The Doomsday Water

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the intriguing history of polywater: the hypothesized polymerized form of water that kicked off a cold-war controversy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And hey, if you are
new to the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, I
thought we do a brief explainer of who we are.
We don't usually do a bumper at the beginning of
our shows to say like, here's who we are, this
is our deal, but we thought we might have some
new people on board because we just recently added a
new video component of our podcast. We've been running a

(00:37):
long time. Got how many years.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
At this point, We've always been here.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yeah, I think I've been on this show since twenty
fifteen or so, Rob, you've been doing it significantly longer
than that. But as an audio format podcast, so for
many years we've covered topics, a lot of topics related
to science, a general nexus of kind of science and culture.
But we have interdisciplinary tastes. We like to talk about

(01:01):
stuff where science connects to literature or mythology, all kinds
of stuff like that. So that's who we are. We've
been around a long time, and the video thing is new.
So if you are here watching us, on Netflix here
at the beginning of a new phase.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Yeah, and as you hear us refer back to old episodes,
you might wonder, well, where are these episodes? I do
not see them. Well, you may be able to hear them.
Just go to wherever you get your podcast, look for
Stuff to Blow your Mind. Go ahead and subscribe. You'll
also find all of our podcast episodes there from years
and years back.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
That's right, So end bracket on the prelude there. Today,
on the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, we're going
to be talking about a substance called polywater. And I
think the first thing we need to establish about polywater
is that polywater does not exist. So this is not
going to be one of those episodes where we're talking

(01:56):
about an interesting, hypothetical, maybe existing substance. It's not like
the you know, the various candidates for dark matter, like
axions or weekly interacting massive particles. You know, these substances
where there's a reasonable debate about whether they exist or
there's a theoretical reason to keep looking for them and

(02:19):
tests to see if they exist. Polywater is not like that. Today,
no credible scientist thinks polywater is real, and there's really
no theoretical reason to think it might be real or
to keep looking for it.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, I do want to throw out, just to avoid
any confusion, this is polywater lowercase P. There is also
polywater capital P. So what we're talking about here not
to be confused with the American Polywater Corporation, the name
of which comes from a nineteen seventy three water based
cable pulling lubricant. Basically, the idea is that this was

(02:57):
trademarked under the name polywater as an odd to what
we're talking about here today. So which just to avoid
confusion there.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
That will become increasingly hilarious the more you learn about
the scientific polywater controversy, like why would you name a
product after this?

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Supposedly the creator just considered polywater. Polywater that we're talking
about here is kind of like the Holy Grail. It's
kind of like a unicorn, and he just was really
attached to the idea, like I'm going to name it polywater,
and okay, it has stuck. It's the name of the corporation.

Speaker 3 (03:31):
So if lowercase P polywater never existed, why are we
talking about it? Well, because, as with many cases in
history where people got something very wrong, there's actually a
lot you can learn by looking at the ways people
came to incorrect conclusions and sort of following their logic
and seeing where they went astray. So polywater has been

(03:54):
used in many interesting books and articles over the years
as a great example of what is called pathological science,
certain types of patterns of behavior that can lead researchers
into dead ends where they delude themselves into believing things
that are not based in fact. And one thing I

(04:15):
think we should really emphasize about polywater is that it
was not just some obscure little rabbit hole that a
few people went down at one point in history. For
a period of a few years, beginning in the nineteen
sixties and stretching into the early seventies, polywater was a
huge deal. A bunch of people all around the world,

(04:36):
including many leading scientists on the cutting edge of physical chemistry,
became convinced that it did exist, and some even became
quite obsessed with it, because if polywater did exist, it
would be a revolutionary, potentially world changing discovery. In one

(04:57):
of the sources I was reading, there is a quote
attributed to the Irish physicist John Desmond Bernal, who was
famous for pioneering the use of X ray crystallography. There's
some dispute about whether he actually said this or not,
but it's at least widely attributed to him secondhand that
he said, this is the most important physical chemical discovery

(05:19):
of the century.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
And the popular media, by the way, went crazy for polywater.
So you know, once this leapt out of the scientific
conferences and journals into the popular press, people were speculating
wildly about how polywater might drive all kinds of astounding
new technologies, from machine lubrication to new designs for nuclear reactors.

(05:43):
Maybe it's the key to understanding the secrets of life.
It's like what drives cell biology. Maybe it will unlock
eternal longevity. You know, we can live forever because of polywater.
There's a great There was a Wall Street Journal article
that I found quoted in a book that said, quote,
a few years from now, living room furniture may be

(06:06):
made out of water.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
Okay, all right, I would love that.

Speaker 3 (06:09):
Yeah. But by around the year nineteen seventy three, basically
everyone had figured out, oh, this was never real. So
we've been talking about how its hypothetical existence was processed.
But what was it? What was polywater supposed to be
Polywater was claimed to be not just some weird, obscure,

(06:32):
newly discovered molecule, but rather the until now hidden liquid
form of a very familiar molecule. Polywater was supposed to
be water. It was chemically identical to regular water. It
was H two oh, but it was allegedly a new

(06:52):
liquid structure of water discovered in a lab in the
Soviet Union, with a polymerized structure at the molecular level.
There were different ways of imagining what this polymer structure
looked like. Maybe these arrangements of squares or arrangements of hexagons.
Maybe we can talk more about that later in the episode.

(07:14):
But this polymerized arrangement of the water molecules was said
to give the water different characteristics, like a higher boiling point,
lower freezing point, and at room temperature, a thick, viscous consistency,
often compared to petroleum jelly. It was said to be

(07:35):
roughly forty percent denser or up to forty percent denser
than liquid water.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
Thicken your suits, I guess exactly.

Speaker 3 (07:43):
Yeah, just so even better than wondra, you know. So
imagine a form of water with no additives. Its just
plain water that has rearranged itself so that it feels
and behaves kind of like vasileine.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Okay, all right, hard to imagine, but which is weird,
you know, because we're not talking about like sentient water
or anything. It's just but still it's like, it's hard
to imagine. Yeah, I have a hard time imagining water
that behaves like basoline without thinking of just being some

(08:19):
basoline type substance.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
You know, Yeah, you'd think it was something else, But no,
this is the idea. This is just another form water
can take. And what's more shocking is that some researchers
working on polywater, certainly not all, but some of them
came to the conclusion that actually it was the most
stable form of water, more stable than the regular, thin,

(08:42):
sloshy water all around us and all throughout the environment,
raising the question of whether polywater was not actually the
true form of water, the water to which our form
of water wanted to return. So one interpretation take by some,
again not all, but some, was that it was possible

(09:04):
all the water around us could, given the right circumstances,
be turned into polywater, and it might be extremely difficult
or impossible to turn it back.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
All right, All the water around us includes everything, it
includes us. Yeah, so this is what neat that yea, yeah,
this is a pretty dire outlook, yes, yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
So I want to emphasize this was not the consensus
of polywater proponents at the time, but it was a
view being talked about in public. And just to set
the tone of how seriously some people took this idea,
I want to read an excerpt from a highly alarming
letter published in the journal Nature in nineteen sixty nine.

