Meet Emily Rosa (see photo). I just learned of her for the first time tonight, but she instantly became a personal hero of mine.

While watching a new episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, a show that seeks to expose the unrational side of popular culture, I learned of Emily Rosa. The episode was on “Alternative Medicine.” You know, crystals, energy, chi, and all the baggage that goes with New Agers. One particular form of alternative medicine featured is something called Therapeutic Touch or, for short, TT (stop giggling).

Wikipedia describes TT as being “an energy therapy claimed to promote healing and reduce pain and anxiety. TT practitioners say that by placing their hands on or near the patient they can detect and manipulate the patient’s putative energy field.” Basically, a nurse will float her hands above you and manipulate some kind of mysterious “energy field,” and by maniuplating this energy field can cure all kinds of different ailments. As the wikipedia article notes, the whole idea of there even being an energy field to be manipulated is in contradiction to our modern understandings of biology, physics and chemistry.

Enter Emily Rosa. In 1996 Emily Rosa sought to study Practicioners of TT and see if their methods held and scientific merit. What she did was place TT practicioners behind an opaque screen with two hand slits in it. The practicioners would place their hands through the slits while Emily would hover her hand over either the left or right hand of the TT practicioner. If they are able to detect energy fields, surely they would be able to answer which hand Emily was hovering her own hand over. They couldn’t. In fact, the results were what would you expect to get if it was just a chance proposition. That is to say, a guess.

What is so remarkable about this seemingly ordinary study of a wacky New Age idea is that at the time the study was conducted, Emily Rosa was nine years old. That’s right. New Age hippie TT practicioners slamed down by a nine year old with a love for science. Emily Rosa herself hold’s the record for the youngest person to be published in a medical journal in the Guinness Book of World Records. My mind blew as soon as I learned this, and Emily Rosa has now become a personal hero of mine.

Not only that, but Emily Rosa has since grown up. She is 21 now. And damn, she is cute.