Should you underestimate the power of the Force?

It's an energy that lets you control people's minds and.... make things float. So where do midi-chlorians fit in?

- STEPHEN KELLY

In Star Wars: A New Hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi describes the Force as, "an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together." It's a more poetic explanation than the one in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which suggests that every Jedi has a bad case of worms. Or, to be more precise, that they get their powers from microscopic cellular beings called midi-chlorians.

"The idea that a parasite living in a creature could change or determine the way the host behaves is a very real thing," says Patrick Johnson, author of The Physics of Star Wars. "And in theory, that small creature could give the host the ability to do things that they might not otherwise be able to do."

A theory that makes more sense to Johnson, though, is that the Force represents some kind of sophisticated control of electromagnetic fields.