(09:46):
So this is not in some you know, crank publication.
This is like the premiere scientific journal. It's in Nature,
written by a chemist named F. J. Donaho of Wilkes
College in Pennsylvania. So here's some excerpts from note. Donaho writes, quote,
after being convinced of the existence of polywater, I am

(10:07):
not easily persuaded that it is not dangerous. The consequences
of being wrong about this matter are so serious that
only positive evidence that there is no danger would be acceptable.
Only the existence of natural ambient mechanisms which depolymerize the
material would prove its safety. Until such mechanisms are known

(10:28):
to exist, I regard the polymer as the most dangerous
material on Earth. Every effort must be made to establish
the absolute safety of the material before it is commercially produced.
Once the polymer nuclei become dispersed in the soil, it
will be too late to do anything. Even as I write,
there are undoubtedly scores of groups preparing polywater treat it

(10:52):
as the most deadly virus until its safety is established.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
Oh wow, keep watching the sky energy amazing.

Speaker 3 (11:00):
Note very firmly again that not everyone agreed with this
level of alarm, and the next issue of Nature published
several replies from prominent experts arguing that this warning was
grossly exaggerated and misguided, and they offered some good arguments
why polywater was not dangerous in the way Donahoe suggested.

(11:20):
We'll get more into that later. And of course there's
an added level of absurdity in that the substance they
were arguing about turned out to have never existed at all,
or at least not in the way that was understood.
But given what was believed at the time, these researchers,
I think had good arguments against Donahoe's level of alarm,
But I want to be sympathetic to people who would

(11:44):
have been really freaked out by this. When I put
myself in the place of a non expert in nineteen
sixty nine who maybe reads a newspaper article about this
note published in a leading scientific journal, and I don't understand,
or I maybe don't even encounter the soothing counter arguments
against it. It is a terrifying proposition. The feeling to

(12:09):
me when reading this note was kind of like when
Sarruman says, you know, the hour is later than you think.
He's got that line. Even as I write this, groups
around the world are creating this stuff, that microscopic quantities
of a substance that, if it escaped containment, could turn
Earth into a lifeless wax world. So many things about

(12:31):
this are so frightening if you don't if you imagine
yourself without the benefit of hindsight and maybe not understanding
the expert arguments against them, like the threat is microscopic.
Once it escapes, it is too late. I have no
control over this. Other people are doing it that I
can't stop them. They're making it right now. Also, imagine

(12:55):
this in the context of Cold War paranoia and the
nuclear arms race. You know, everybody's got a mindset of
you know, races to achieve new types of weapons and
potentials on either side of the Cold War. And then finally,
just the specific image of catastrophe conjured up here is
so weird and grotesque, Like, imagine all of our water

(13:20):
is now transformed into some kind of waxy substance or gel.

Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, the oceans turning into some sort of grotesque jell
o product, or our bodies suddenly transforming into some sort
of I'm only imagining here, but like a denser sludge
body that of course is also lifeless because it would
it would kill us. Yeah, crazy, crazy to imagine. And
then I think the atomic tie in is key because

(13:48):
at this point we are well aware of the fact
that the Cold War competition and other drivers in our
culture have certainly proven that we will totally race toward
complete and collective annihilation. Yeah, so it's not you know,
it's not like we would all say, whoa hold on,

(14:11):
let's not do polywater. It would be like, oh, if
you're doing polywater while I'm doing polywater, I'm gonna do
polywater even harder, right, and then.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
We're all sledge Yeah, And we can talk about some
analogies to this later on. One thing I'm sure lots
of people listening or watching out there are already thinking

(14:38):
of is the connection to Cat's Cradle. Tons of authors
writing on this subject have compared Donahoe's polywater doomsday scenario
in this letter to a famous literary analog, and that
is the fictional substance known as ice nine from Kurt
Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, which is responsible for the apocalyptic

(15:01):
ending of the book. People made this comparison, I want
to emphasize at the time the novel was already out.
It was published in nineteen sixty three, so this is
not just a retrospective comparison we're making now and people
were writing about it in nineteen sixty nine.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah. Yeah, this is fascinating. We've touched on Einstein before
because we did some episodes on different forms, different types
of ice.

Speaker 3 (15:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
So, first of all, it is totally fictional. There's no
such thing as ice neine, But within the context of
the novel, it's said to be a polymorph of water
with a much higher freezing point, and it converts all
water to ice nine upon contact. So it could be
the ocean, it could be the water inside a human
body if it makes contact it's going to change that

(15:47):
water into this new form of water, and that is
going to be disastrous for all concerned.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
Yeah, it would be acting as what's called a seed crystal.
The idea is it goes in and it provides a
nucleation point that all of the water around it around
it to rearrange into the ice nine form. Yeah, and
so would change all of the water in the biosphere
into this form that is frozen up to I think
like one hundred and fourteen degrees fahrenheit they say in

(16:14):
the novel. So obviously that's not good and it is
apocalyptic in the story. In fact, I have my copy
of Kat's Cradle right here. I got it off the shelf.
I was trying to find a good passage at the
end here that describes it. I didn't. I don't know,
maybe there is one I didn't dig up. There's one
part where so at the end of the story spoiler
alert for Kat's Cradle. But at the end of the story,

(16:36):
the ice nine does get out and it transforms all
of the water in the natural environment into ice nine.
And so the main character talks about like peeking up
out of a bunker into the world and he says.
He says, there were no smells, there was no movement.
Every step I took made a gravelly squeak and blue

(16:58):
white frost, and every squeak was echoed loudly. The season
of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight.
It was winter now and forever.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah that's bleak. Yeah, So I actually have not read
Cat's Cradle. This is not one of the Vonnegut books
I've read. Do people get ice nined in this as well?
Or is it just the.

