Gwyneth Paltrow Says You Can Hurt Water's Feelings

It’s only Tuesday but Gwyneth Paltrow has managed to rile up the Internet thanks to recent comments she made about what seems like a totally innocuous subject: water. In the May 29th issue of her newsletter goop, the actress pled her case for not hurting water’s feelings. Yeah.

“I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter," Paltrow wrote in the post. "I have long had Dr. Emoto's coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it.”

The actress's “health and love guru,” Habib Sadeghi (who, with his therapist wife, is also responsible for coining the term "conscious uncoupling"), then weighs in, writing, “Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto performed some of the most fascinating experiments on the effect that words have on energy in the 1990’s…In his experiments, Emoto poured pure water into vials labeled with negative phrases like ‘I hate you’ or ‘fear.’ 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.”

For anyone who has never heard of Emoto (which might be most people?) his theories are well, dubious. He also claims that by exposing water to different thoughts and emotions, one can affect how it freezes and he's conducted experiments in which he’s yelled at rice and concluded that “bad” rice emits a funky smell. A story published Tuesday on the news website Vox quotes Caltech physicis professor and snow crystal expert Kenneth Libbrecht expressing his feelings on Emoto's work. "Have I tried to reproduce Mr. Emoto's experiments? No, and I don't intend to. As we liked to say back on the farm in North Dakota — it's good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out!"

However amusing you may find Paltrow's remarks on water, they're preferable to her thoughts on war, alcohol, and working women, right?