What the Physicists and Psychologists Found

Popular presentations of the law of attraction, The Secret prominent among them, routinely invoke quantum physics as the mechanism supposedly underlying the claim, arguing that focused thought sends out some form of vibration that the physical universe then somehow detects and responds to by rearranging events in the thinker's favor. Physicists who have examined that specific claim have rejected it as a serious misappropriation of quantum mechanics, a field of physics that describes the behavior of subatomic particles and offers no established mechanism by which ordinary human thought could act directly on external physical outcomes at a distance, and commentary in publications such as Skeptical Inquirer has specifically criticized the argument for lacking any real basis in physical science despite its confident scientific language. Psychologists who have studied the popular claim on its own more modest terms have similarly found no reliable support for the idea that thought alone reliably produces material outcomes in the world, as opposed to the more limited and genuinely supported finding that a person's expectations can shape their own attention, effort and behavior in ways that indirectly affect what they achieve. The gap between the confident claim and the actual supporting evidence is the central criticism made against it.