Speaker 3 (17:21):
Yes, it works out badly for people. Not a happy ending.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
Now. I did look up the origin story, or at
least what is said to be the origin story of
this novel, and the story here goes that you had HG. Wells,
the noted author, legendary author science fiction during the nineteen thirties.
He visits GE Labs and while there he meets Irving

(17:47):
Lagmir who were actually going to come back to His
work included some ice based cloud seating. I think he
did some de icing research as well, and he pitched
the idea to HG. Wells. He's like, hey, you should
do a story about some sort of room temperature stable ice,
and Wells of course never wrote anything with that concept,

(18:09):
but people overheard this exchange. Apparently it included Kurt Vonnegut's brother,
his older brother, who apparently worked at G E. Labs
at the time, as did Kurt Vonnegut, I believe, And
so again, Wells never used it, and after both Lagmuir
and Wells had passed away, Kurt figured, hey, it's fair game.
I can take this and run with it now, and

(18:30):
he did. How much of that is true? I don't know.
That's the story anyway.

Speaker 3 (18:34):
And we should note that there actually is a form
of ice known as ice nine, but it does not
have any of the properties described.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
And I think cannot exist on Earth given the pressures
that we have on Earth. So it's yeah, for many
different reasons, this does not exist, and nothing like ice
nine in the novel exists.

Speaker 3 (18:57):
Kind of like the polywater doomstay scenario for multiple reasons.
Not something to worry about.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
Yeah, now, are there things like polywater to maybe worry about. Well,
maybe we'll get back to those, either later on in
this episode or in a subsequent episode.

Speaker 3 (19:11):
Yeah, Okay, Robert, you cool if we jump here into
sort of a historical sketch of the polywater affair.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, let's do.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
It, Okay. So I'm going to try to run through
a basic timeline of the polywater craze, and I want
to mention a couple of my main sources here. One
is an article called case Studies in Pathological Science published
in American Scientist in the year nineteen ninety two. The
author of this article is Dennis L. Rousseau, a PhD.

(19:42):
Physical chemist who was a longtime technical staff member at
Bell Labs. I looked him up and it looks like
now he's affiliated with Albert Einstein College of Medicine in
New York. But Rousseau is a great source on this
because he not only has he's not only done the
research to give this historical sketch and couch it in
the framing of pathological science, he was also personally involved

(20:07):
in polywater research on the skeptical side. He was the author,
the lead author of one of the main experiments that
really put the nail in the coffin of the polywater program.
That was kind of the final embarrassment to it.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
I killed polywater.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
Yeah. And I don't frame it like that, like he's
trying to crow over it or be mean like that.
I mean he approaches the subject, I think with some humility,
but yes, he did put out an experimental result that
was potentially kind of humiliating to polywater, even if it
wasn't meant to be. The other source that I found
really useful is a fantastic chapter in a book called

(20:45):
H two OO, A Biography of Water by the British
science writer Philip Ball, great science writer who I always
like his work. This book was first published in nineteen
ninety nine, and Ball has a really good historical overview
of polywater and again frames it within the context of
pathological science. So research on polywater began in the Soviet

(21:06):
Union in the early nineteen sixties, and it's worth pointing
out that it was not initially called polywater. For the
first few years, publications on this subject mostly referred to
it as anomalous water. And I think that difference in
naming may be more important than you might assume at first.
We'll maybe come back and discuss that later, but I

(21:29):
want to start off here kind of framing this within
the environment of global science in the nineteen sixties. So
obviously at this time, huge advancements were being made in
a bunch of fields, you know, computer science, aerospace, molecular biology,
and Philip Ball really flags this as well. Scientists were

(21:50):
constantly making discoveries that they, in many cases correctly predicted
would change the world. So it's a frothy time in
the sciences. But the global advance of science at this
time was made sort of awkward by the Cold War.
For the most part, Western scientists published in British and

(22:10):
American sometimes continental European journals, the majority of which were
in English, while Eastern Bloc scientists mostly published in Russian
language journals, And there was transmission of scientific information back
and forth, like there was translation of journals going from
each side to the other, but the transmission of information

(22:32):
between the two spheres was limited in certain ways, for
both intentional and unintentional reasons. And these reasons included everything
from certain types of government restrictions on travel and communication
across the Iron Curtain to simple things like the language
barrier and the financial costs of acquiring Western journals in
the Soviet Union. And it seems to me that motivations

(22:56):
and outlook throughout the scientific community were very mixed. Like
some scientists on both sides had a more global view
of worldwide cooperation, very you know, for the good of
humankind kind of approach to scientific work. Others were more
partisan or nationalistic, you know, trying to advance their side
in the Cold War and kind of jealous or suspicious

(23:18):
of the other side. So while communication of cutting edge
science between East and West did happen, it was sometimes
limited or delayed, and in certain fields that were seen
as more crucial for national security, it was more often
tightly constrained or not shared at all, And a lot
of times when new discoveries were shared between the two spheres,

(23:42):
it happened at these international conferences, through lectures or even
just individual chance meetings between scientists.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
We've discussed before on the show how this competitiveness in
the Cold War it led also led to things like
paranormal research on both sides, where a lot of it
seemed to have been fueled by the idea that, like,
there may be nothing to this, but if there is
something to yes, we want we want to at least

(24:10):
be on equal footing with the enemy. And of course
there was nothing to any of it.

Speaker 3 (24:14):
Yeah, if the Soviets are training psychic assassins, we better
check that out too and see if there's something going
on here.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yeah, even if in reality we might maybe we're even
we're even falling into a trap, wasting our time, and
that was the whole point. So yeah, we've discussed that
on the show before, so similar energy in some of this, I imagine.

Speaker 3 (24:33):
So the timeline for polywater within this context starts in
the early nineteen sixties. I think the first research would
have been around nineteen sixty two when a Soviet researcher
named Nikolai Fedyakin made a discovery while working at the
Polytechnical Institute in Kostroma, which is a city on the
Volga northeast of Moscow. And what Fedyakin found was that

(24:57):
when you put water inside a very narrow glass capillary tube,
so imagine like a tiny, tiny glass straw where the
tube is only about as wide as a human hair,
or even narrower. When you did that, it appeared that
the water would somehow separate into two different columns of liquid.

