Woo-Woo (wuwu)

I don't believe in astrology. Not the horoscopes, not the rising-sign icebreakers, not the "you're such a Sagittarius" stuff. That is a closed system pretending to be a sky.

I do believe in woo-woo. Woo-woo (wuwu) is the name I give the leftover. Tides are real. Gamma rays cross the universe at the speed of light. We have mapped a fraction of the brain. There is something in the gaps we have not figured out yet. My operating philosophy is not a physics paper. It is this: everything left over after science is God.

That is not a claim that the moon writes your personality. It is a claim that the map is smaller than the territory, and I would rather stay curious at the edge than fake certainty in the middle.

What woo-woo is (and is not)

Astrology is a story that already knows the ending. Woo-woo is the opposite: it is permission to notice a correlation, feel it in your body, and still say I don't know yet.

Science is the best tool we have for shrinking that leftover. I want more of it, not less. The moon does move water. Gravity does couple masses. Electromagnetic radiation does arrive from events we will never stand next to. None of that licenses a newspaper column about your love life.

The mistake is treating "we haven't measured it" as "it isn't there," or treating "it might be there" as "my sign said so." Woo-woo lives in the first gap. Horoscopes live in the second.

Sturgeon Moon

Two days from the original writing of this, August 2020, was a full moon dubbed Sturgeon Moon. Other names: Grain Moon, Green Corn Moon, Fruit Moon, Barley Moon. A sturgeon is a big ol' fish.

Lake sturgeons do not only live in lakes; they also live in rivers, but not in the ocean. This monster fish used to be a major part of the ecosystems in North America's Great Lakes, Hudson Bay, and in the Mississippi River, and they were once found all the way from Canada to Alabama. Today, the lake sturgeon has become one of the rarest fish in North America because of intense overfishing in the 19th century, pollution, and damage to their habitat and breeding grounds due to agriculture and lumbering.

The naming is folklore with a body. People who lived next to those waters needed a calendar they could see. That is not astrology. That is paying attention.

After July 4th, 2020 and the blood moon I was eager to look into the phases. A full moon on the night after Independence Day felt like a joke the sky was in on. You could even see some of the red the night before on the 4th.

For whatever reason, the fireworks all around me ("bombs bursting in air"), I had some epiphany at 26 that I want to devote my life to a certain purpose. That path runs through math, science, neurology, history, and a lot of other subjects. The gist of it is that I want to start a "single payer" company. Club → consulting → VC → company XYZ → research → charity.

I still don't think a moon caused that. I think a night loud enough to drown the usual noise let something through. Woo-woo is being honest that I cannot prove the difference.

"It must be a full moon"

My mother just retired from teaching middle school special education reading. She is a saint, that woman. The patience someone needs for those kids and the helicopter parents who follow closely behind them.

We used to joke every once in a while that "oh, it must be a full moon" whenever there would be a crazy day at work, etc.

That joke is doing two jobs. One is folk meteorology: a shared shrug when the day will not sit still. The other is a hypothesis nobody in the teachers' lounge is actually going to test. Emergency rooms and police desks have the same folklore. Some studies look for lunar effects on sleep, seizures, psychiatric admissions. The results are messy, small, and easy to overfit. That is not a license to sneer at the teachers. They are reporting a feel. Science's job is to ask whether the feel is a tide or a story we tell about tides.

I want both to be allowed in the same paragraph.

Tides vs horoscopes

Here is the part I will not hand-wave. The moon's gravity raises oceans. You can calculate it. You can stand on a beach and watch the difference. That is not woo-woo. That is a solved-enough problem with leftover questions at the edges (coastal resonance, weather, the sun).

Your "chart" is not that. A natal chart is a coordinate system with a personality glued on. The glue is the tell.

What I will leave open: we are wet machines running on electrolytes and sleep. Light at night is not nothing. Pressure and humidity are not nothing. A room full of tired people is not nothing. If a full moon changes how much light hits a bedroom window, that is a mechanism. It is not destiny. It is closer to "the streetlamp is brighter" than "Mercury is in retrograde."

Woo-woo, for me, is refusing to collapse those into one pile.

Gamma as a metaphor for something arriving

I started thinking there might be some force in nature — some minimal version of radiation — that can interact with the brain in different manners. Maybe planetary mass, gravity, the bounce of signals. Greenhouse gases released upward, ping the moon, bounce back at us? Probably not as a cartoon. I am not building a perpetual-motion horoscope out of CO₂.

The useful image is arrival.

Gamma rays are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. They travel at c, 3×10⁸ m/s. They are the most energetic form of light. High-temperature regions of the universe produce them. We use them in medicine because they punch through. They are not a vibe. They are photons with a job.

The Gamma rays (γ-rays) are also part of the vast EM radiation, so they also travel with the speed of light c (3×10⁸ m/s). Gamma-rays are the most energetic form of light; due to their high energy they can be used in cancer diagnosis. Gamma rays are produced by very high temperature regions of the universe.

Interesting.

That same weekend there was some heavy gamma in Atlanta according to the Radnet database, a blood moon, and chatter about a potential supernova. I am not claiming those events wrote my mood. I am claiming that the universe is constantly delivering packets we did not order, at speeds that make "local" a polite fiction. Woo-woo is standing in that delivery stream without pretending you can read the return address off a zodiac wheel.

If a star goes supernova, the light is already on the way before anyone on Earth has a feeling about it. That is the part that gets me. Cause and effect at astronomical distance is delayed, impersonal, and still real.

Sensitivity, not mysticism

Potentially then some people like me with brain trauma injuries in their life have mood swings like the tides and it's purely a sensitivity thing.

I mean that as mechanism, not branding. A TBI is not a third eye. It is tissue that got rattled. Sleep, light, noise, crowds, weather — the same inputs everyone else has, with a lower threshold. Mood swinging like a tide is a metaphor I will keep because it is honest about amplitude. It is not a claim that the lunar node is in my frontal lobe.

If you have a more sensitive instrument, you pick up more noise and more signal. The work is not to worship the noise. The work is to get better at telling them apart — which is, again, science — while admitting you will never finish the leftover.

God as remainder

"Everything left over after science is God" is an operating philosophy, not a physics claim.

It does not mean "stop measuring." It means the leftover is where I will not lie. I will not stuff a gap with a horoscope just to feel finished. I will not stuff a gap with smugness either. The Sturgeon Moon can be a fish, a calendar, a night of fireworks, a Radnet blip, and a 26-year-old deciding on a path, all at once, without any of those things owning the others.

Club → consulting → VC → company → research → charity is still the sketch. The woo-woo is the part of the sketch that will not fit in the boxes. I am okay with that.

References

• Sturgeon Moon Is the Full Moon in August
• Do gamma rays travel as fast as the speed of light? - Quora