Law of Attraction

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Pseudoscience Alert
This topic is a pseudoscience, and is not accepted by the scientific community as a valid discipline.
Although it may use scientific terminology, it does not use scientific methodology.
Remember: just because it sounds right doesn't mean it's actually right.

The Law of Attraction is an idea from the New Age Movement that thinking about something will make the "cosmos" suddenly manifest it for you. It has recently been popularized by the book and movie The Secret. Proponents try and wrap the idea up in pseudoscientific language, usually something to do with quantum physics. Thoughts form "energy fields" that "vibrate" with a "frequency" that attracts "like-energy" from the "cosmos" and all this somehow happens because of things like quantum probability waves and wave-particle duality.

In essence, to be rich, think about being rich. To be poor think about being poor. That's why all those people are starving in Africa — all they think about is not having food.

"In 1906, William Walker Atkinson (1862 - 1932) used the phrase in his New Thought Movement book, Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World. Atkinson was the editor of New Thought magazine, a student of Hinduism, and the author of more than 100 books on an assortment on religious, spiritual, and occult topics. The following year, Elizabeth Towne, the editor of The Nautilus Magazine, a Journal of New Thought, published Bruce MacLelland's book Prosperity Through Thought Force, in which he summarized the principle, stating: "You are what you think, not what you think you are." The phrase "Law of Attraction" appeared in the writings of the Theosophical authors William Quan Judge in 1915, and Annie Besant in 1919." ^[1]