(25:20):
So think about like you ever mix up a salad dressing.
You're mixing up oil and water. If you don't have
a good to mulsifier in there, you might shake it
up and it'll get all mixed up, but then over
time the suspension will separate and the oil will float
to the top. Fadyakin was watching something like this happen
over a period of days or weeks inside these extremely

(25:43):
tiny glass tubes, except it wasn't oil and water, it
was just water. So it was like pure water was
separating into water and question marks something else. What could
it be? And this anomolus secondary substance would tend to
appear at the top of the column in the tube,

(26:06):
and it seemed to grow in volume proportional to a
loss of water at the bottom of the tube. It
wasn't like all of the water became the stuff at
the top, but it looked to Fedyakin like some of
it turned into this water at the top. So it
really seemed like what was happening was that the regular
water was evaporating from below and then condensing above, having

(26:28):
been transformed into something else. But there was no physical
reason it should have been evaporating and condensing somewhere else,
because the temperature and the pressure in the tubes were
supposedly held constant throughout. So the only way this would
really make sense was if the secondary water was somehow

(26:49):
different from the primary water, with a lower vapor pressure
meaning a higher boiling point, and Fedyakin believed this secondary
liquid was still water, but it was a new form
of water, chemically identical irregular water, so still h two oz,
but with a different physical structure that gave it different

(27:10):
properties at scale. For example, it seemed to be denser
than normal liquid water. And I'll come back to those
properties in just a minute. But here we have the
intervention of a figure who will become incredibly important in
the history of polywater. After Fedyakin publishes his findings in
a Russian journal, they catch the attention of an extremely

(27:32):
distinguished and important Soviet chemist and named Boris V. Der Yagan. Deryagan,
working out of Moscow, believed this anomalous water to be
of immense scientific and technological importance, so he started a
collaboration with Fedyakin, and then it seems he effectively took
over research on the subject. So for a while, Derriagan

(27:54):
would become sort of the anomalous water guy. He's the
main advocate for this program, and he and his colleagues
published ten papers on the anomalous water by the time
he presented on this subject at a conference in nineteen
sixty six. So we mentioned earlier what some of the characteristics,
the alleged characteristics of this anomalous water were, but I

(28:17):
just want to run through them briefly again here. The
numbers cited tend to be different in different sources, and
I think this probably reflects a range of reported results
in the primary literature, so I'm trying to kind of
put them all together here. This water somehow did not
boil at the regular boiling point of water, so did
not boil at one hundred degrees celsius. It had a

(28:39):
much higher boiling point. Some sources place it at about
two hundred degrees cee. Others say more like three hundred degrees.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
That's going to definitely hurt your soup thickening applications here.

Speaker 3 (28:52):
Yeah, some problems here. Its freezing point seem to also
be more of a range, beginning at about negative thirty
degrees celsia, and then I've seen other sources say negative
fifty degrees celsius. And again it was said to be
more dense and viscous than normal water. So we get
a range of figures, but it's up to like forty
percent denser than normal water and fifteen times more viscous.

(29:17):
Sources describe its consistency as similar to that of petroleum
jelly like vacilline, or sometimes compare it to paraffin wax.
I want to emphasize though here there was very little
of it being made, So this wasn't like they were
making bowls of it and sticking their hands into it
and saying, oh, it's like vacoline. They were making microscopic

(29:38):
quantities and then extract extrapolating from those microscopic quantities into
what they thought the macroscopic qualities would be.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
Okay, reminds me a little bit of our recent episode
on the idea of manufacturing gold and what is currently
possible like small unstable amounts so forth.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, this is a somewhat
similar It is a manufacturing program of this very interesting
and potentially quite valuable new material. But they can only
make tiny, tiny amounts at a time. So this anomalous water,

(30:26):
if it really existed, would have bizarre and fascinating implications.
For one thing, Philip Ball explains this in his chapter,
it might not even make sense to call this new
water anomalous water, because really this form of water, with
the lower vapor pressure would potentially be the more stable

(30:47):
form of water. So really it would be the regular water,
and the water that we know would be the weird
water that would be it would be the unusual form.
It might be what can mists call meta stable. Meta
stable would mean it's in a semi stable form occupying

(31:09):
a local energy minimum, which, given the right conditions to
get past that energy barrier, will hop down and transform
into the more stable lower energy form. As a rough analogy,
you can think of meta stability as the chemical equivalent
of like a ball sitting in a bowl on the

(31:29):
edge of a table. So the ball is stable sitting
in the bowl. It's not going to suddenly fall through
the bottom of the bowl and through the table onto
the floor. But if it's somehow perturbed, like if it
is knocked over the lip of the bowl and off
the edge of the table, gravity will act on it
and pull it all the way down to the floor.

(31:50):
So in this analogy, the bowl is the liquid water
we know and the floor is the anomalous water. Here
we get back to that scary image.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yeah, yes, scary is a good description because it does
remind me of a number of the concepts that you
encounter in cosmic horror. You know, where there's generally some
sort of a scenario by which reality, be it inner
reality or outer reality as we know it turns out
to be in a lot more fragile a place. Yes,

(32:21):
and just by knowing about its fragility, you put it
at risk.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
Yes. Yes, that the horror of what you thought was
normal is actually the brief exception, and we were about
to return to the more normal state of reality, which
is horrifying to us.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
So I feel like I need to emphasize again that
this was by no means agreed on by all proponents
of the new water. But to some it seemed possible
that thermodynamically all water wanted to be the anomalous water,
and with the right push, like some kind of seed crystal,
it could turn into polywater. So what would have been

(33:02):
the theoretical reason that water took this different form. Philip
Ball's account here again has a great section explaining the reasoning.
One thing that is absolutely true is that molecules of
liquid water behave weirdly and assume new structures when they
come into contact with a surface or a wall. At

(33:26):
the interface with a surface, several layers of liquid water
molecules nearest the surface will often form unusual patterns and arrangements,
so they'll act differently than water. Just in the center
of a mass of liquid water, right up at the wall,
they start to arrange themselves in different ways. Boris Deriagan

(33:49):
knew something about this and proposed that something about the
interaction with the glass surface on the inside of the
capillary tube caused the water to assume this new structure
and then, even more remarkably, somehow remember or retain this
new structure even after evaporating and condensing again. So Derriagan

(34:16):
and his team they started, you know, they fired up
production and started making samples of this anomalous water. They
came up with a faster system than Fidyakin had used,
though the amounts they were able to produce it at
a time were still very, very small, because the tubes
were tiny, Like the tubes were like a tenth of
a millimeter in width, and the columns of this anomalous

(34:38):
water they were making, you know, might only be a
millimeter tall. So you're talking tiny, tiny amounts. And one
thing we're thinking about is that when you've got that
little of a sample to work with, with these tiny,
tiny amounts, you really need to be conscious of the
dangers of contamination. Philip Ball flags this and Rousseauta talk

(35:00):
about this in his paper as well. You're making so
little of it that even a tiny amount of contamination
in total in the capillary tubes would be a significant
part of the final product and could change its properties significantly. So,
you know, there were all these efforts made to ensure

(35:22):
that the samples were of the highest possible purity, Like
Derriogan and colleagues they used. They made sure that the
silica used to make the glass capillary tubes was made
was very pure. It was made from pure quartz, and
this was to prevent like trace inorganic materials getting mixed
in with the glass and then some leeching into the

(35:44):
water in the tubes. And they also worked very hard
to ensure that the water used in the experiment was pure.
So they're of the you know, if you suggest to
them that their samples are contaminated, they're like, no, look
at all these links we go to to make sure
that the samples cannot be contaminated. It's very very pure.
But at the same time, it was still quite laborious

(36:06):
to produce the anomalous water and very little was available,
which limited the testing that could be done on it.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
So this is happening kind of in a bubble for
a while, right, but eventually polywater is going to leak out.

