribution. Heat water on a stove and it happens even more. Ice made from microwaved water freezes normally. Enzymes and bacteria, testifying by the trillions, vote not guilty.

“Excite” and “rotational modes” sound like structural meddling if you distrust boxes that hum. Adam and Melissa use the right nouns, invoke real properties, and gesture at invisible mechanisms. Heat from a flame feels natural; the word “radiate” smuggles in nuclear anxiety.

Crystal mysticism has roots in real science. Mid-century physics pulled quartz oscillators, piezoelectricity, band gaps, and lasers out of its hat. Crystals turn pressure into voltage, voltage into timekeeping, and sand into computation. LCDs followed: apply a voltage, patterns appear. In that sense, crystals do know time. Order responds to invisible forces. Once imagined as intentional, it drifts right on down, lands in nonsense.

The 30-day pyramid transformation launders mysticism through quasi-engineering constraints. Not “chant until Houtu signals,” but “store for 30 days.” A soak time defined in a spec. It feels procedural rather than occult. When Adam’s unwired crystals track solar days, not sidereal time, the scaffolding shows through.

Asking how Adam’s crystals know what a day is would mean letting astronomy into his pyramid. No one in the kitchen with Melissa demands control samples. The beliefs survive by staying small, domestic, and unreviewed. Engineers are trained to respect reality where reality speaks loud. Elsewhere, we’re free to improvise. The danger is not believing nonsense. It’s knowing the questions that would shatter the spell. And doing nothing.