
The Rise and Fall of Polywater - anarbadalov
https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-rise-and-fall-of-polywater
======
anarbadalov
i'd be remiss not to mention the author (Ainissa Ramirez's) wonderful book,
"The Alchemy of Us," ([https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Us-Humans-Transformed-
Another...](https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Us-Humans-Transformed-
Another/dp/0262043807)) which explores how materials — and the innovations
they made possible — shaped the human experience. She's a materials scientist
and, as you'll see if you read the polywater piece, a terrific science writer.

Full disclosure: i work for the MIT Press. but i'll also disclose this: books
and authors like Ainissa are rare; i'm not a publicist or a sales person. This
is just one of my favorite books that we've published in recent years. Oh, and
if you want more stories like the polywater one, check out this segment with
her on Science Friday ("How An Undertaker Helped Develop Computers, And Other
Untold Stories"): [https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/alchemy-of-us-
book/](https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/alchemy-of-us-book/).

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dekhn
My grad school advisor wrote a couple papers in 1970 and 1971 where they
proposed a 3D structure for polywater, and then "disproved" its existence. The
second one has a wonderfully scientific statement: "It is important to
distinguish clearly between the essentially empirical interrelation of
experiments achieved by the original model and the current attack on it,
because it is obvious from ref. 1 that we have placed ourselves in the unusual
and all too easy to discredit position of being authors both of the original
model and of the new results against it."

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ridgeguy
One of the curious consequences of the polywater episode was delayed
development of diamond synthesis under metastable conditions, mainly by
chemical vapor deposition.

After polywater, Deryagin was a very early claimant to having produced diamond
by CVD. In light of his role in polywater, his diamond work was widely
ignored. It took roughly another decade until Japanese work proved diamond
could be made by CVD.

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layoutIfNeeded
Actually, polywater is the only known thing that can dissolve red mercury.

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briantakita
"The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor" by Gerald Pollack
is an excellent book with many recent experiments. He models the "fourth
phase" as being a lattice of H3O2, which is has a negative charge, to possibly
explain phenomenon ranging from blood flow, plant sap flow, cloud formation,
surface tension, water vesticules (bubbles & droplets), swelling from injury,
etc.

[https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/health-
issues/the...](https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/health-issues/the-
fourth-phase-of-water/)

~~~
dekhn
Actual water structure is a long ongoing scientific research topic (I remember
my undergrad biochem professor saying "water... you think it's simple then you
learn about transient water structures forming in liquid phase" 20+ years ago)
and I still see new articles about techniques being used to probe transient
structures in liquid water
([https://www.nature.com/articles/379055a0](https://www.nature.com/articles/379055a0)).
No need to invoke a fourth phase, liquid water on its own is plenty
complicated.

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outworlder
Obviously, the reason they cannot detect polywater anymore is the lack of
n-rays:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray)

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buescher
Harry Gray told us in freshman chemistry, during the cold fusion craze, that
Dick Feynman had told him "If polywater were real, dogs would drink regular
water, and pee polywater."

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rgejman
Another good example of bad science related to water is "water memory"
(published in Nature!): the idea that water could hold onto the "shape" of
molecules with which it was mixed. Fun times.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory)

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gwbas1c
I clicked on the link to "Cat's Cradle." That looks like a really cool book!

~~~
sixstringtheory
Highly recommend. It’s a good intro book to Vonnegut, the other being
Slaughterhouse 5. Or maybe those are just my favorites!

Very effective mixes of comedy and tragedy, prose that borders on poetry at
times, very imaginative concepts. He’s able to walk you over that threshold of
disbelief almost before you even realize it.

~~~
MengerSponge
Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of excellent short stories that
includes "Harrison Bergeron". "The Euphio Question" haunts me to this day

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01100011
Water does, however, seem to self-assemble into larger structures:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cluster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cluster)

That isn't to say polywater exists, or that you should go out and drink de-
clustered water. It is interesting to me that a full understanding of the
properties of water still eludes us, however.

~~~
dekhn
The reason I have my current job is related to water clusters (I'm a SWE at a
large internet firm). About 15 years ago I read about pagerank and graph
centrality while doing molecular dynamics simulations of DNA and RNA in water.
I noticed in my simulations that water would "cluster" at specific locations
around the DNA, but I could only really see density, not the "structure". I
realized you could create "graphs" of water clusters from the MD trajectories
and then analyze them from the perspective of graph centrality. Unfortunately,
nobody in academia/government labs had the infrastructure to do this kind of
analysis (it doesn't fall under the normal HPC or supercomputer in academia)
so I joined a large internet company to get access to their technology and
computers. I ended up hiring some scientists to run MD simulations on spare
cycles (sort of like Folding @ Home, but inside the datacenter) and we did
some cool analysis (although never really did pagerank analysis of water
clusters... I did hear somebody external did that, although I don't think it
went anywhere).

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swasheck
Just read about polywater in Humans
[[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40858227-humans](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40858227-humans)]

This is a quick, fun read.

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snazz
Did the polywater "invention" come around the same time as the discovery of
tritiated water (aka super-heavy water or T2O)? That could explain why this
was somewhat easily believed during that time.

~~~
eesmith
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water)
references Jones (1952). "The Triple Point Temperature of Tritium Oxide". A
Google Scholar search shows publications about "tritium oxide" in the late
1940s, like
[https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.1746932](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.1746932)
from 1948.

The linked-to piece says "1966, after nearly four years of work".

That puts at least 14 years minimum between them, and likely more.

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Negitivefrags
“Polywater turned out to be 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

That is an amazing punchline.

The article is like the longest buildup for a joke I have ever read.

~~~
OkGoDoIt
“It was all water under the bridge now.”

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peter303
Is Structured Water like polywater? Another New Age topic from Russia.

Some say these go back to the Orthodox Church belief that holy water is
physically different from regular water.

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gwbas1c
I don't get it. When I first looked at this thread it linked to a Wikipedia
page. I even commented on the contents of the Wikipedia page. (See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater))

Now my comment makes no sense because the context is gone, and I can't edit my
comment to point out why.

~~~
dang
It only takes a little work to answer such things. Both
[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org)
or
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=polywater&sort=byDate&type=story)
lead to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23248733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23248733),
which contains the answer:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249978)

I remember your comment
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249126))
because I had to decide whether to include it in the merge or not—so I checked
the new article to see whether it mentions Cat's Cradle. It does, so I
included your comment. If it hadn't, I would have left it where it was, but
then many fewer users would have gotten to read it, and the replies it has
since received would not exist.

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rotten
The problem is that you need a cold fusion reactor to make it, and that
technology is still too new.

~~~
gottareply2020
But did you see this latest article I just read? We’re so close!!

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amelius
Tl;DR:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater)