Speaker 3 (36:19):
That's right. So the Western scientists start catching on to
polywater beginning in around nineteen sixty six, Derriagan gave some
conference presentations on it. Gave one in nineteen sixty five
in Moscow, another in England in sixty six. Some scientists
did attend these, but not many took notice, but a

(36:42):
few did so ballflags a few scientists who got interested
from these earliest talks. One was named Brian Pethica, who
was a director of Unilever Research Laboratory at Port Sunlight
in England. And another one is a figure I mentioned
earlier in the episode, John Desmond Bernal, very famous and
respected crystallographer, and supposedly after one of these I think

(37:06):
it's the presentation in England, Bernal took der Yagan back
to his lab at Birkbeck College in London and they
had a talk where they were talking they were like
talking about the procedure for making the anomalous water. And
this was at this meeting. This was when Bernal allegedly
said that this is going to be, you know, one
of the most important discoveries of the century. So the

(37:31):
two scientists I just mentioned in their associates, they start
cranking on trying to do polywater research. It's not called
polywater yet though, it's still anomalous water. And then meanwhile
some American scientists get interested as well. You have Robert
Stromberg of the National Bureau of Standards in Maryland, and
then also Ellis Lippencott of the Center for Materials Research

(37:56):
at the University of Maryland. They start cranking on polywater
search as well. I think this was roughly nineteen sixty eight,
and then anomalous water really started to break out into
the open in sixty nine, when you had Pethica's team
publish a paper in Nature. They reported their attempts to
recreate the substance via dir Yogan's methods, and they started

(38:19):
talking about the properties of the new water. Very importantly.
Their publication included photographs, so now there's something to look at.
You can see these microscopic columns, something that had condensed
in the tubes. But one thing here is that Pethica's
team offered some reasonable caveats For example, they said, we

(38:39):
can't rule out that something is leeching out of the
pyrex glass tubes and mixing with the water to form
a gel. That's possible, but they thought that might explain
our results. But it doesn't explain Deryogan's results because they're
not using just like normal pyrex glass. They're using this
special pure quartz silica glass. And then also they mentioned

(39:03):
that their attempts to figure out what this stuff was
were severely limited by how little of it could be produced.
Microscopic amounts are hard to study. There is a quote
attributed to one of JD. Bernell's students saying, if only
we could make a thimbleful, but the anomalous water would
really become a sensation. A few months later, when Stromberg

(39:26):
and Lippincott published their own research in the journal Science,
and their research was a big deal because it used
the technique of infrared spectroscopy. So spectroscopy is a powerful
tool of analysis that lets you study a substance by
measuring how it absorbs, emits or scatters various kinds of

(39:46):
electromagnetic radiation, like infrared or UV light or visible light.
Each molecule has its own special pattern of absorption or
emission or scattering, determined by things like the atomic makeup
and the chemical bonds within it. So you can make
a spectrum graph of a substance and that will tell

(40:07):
you things about its molecular makeup and structure which are
too small to see with the naked eye. Spectroscopy is
used all throughout various kinds of sciences. It's not just
in chemical analysis, you know, it's used in like astronomy.
We use spectroscopy to try to figure out what elements
are in the atmosphere of another planet we're looking at,
or something like that. Stromberg and Lippincott publish their paper

(40:29):
in the journal Science in nineteen sixty nine, and they
were building on some previous research that had also used spectroscopy,
but they were trying to show that the anomalous water,
because it produced this different spectrum, had a different structure
from familiar water, and they proposed that it was something
like a stable polymer. And this paper is where we

(40:52):
get the term polywater. It was the paper's title. And
I think we should pause here to think of this,
because I think it's wise not to overlook the power
of giving something an intriguing name. Naming is persuasive. Naming
is rhetorical. I think in a lot of cases, giving

(41:13):
a concept an evocative name really affects how it is
received in multiple ways. For one thing, if there's a
name for something, instead of just talking about something in
descriptive terms, like anomalous water, if there's a specific new
name for it feels like it's something that really exists,
doesn't it. You know, why would it have a name

(41:34):
if it didn't exist? And then the qualities of the
name affect how we think about the thing. To me,
when I hear polywater sounds new, sounds exciting, sounds like
a product almost. In fact, that may be one reason
why it could have been appealing to adopt as the
name of a product line actually, which you were talking

(41:54):
about earlier.

Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah, this is a great point though. Yeah, once you've
given it an intriguing name, polly water, it's like a
like the brain kind of chews on it when it
absorbs the term, because you know, water as mundane as
it and as it gets also being you know, essential
to pretty much everything. But that what does polywater mean?

(42:18):
Like you have to sort of like break down what
the con what it even means and it doesn't sound
overtly evil or anything. It's not like they called it
doom water or and it's also not super goofy. They
didn't call it like, I don't know, ranch water or something,
but polywater. It just it begins to raise questions in

(42:39):
the mind. And it does kind of feel like the
sort of thing like like it's like it's it's hiding,
you know, like it's it could be secretly bad, but
we just don't know how to feel about it. Just
based on that that that term.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
Yeah, well, these authors, I think we're not making the
case it was secretly bad.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
You know.

Speaker 3 (42:56):
They were not one of the ones saying, oh, it's
gonna it's gonna take over the earth and and olar
water into vasoline.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
So, now that the substance had an and I should say,
by the way, that at this point a bunch of
people writing about anomalous water now polywater, were proposing physical
molecular structures for the polymers. Some of them were saying, oh,
it's a square form with four linked water molecules. Others

(43:24):
were saying it's a hexagon form forming these sheets of
water molecules. This was, again without having actually established firmly
that it was water, but they were you know, they
were moving on quickly to the theoretical stage and trying
to say like what can how does it work before
firmly establishing that it actually is something.

Speaker 2 (43:46):
Well, and then also the fact that it's being picked
up increasingly by science communicators, by writers, right, yeah, because
in bringing a concept like this to a wider audience,
you you kind of do have to to get beyond
like just the pure chemistry and speculative structure of the thing,
and you have to end up talking about the practicalities

(44:08):
or hypothetical practicalities in order to make people understand like
what you're talking about, you know, you have to sort
of work back from that to communicate the chemistry that's right.

