Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And hey, if you are
Speaker 3: new to the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, I
Speaker 3: thought we do a brief explainer of who we are.
Speaker 3: We don't usually do a bumper at the beginning of
Speaker 3: our shows to say like, here's who we are, this
Speaker 3: is our deal, but we thought we might have some
Speaker 3: new people on board because we just recently added a
Speaker 3: new video component of our podcast. We've been running a
Speaker 3: long time. Got how many years.
Speaker 2: At this point, We've always been here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I've been on this show since twenty
Speaker 3: fifteen or so, Rob, you've been doing it significantly longer
Speaker 3: than that. But as an audio format podcast, so for
Speaker 3: many years we've covered topics, a lot of topics related
Speaker 3: to science, a general nexus of kind of science and culture.
Speaker 3: But we have interdisciplinary tastes. We like to talk about
Speaker 3: stuff where science connects to literature or mythology, all kinds
Speaker 3: of stuff like that. So that's who we are. We've
Speaker 3: been around a long time, and the video thing is new.
Speaker 3: So if you are here watching us, on Netflix here
Speaker 3: at the beginning of a new phase.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and as you hear us refer back to old episodes,
Speaker 2: you might wonder, well, where are these episodes? I do
Speaker 2: not see them. Well, you may be able to hear them.
Speaker 2: Just go to wherever you get your podcast, look for
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow your Mind. Go ahead and subscribe. You'll
Speaker 2: also find all of our podcast episodes there from years
Speaker 2: and years back.
Speaker 3: That's right, So end bracket on the prelude there. Today,
Speaker 3: on the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, we're going
Speaker 3: to be talking about a substance called polywater. And I
Speaker 3: think the first thing we need to establish about polywater
Speaker 3: is that polywater does not exist. So this is not
Speaker 3: going to be one of those episodes where we're talking
Speaker 3: about an interesting, hypothetical, maybe existing substance. It's not like
Speaker 3: the you know, the various candidates for dark matter, like
Speaker 3: axions or weekly interacting massive particles. You know, these substances
Speaker 3: where there's a reasonable debate about whether they exist or
Speaker 3: there's a theoretical reason to keep looking for them and
Speaker 3: tests to see if they exist. Polywater is not like that. Today,
Speaker 3: no credible scientist thinks polywater is real, and there's really
Speaker 3: no theoretical reason to think it might be real or
Speaker 3: to keep looking for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do want to throw out, just to avoid
Speaker 2: any confusion, this is polywater lowercase P. There is also
Speaker 2: polywater capital P. So what we're talking about here not
Speaker 2: to be confused with the American Polywater Corporation, the name
Speaker 2: of which comes from a nineteen seventy three water based
Speaker 2: cable pulling lubricant. Basically, the idea is that this was
Speaker 2: trademarked under the name polywater as an odd to what
Speaker 2: we're talking about here today. So which just to avoid
Speaker 2: confusion there.
Speaker 3: That will become increasingly hilarious the more you learn about
Speaker 3: the scientific polywater controversy, like why would you name a
Speaker 3: product after this?
Speaker 2: Supposedly the creator just considered polywater. Polywater that we're talking
Speaker 2: about here is kind of like the Holy Grail. It's
Speaker 2: kind of like a unicorn, and he just was really
Speaker 2: attached to the idea, like I'm going to name it polywater,
Speaker 2: and okay, it has stuck. It's the name of the corporation.
Speaker 3: So if lowercase P polywater never existed, why are we
Speaker 3: talking about it? Well, because, as with many cases in
Speaker 3: history where people got something very wrong, there's actually a
Speaker 3: lot you can learn by looking at the ways people
Speaker 3: came to incorrect conclusions and sort of following their logic
Speaker 3: and seeing where they went astray. So polywater has been
Speaker 3: used in many interesting books and articles over the years
Speaker 3: as a great example of what is called pathological science,
Speaker 3: certain types of patterns of behavior that can lead researchers
Speaker 3: into dead ends where they delude themselves into believing things
Speaker 3: that are not based in fact. And one thing I
Speaker 3: think we should really emphasize about polywater is that it
Speaker 3: was not just some obscure little rabbit hole that a
Speaker 3: few people went down at one point in history. For
Speaker 3: a period of a few years, beginning in the nineteen
Speaker 3: sixties and stretching into the early seventies, polywater was a
Speaker 3: huge deal. A bunch of people all around the world,
Speaker 3: including many leading scientists on the cutting edge of physical chemistry,
Speaker 3: became convinced that it did exist, and some even became
Speaker 3: quite obsessed with it, because if polywater did exist, it
Speaker 3: would be a revolutionary, potentially world changing discovery. In one
Speaker 3: of the sources I was reading, there is a quote
Speaker 3: attributed to the Irish physicist John Desmond Bernal, who was
Speaker 3: famous for pioneering the use of X ray crystallography. There's
Speaker 3: some dispute about whether he actually said this or not,
Speaker 3: but it's at least widely attributed to him secondhand that
Speaker 3: he said, this is the most important physical chemical discovery
Speaker 3: of the century.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And the popular media, by the way, went crazy for polywater.