Speaker 3 (44:18):
So yeah, now that it had been named I think,
very importantly and had been given credibility by respected scientists
in a Western journal, it was kind of polywater fever,
you know. In nineteen sixty nine, a lot of researchers
in relevant fields took notice. They started talking and writing
about the subject. There was a division of opinion. Some

(44:39):
were skeptical about it. Some were like, are we sure
this isn't just contamination or impurities? Others were more bullish
on it. You know, they're like, no, this is real.
You know, this is going to change the world. There
was this proliferation of theoretical work on the structure of
poly water, but as you alluded to by it was
by the summer of nineteen sixty nine really that the

(45:00):
mainstream press caught wind of it and started going going bananas.
So Philip Ball mentions that once the subject move from
professional and scientific journals into the mainstream press, the mainstream
press kind of became the preferred venue for even the
scientists themselves to communicate on the subject. Maybe not all

(45:24):
of them, but some of them, the most you know,
the most eager to argue, wanted to go straight to
the mainstream press. And you know what, you still see
versions of this phenomenon today, don't you. Like, somebody has
a revolutionary new idea, it's not really getting traction with
their professional colleagues. So you can just bypass your expert
colleagues and take your claims straight to the daily mail,

(45:46):
or you know, you go straight to some kind of
blog or popular press, or now even easier, you go
to social media or the podcast circuit.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
That's right, Yeah, then you're you're avoiding then the the
peer of scrutiny that you would otherwise go through, and
you're also throwing out, you know, what may be just
a very loose hypothesis into the public arena where there
may be less of an understanding at times regarding you know,

(46:19):
the nature of hypothesis and and how these ideas work.
And indeed, the enterprise of science that that every scientific
idea that is presented is not is not one solidified yet,
that we go through this process. So so, yeah, you
can see where the problems emerge here.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
Yeah, process is so important that that science is a
process of gradual understanding and clarification that you know, over time,
you you bring things into sharper focus and you figure
out you're able to weed out what you thought yesterday.
You know, the things you thought yesterday, some of them
actually do make sense and are are borne out by

(46:57):
results and some are not.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
Yeah, and when you do realize that, okay, polywater never existed,
like that is part of the scientific process. That is
like a natural part of it. That's not like ohe
science messed up. Yeah, you know, the mistakes are part
of the of the whole process.

Speaker 3 (47:13):
Though I think it's important to be fair and be
clear about the fact that polywater was not something that
was roundly rejected as fringe crankery by by prestigious scientists
at the time. A lot of very respected scientists were
buying into it. Certainly not all the were sceptics too,
but it was treated as a legitimate, lively debate.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
Meanwhile, in the popular media, you had all this you know,
wild stuff. We mentioned earlier, the idea that you know,
they were saying, we're going to use it as some
kind of super lubricant or it's going to be in
nuclear reactors. Philip Ball highlights that quote from the Wall
Street Journal about how our furniture is going to be
made out of polywater.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
How is that? How would that even work?

Speaker 3 (47:53):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (47:54):
It's like waterbeds sort of.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
I didn't. I didn't dig in and get to the
bottom of that, but I would like to know more.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
I'm guessing stuffing of couch cushions with polywater.

Speaker 3 (48:02):
But anyway, here's one detail. This is also mentioned in
Ball's account that I love the idea came up in
some popular media that, h what if the lunar regolith
that was that was sticking to the astronaut's boots during
the moon landing was actually a kind of polymer moon mud.

(48:24):
It was lunar soil with polywater mixed in. Like, wouldn't
that be a cool way that the Moon could have
retained water over the past billions of years.

Speaker 2 (48:33):
Oh yeah, that's just like essentially oceans of water pudding.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
Yeah, yeah, moon mud, polymud, And again other articles we're
talking about, Oh, it's it's going to be the key
to understanding how how life works, or it's going to unlock,
you know, the secrets of eternal life. Maybe it plays
some role in cells. And this is also, of course,

(48:58):
the time we get to that letter Thatajo sends to
Nature about how polywater is potentially the most dangerous substance
on Earth and its containment was of absolute necessity. Now

(49:18):
we already explained early on what Donahoe's reasoning was there
that okay, so a bit of a bit of this
polywater acts as a seed crystal. It transforms all of
the water in the environment into the more stable form
of water, which is polywater, and then if there is
no ambient mechanism to turn it back, then we're really

(49:39):
in a bad situation. There However, in the next issue
of Nature, Donahoe's note was rebuked by responses from multiple
esteemed scientists, including Bernal who I mentioned earlier, who is
a very very dogged proponent of polywater, very much a believer,
also by a British chemist named Douglas Everett, and their

(50:02):
point was like, well, you are getting way ahead of yourself,
and there are good reasons for thinking that this is
not going to happen. So they've pointed out, for example,
we've seen polywater in contact with regular water already. We've
seen that in the laboratory, and we have not observed
it transforming the normal water through touch alone. So it's

(50:23):
not like water comes into contact with polywater and then
is all transformed. That's not what we observe. And then
second they say, you know, if polywater exists, it must
occur sometimes in nature because there are natural quartz surfaces,
some must have pores and capillaries like the tubes in
our experiments. And it is not already the case that

(50:46):
all of Earth's water has been transformed into polywater. So
if that were going to happen through exposure to poly water,
it would have already happened in the past four and
a half billion years. If it hasn't already happened, it's
not going to happen.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
Right, Right, because to be clear, like, it's not like
the invention of glass and putting water in glass tubes
created a drastically different environment that it never existed on
Earth before, right, And.

Speaker 3 (51:10):
These seem like reasonable arguments to me, though again it's
this double confusion to sort through when you're trying to
figure out whether it's reasonable to fear a doomsday scenario
from a substance that within a few years everyone would
agree does not exist at all.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
Yeah, it's really fascinating to think about, especially the scientist's
point of view and all of this at the time.
And you see this in various other scenarios that are
similar to the poly water scenario that we'll get to later,
where you know, how do you proceed if you're faced
with even a slim possibility of a disastrous consequence? Do

(51:50):
stop researching? Do you put up you know, you know,
blockers and you'd refuse to go forward? Do you run
more tests? Like how how does science proceed? Because we've
talked about before, like science, you know, we think of
it as kind of like a slime mold and a maze,
and it's branching out and it's going through the different
corridors of the maze. But then if you say no

(52:12):
slime mold, you don't go down this corridor, like that's
that's you know, that kind of runs against the whole scenario.
But on the other hand, like there are definite there
are definite times and places where you where we as
a culture have to say no, we can't, we can't
test like this, We can't, we can't or shouldn't go
after this. But it becomes a very nuanced conversation regarding

(52:35):
some of those corridors.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
Yeah, it's hard to know where the line should be,
especially I think when you're dealing. I mean, it's clear
if it's like there's a pretty good chance of very
catastrophic danger, Okay, then it becomes very clear we should
do what we can to limit this research. What if
it's like the danger would be absolutely apocalyptic if if

(53:00):
it became real, but the chance of it happening is
considered very very low. What do you do there?

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Yeah, yeah, and then yeah, what are the potential of
positive outcomes and so forth. So again we'll come back
to some other scenarios that also have these parameters in place.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
By the way, while all of this media frenzy is
going on and all of this debate is raging back
and forth, Philip ballflags something that I think is really
worth noting. He says, while all this is happening, there
still has not been a single high quality chemical analysis
of polywater published anywhere. So while we're arguing about what

(53:39):
its polymer structure is, about whether or not it's dangerous,
nobody has actually shown definitively that it is water. There's
been no experiment that has demonstrated this, and again it's
difficult because of how little of it there is. So
let's check in with the polywater skeptics at the time,

(54:00):
mentions one named Arthur Cherkin of the Veterans Administration Hospital
in Sepulvada, California. Churkin is out there suggesting, are we
sure this is not just contamination from the glass tubes,
Like what if particles of silica from the glass or
getting into the water turning into a kind of gel
or being dispersed in the water, and that is affecting

(54:21):
the properties of the water. Of course, again, the polywater
advocates were as they often said. They were like, well,
maybe your samples are contaminated, but ours are pure. So
you know, the fact that you might find a contaminated
sample doesn't show that there's anything wrong with ours. Also
want to mention a polywater skeptical researcher named Robert Davis

(54:43):
of Purdue University. He had his own theory about the
origins of polywater. He said, I think it's sweat, and
he actually this wasn't original to him. He highlighted a
previously little notice finding that had been public in a
Russian language journal years earlier in nineteen sixty eight, which

(55:05):
tried to create the anomalous water and had determined that
it was almost entirely made of organic contaminants, which Davis
interpreted as mostly sweat. Oh wow, And here's where the
author of the case Studies in Pathological Science paper comes in.
The author Dennis Rousseau. He talks in the paper about

(55:27):
how he started studying polywater when he was an associate
of the professor Sergio Porto at the University of Southern
California around nineteen sixty nine. They initially they got very
excited about polywater. They thought, actually, I'm going to read
a quote from his paper, he said, quote could polywater
alter biological processes? We wondered if polywater could extend longevity,

(55:51):
possibly being the long awaited fountain of youth. So they
got excited, but they started their own experiments. They tried
to do a Raman scattering measurement. This is another type
of spectroscopy experiment where you're going to try to measure
vibrational modes of the molecule. So you shoot the sample

(56:12):
with a laser and then you examine the spectrum of
the scattered light. However, they hit a snag here. I'm
going to read from Rousseau. Quote as soon as we
directed our laser on polywater, it turned into a black char.
Doesn't seem right?

Speaker 2 (56:28):
Yeah? Yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
He goes on to say, quote, this was no polymer
of water, but more likely a carbonaceous material. We quickly
abandoned our grandiose plans for exploiting polywater's immortal qualities. So
something has gone wrong here. Water is not supposed to
burn up and turn into a carbon soot under a laser.
Obviously the polywater they had was not water.

Speaker 2 (56:51):
Yeah. Even the worst chefs among us have not managed
to burn water like this.

Speaker 3 (56:56):
Yeah, right, So they talk about how they also did
some research trying to do some chemical analysis of supplied
polywater samples, and they discovered that the samples were heavily
contaminated with sodium. In fact, so heavily contaminated that they
were mostly contamination. Somewhere between twenty and sixty percent of

(57:17):
their polywater samples were by weight were sodium. They also
had some potassium, some sulfate, chlorine, and trace amounts of
other stuff. So it wasn't just that it was contaminated,
it was like almost all contamination. So Rousseau goes on
to explain that his experience did not end after the
laser incident. He moved on in his career and became

(57:40):
a researcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the summer of
nineteen sixty nine, where he there found his colleagues and
managers in a state of excitement about polywater. They were
trying to figure out what all this meant, and he
recounts being invited to one meeting to discuss whether polywater
could be to blame for dielectric losses in transatlantic telephone cables, Like,

(58:04):
was polywater somehow is it seeping into the cables? And
changing the properties of the cable or the insulating material.
So he was put in charge of investigating polywater at
Bell Labs or I don't know if he was the
head guy in charge, but he was given he was
tasked with investigating it, and he kept he was By
this point he was pursuing the idea, I think we've

(58:26):
got a serious impurities and contamination problem, and that may
be to explain what's going on with polywater. Again, he
got the response we've mentioned earlier, these these kind of
handwaving responses from the polywater proponents that are like, well,
maybe the sample you tested was contaminated, but our samples
are not contaminated. So Rousseau attacked to this in several directions.

(58:50):
One experiment he did was that he he tried to
make polywater using not regular water but heavy water. We've
done episodes on heavy water in the past, but heavy
water is made with the hydrogen replaced with a heavier
isotope of hydrogen known as deuterium. And when he made
polywater following the standard method with heavy water, and then

(59:14):
he did infrared spectroscopy on it, he got the same
line that they had showed in the original polywater spectroscopy experiment.
So that shouldn't be right, you know, it shouldn't be
looking the same with heavy water, So it kind of
makes it look like the stuff we're calling polywater isn't water.
And then he writes quote, Determined to understand polywater's infrared spectrum,

(59:38):
I turned to my athletic passion handball. After a lively game,
I returned to the laboratory with my sweaty t shirt
and wrung the perspiration into a flask. When I placed
the sweat in an infrared spectrometer, the spectrum looked strikingly
similar to that of polywater. And then he shows the
graph side by side and they look almost exactly the same.

(01:00:00):
So what did this mean? This was some pretty strong
evidence that polywater was not water. It was probably in
different experiments, different things, but at least in the experiment
that had produced this famous spectrum graph that everybody was
using as proof that this is really different than the

(01:00:21):
structure of regular water. In that case, it was probably
a result of organic contamination of the capillary tubes where
it was being condensed, and that contamination may well have
been sweat. And he says, you know, after he published
this result, research on polywater really pretty quickly started to
grind to a halt. There was still some stuff going

(01:00:43):
through the peer review process that would continue to kind
of trickle out over the next couple of years, but
new research stopped pretty quick and eventually even borister Yagan
and the pro polywater Associates they admitted that the entire
phenomenon was probably just a mistake. Is probably a result
of biological contaminants like sweat being mistaken for a type

(01:01:06):
of water.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
Given the amount of time and energy invested in it,
I think it's like this noble though, yeah, to say,
you know, actually we got it wrong and not like
double down and then enter into like a realm of
true ignorance on the topic. You know.