Speaker 3: So you know, once this leapt out of the scientific
Speaker 3: conferences and journals into the popular press, people were speculating
Speaker 3: wildly about how polywater might drive all kinds of astounding
Speaker 3: new technologies, from machine lubrication to new designs for nuclear reactors.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's the key to understanding the secrets of life.
Speaker 3: It's like what drives cell biology. Maybe it will unlock
Speaker 3: eternal longevity. You know, we can live forever because of polywater.
Speaker 3: There's a great There was a Wall Street Journal article
Speaker 3: that I found quoted in a book that said, quote,
Speaker 3: a few years from now, living room furniture may be
Speaker 3: made out of water.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, I would love that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But by around the year nineteen seventy three, basically
Speaker 3: everyone had figured out, oh, this was never real. So
Speaker 3: we've been talking about how its hypothetical existence was processed.
Speaker 3: But what was it? What was polywater supposed to be
Speaker 3: Polywater was claimed to be not just some weird, obscure,
Speaker 3: newly discovered molecule, but rather the until now hidden liquid
Speaker 3: form of a very familiar molecule. Polywater was supposed to
Speaker 3: be water. It was chemically identical to regular water. It
Speaker 3: was H two oh, but it was allegedly a new
Speaker 3: liquid structure of water discovered in a lab in the
Speaker 3: Soviet Union, with a polymerized structure at the molecular level.
Speaker 3: There were different ways of imagining what this polymer structure
Speaker 3: looked like. Maybe these arrangements of squares or arrangements of hexagons.
Speaker 3: Maybe we can talk more about that later in the episode.
Speaker 3: But this polymerized arrangement of the water molecules was said
Speaker 3: to give the water different characteristics, like a higher boiling point,
Speaker 3: lower freezing point, and at room temperature, a thick, viscous consistency,
Speaker 3: often compared to petroleum jelly. It was said to be
Speaker 3: roughly forty percent denser or up to forty percent denser
Speaker 3: than liquid water.
Speaker 2: Thicken your suits, I guess exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just so even better than wondra, you know. So
Speaker 3: imagine a form of water with no additives. Its just
Speaker 3: plain water that has rearranged itself so that it feels
Speaker 3: and behaves kind of like vasileine.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, hard to imagine, but which is weird,
Speaker 2: you know, because we're not talking about like sentient water
Speaker 2: or anything. It's just but still it's like, it's hard
Speaker 2: to imagine. Yeah, I have a hard time imagining water
Speaker 2: that behaves like basoline without thinking of just being some
Speaker 2: basoline type substance.
Speaker 3: You know, Yeah, you'd think it was something else, But no,
Speaker 3: this is the idea. This is just another form water
Speaker 3: can take. And what's more shocking is that some researchers
Speaker 3: working on polywater, certainly not all, but some of them
Speaker 3: came to the conclusion that actually it was the most
Speaker 3: stable form of water, more stable than the regular, thin,
Speaker 3: sloshy water all around us and all throughout the environment,
Speaker 3: raising the question of whether polywater was not actually the
Speaker 3: true form of water, the water to which our form
Speaker 3: of water wanted to return. So one interpretation take by some,
Speaker 3: again not all, but some, was that it was possible
Speaker 3: all the water around us could, given the right circumstances,
Speaker 3: be turned into polywater, and it might be extremely difficult
Speaker 3: or impossible to turn it back.
Speaker 2: All right, All the water around us includes everything, it
Speaker 2: includes us. Yeah, so this is what neat that yea, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is a pretty dire outlook, yes, yeah.