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
Yeah, it sounds like they took some mighty convincing, but
they did eventually admit it, and that's more than you
can say for you know, a lot of people out
there today pushing their own pet theories. Who are They're
never going to admit that they were wrong, you know, right,
So hats off to der Augen for finally getting there
saying like, yeah, it looks like this was a mistake.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Now as we get closer to the end of this episode.
Joe We mentioned pathological science earlier, what what is pathological
about the polywater scenario here?

Speaker 3 (01:01:51):
Well? So, Rousseau in his article compares the history of
polywater with other cases of what he calls pathological science,
like cold old fusion and infinite dilution. He says, in
all cases, these were research programs where proponents could have

(01:02:11):
performed definitive experiments that would have immediately answered the question
once and for all, that would have shown whether the
discovery was real or an illusion, but that these definitive
experiments were always kind of avoided somehow, with proponents preferring
to expand on and nibble around the edges of whatever

(01:02:34):
initial result inspired the craze. And he takes that as
kind of a a fear of confronting, you know, the
final Like there is some indication that there's a fear
of what if I'm wrong about this, and so you
don't want to just like find out once and for all.

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:54):
So for you know, like I mentioned, for so long
with poly water, there were these seriments or not experiments,
theoretical work trying to get into the polymer structure of
it when no one had fully done a like rigorous
chemical analysis to prove yes, this is h two OZ.
So maybe we can save some of Rousseau's core ideas

(01:03:17):
about like the characteristics of pathological science for the next episode.
But there are a couple of peripheral pathological science related
ideas I want to visit here right before we wrap
up today. One thing I want to say is, I
think the wrong takeaway from the Polywater episode is that,
you know, we should look at these people and think, oh,

(01:03:38):
what a bunch of idiots, you know, that we should
feel superior to them because they fell for an erroneous enterprise.
I think it's a lot more useful to acknowledge that
these are smart people. They knew what they were doing
in various ways, but they they got tricked, they fell
for something that wasn't true, and so it's much more

(01:03:59):
useful to look for ways that we can all learn
from this episode because we're all fallible in this way.
We can all get wrapped up in an idea that
we're stuck on for some reason, for maybe emotional ego reasons,
or we just found ourselves really convinced of it, you know,
at a certain time and place in which you know,
we wanted to hear something like this, and for whatever reason,

(01:04:22):
we're stuck on it and we can't see the good
reasons for doubting it, and so like, are there patterns
to be aware of, to watch out for so we
don't find ourselves falling for the next polywater. That's a
big part of what the pathological science idea is about.
And again we can come back to that next time.
But another thing I want to talk about is something

(01:04:43):
that Philip Ball mentions in his chapter. He highlights some
comments by a scientist and named Felix Franks, who wrote
a book about the polywater controversy in nineteen eighty one,
and Franks argues that part of what made the polywater
illusions so powerful and so irresistible was the role of
the mass media. It was because it wasn't just happening

(01:05:07):
in the scientific journals and with you know, written correspondence
going back and forth there, that it's spilled over into
the mainstream press and the popular media. And there were
multiple problems with this, Like, of course people in the
media without expertise or understanding of the subject would engage
in their own wild speculation, but they would also encourage

(01:05:29):
scientists to do the same sort of encouraging the worst
tendencies of certain scientists involved in this controversy. It also
provided an outlet with a less discerning audience. You know,
that's not to insult people like us, you know, the
regular readers, non scientists, but we don't have the expertise
always to understand whether what a supposed authority says is

(01:05:54):
reasonable or not. So instead of talking to knowledgeable, skeptical peers,
you're now talking to people who have no idea if
they should take what you're saying seriously. And then one
thing that I think is especially probably toxic about this
and is very relevant I think to the world today
is the increasing velocity of public comment. How Like, if

(01:06:18):
things are going back and forth in scientific journals, there
is a delay, and that can have some downsides, like
it can slow down scientific progress obviously, but it also
has a lot of upsides, like you are more considered
in your responses if you have to wait, you know,
there's a waiting period before you can get your comment

(01:06:39):
in response out in public. And if you speed up
the ability to respond back and forth between you know,
between people who are criticizing each other or arguing about something.
I think a lot of times that degrades the quality
of the argument. It increases the likelihood of people making
responses and arguments that really, if they had time to

(01:07:00):
think about it, they would know or not great or
not the best way to reply.

Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. And really, like the
media often ends up filling that space between the peer
viewed correspondence and the more scientific correspondence. This is happening.
I mean, like, I just think of various cases where
there'll be some sort of amazing headline grabbing the finding,
and you know, there's going to be kind of a

(01:07:28):
balancing that occurs in the aftermath of something like that usually,
but if it just hits the headlines, then it kind
of solidifies out there for so many different people, people
who may not tune in for the follow up studies
and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:07:45):
Yeah, Okay, well, should we wrap it there for today
and then come back in our next core episode to
talk some more about the relationship of polywater to the
idea of pathological science and then also maybe to other
cases where there have been proposed containment dangers of speculative

(01:08:06):
technologies or scientific experiments, some that might be more actually
dangerous or more potentially actually dangerous than the polywater scare
turned out to be.

Speaker 2 (01:08:17):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, definitely. I mean there's some that
we're living through right now and others that are maybe
a little bit more far fetched. But we again come
back to the scenario we're talking about with polywater researchers,
where hindsight is twenty twenty on all of these things,
and like when you're in the moment and you're staring
down some potential catastrophe in the future based on new

(01:08:42):
avenues of research, new scientific findings, like, how do you respond?
And so in the next episode we'll get into some
of that as well. Now, as for how you respond
a listener, you can certainly email us. We would love
to hear from you. We're going to throw out that
email address in just a minute here, but yeah, if
you're new to the show, people write in all the time,

(01:09:02):
and we love it if you have additional insight based
on your profession or your passions, your travels, or just
your day to day reality. Yeah, right in, tell us,
tell us what's up. We also take episode suggestions and
just you know, just right in to say hi if
you like. As well, just to remind you here that

(01:09:24):
the stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast. Again, we've been around for years. You
can find all of our episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
Just look for Stuff to Blow your Mind. We have
our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays usually, and on
Wednesdays we do a short form episode and on Fridays
that's when we set aside most serious concerns and we
just talk about a weird movie on episodes that we

(01:09:44):
call Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:09:46):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway.
As Rob said, if you would like to get in
touch for any reason, if you want to suggest a
topic for the future, if you want to give feedback
on this episode, or if you just want to give
us a friendly hello, you can email us at contact
at stuff to blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:10:12):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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