Speaker 3: So I want to emphasize this was not the consensus
Speaker 3: of polywater proponents at the time, but it was a
Speaker 3: view being talked about in public. And just to set
Speaker 3: the tone of how seriously some people took this idea,
Speaker 3: I want to read an excerpt from a highly alarming
Speaker 3: letter published in the journal Nature in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 3: So this is not in some you know, crank publication.
Speaker 3: This is like the premiere scientific journal. It's in Nature,
Speaker 3: written by a chemist named F. J. Donaho of Wilkes
Speaker 3: College in Pennsylvania. So here's some excerpts from note. Donaho writes, quote,
Speaker 3: after being convinced of the existence of polywater, I am
Speaker 3: not easily persuaded that it is not dangerous. The consequences
Speaker 3: of being wrong about this matter are so serious that
Speaker 3: only positive evidence that there is no danger would be acceptable.
Speaker 3: Only the existence of natural ambient mechanisms which depolymerize the
Speaker 3: material would prove its safety. Until such mechanisms are known
Speaker 3: to exist, I regard the polymer as the most dangerous
Speaker 3: material on Earth. Every effort must be made to establish
Speaker 3: the absolute safety of the material before it is commercially produced.
Speaker 3: Once the polymer nuclei become dispersed in the soil, it
Speaker 3: will be too late to do anything. Even as I write,
Speaker 3: there are undoubtedly scores of groups preparing polywater treat it
Speaker 3: as the most deadly virus until its safety is established.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, keep watching the sky energy amazing.
Speaker 3: Note very firmly again that not everyone agreed with this
Speaker 3: level of alarm, and the next issue of Nature published
Speaker 3: several replies from prominent experts arguing that this warning was
Speaker 3: grossly exaggerated and misguided, and they offered some good arguments
Speaker 3: why polywater was not dangerous in the way Donahoe suggested.
Speaker 3: We'll get more into that later. And of course there's
Speaker 3: an added level of absurdity in that the substance they
Speaker 3: were arguing about turned out to have never existed at all,
Speaker 3: or at least not in the way that was understood.
Speaker 3: But given what was believed at the time, these researchers,
Speaker 3: I think had good arguments against Donahoe's level of alarm,
Speaker 3: But I want to be sympathetic to people who would
Speaker 3: have been really freaked out by this. When I put
Speaker 3: myself in the place of a non expert in nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty nine who maybe reads a newspaper article about this
Speaker 3: note published in a leading scientific journal, and I don't understand,
Speaker 3: or I maybe don't even encounter the soothing counter arguments
Speaker 3: against it. It is a terrifying proposition. The feeling to
Speaker 3: me when reading this note was kind of like when
Speaker 3: Sarruman says, you know, the hour is later than you think.
Speaker 3: He's got that line. Even as I write this, groups
Speaker 3: around the world are creating this stuff, that microscopic quantities
Speaker 3: of a substance that, if it escaped containment, could turn
Speaker 3: Earth into a lifeless wax world. So many things about
Speaker 3: this are so frightening if you don't if you imagine
Speaker 3: yourself without the benefit of hindsight and maybe not understanding
Speaker 3: the expert arguments against them, like the threat is microscopic.
Speaker 3: Once it escapes, it is too late. I have no
Speaker 3: control over this. Other people are doing it that I
Speaker 3: can't stop them. They're making it right now. Also, imagine
Speaker 3: this in the context of Cold War paranoia and the
Speaker 3: nuclear arms race. You know, everybody's got a mindset of
Speaker 3: you know, races to achieve new types of weapons and
Speaker 3: potentials on either side of the Cold War. And then finally,
Speaker 3: just the specific image of catastrophe conjured up here is
Speaker 3: so weird and grotesque, Like, imagine all of our water
Speaker 3: is now transformed into some kind of waxy substance or gel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the oceans turning into some sort of grotesque jell
Speaker 2: o product, or our bodies suddenly transforming into some sort
Speaker 2: of I'm only imagining here, but like a denser sludge
Speaker 2: body that of course is also lifeless because it would
Speaker 2: it would kill us. Yeah, crazy, crazy to imagine. And
Speaker 2: then I think the atomic tie in is key because
Speaker 2: at this point we are well aware of the fact
Speaker 2: that the Cold War competition and other drivers in our
Speaker 2: culture have certainly proven that we will totally race toward
Speaker 2: complete and collective annihilation. Yeah, so it's not you know,
Speaker 2: it's not like we would all say, whoa hold on,
Speaker 2: let's not do polywater. It would be like, oh, if
Speaker 2: you're doing polywater while I'm doing polywater, I'm gonna do
Speaker 2: polywater even harder, right, and then.
Speaker 3: We're all sledge Yeah, And we can talk about some
Speaker 3: analogies to this later on. One thing I'm sure lots
Speaker 3: of people listening or watching out there are already thinking
Speaker 3: of is the connection to Cat's Cradle. Tons of authors
Speaker 3: writing on this subject have compared Donahoe's polywater doomsday scenario
Speaker 3: in this letter to a famous literary analog, and that
Speaker 3: is the fictional substance known as ice nine from Kurt
Speaker 3: Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, which is responsible for the apocalyptic
Speaker 3: ending of the book. People made this comparison, I want
Speaker 3: to emphasize at the time the novel was already out.
Speaker 3: It was published in nineteen sixty three, so this is
Speaker 3: not just a retrospective comparison we're making now and people
Speaker 3: were writing about it in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, this is fascinating. We've touched on Einstein before
Speaker 2: because we did some episodes on different forms, different types
Speaker 2: of ice.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, first of all, it is totally fictional. There's no
Speaker 2: such thing as ice neine, But within the context of
Speaker 2: the novel, it's said to be a polymorph of water
Speaker 2: with a much higher freezing point, and it converts all
Speaker 2: water to ice nine upon contact. So it could be
Speaker 2: the ocean, it could be the water inside a human
Speaker 2: body if it makes contact it's going to change that
Speaker 2: water into this new form of water, and that is
Speaker 2: going to be disastrous for all concerned.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it would be acting as what's called a seed crystal.
Speaker 3: The idea is it goes in and it provides a
Speaker 3: nucleation point that all of the water around it around
Speaker 3: it to rearrange into the ice nine form. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: so would change all of the water in the biosphere
Speaker 3: into this form that is frozen up to I think
Speaker 3: like one hundred and fourteen degrees fahrenheit they say in
Speaker 3: the novel. So obviously that's not good and it is
Speaker 3: apocalyptic in the story. In fact, I have my copy
Speaker 3: of Kat's Cradle right here. I got it off the shelf.
Speaker 3: I was trying to find a good passage at the
Speaker 3: end here that describes it. I didn't. I don't know,
Speaker 3: maybe there is one I didn't dig up. There's one
Speaker 3: part where so at the end of the story spoiler
Speaker 3: alert for Kat's Cradle. But at the end of the story,
Speaker 3: the ice nine does get out and it transforms all
Speaker 3: of the water in the natural environment into ice nine.
Speaker 3: And so the main character talks about like peeking up
Speaker 3: out of a bunker into the world and he says.
Speaker 3: He says, there were no smells, there was no movement.
Speaker 3: Every step I took made a gravelly squeak and blue
Speaker 3: white frost, and every squeak was echoed loudly. The season
Speaker 3: of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight.
Speaker 3: It was winter now and forever.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's bleak. Yeah, So I actually have not read
Speaker 2: Cat's Cradle. This is not one of the Vonnegut books
Speaker 2: I've read. Do people get ice nined in this as well?
Speaker 2: Or is it just the.
Speaker 3: Yes, it works out badly for people. Not a happy ending.
Speaker 2: Now. I did look up the origin story, or at
Speaker 2: least what is said to be the origin story of
Speaker 2: this novel, and the story here goes that you had HG. Wells,
Speaker 2: the noted author, legendary author science fiction during the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2: He visits GE Labs and while there he meets Irving
Speaker 2: Lagmir who were actually going to come back to His
Speaker 2: work included some ice based cloud seating. I think he
Speaker 2: did some de icing research as well, and he pitched
Speaker 2: the idea to HG. Wells. He's like, hey, you should
Speaker 2: do a story about some sort of room temperature stable ice,
Speaker 2: and Wells of course never wrote anything with that concept,
Speaker 2: but people overheard this exchange. Apparently it included Kurt Vonnegut's brother,
Speaker 2: his older brother, who apparently worked at G E. Labs
Speaker 2: at the time, as did Kurt Vonnegut, I believe, And
Speaker 2: so again, Wells never used it, and after both Lagmuir
Speaker 2: and Wells had passed away, Kurt figured, hey, it's fair game.
Speaker 2: I can take this and run with it now, and
Speaker 2: he did. How much of that is true? I don't know.
Speaker 2: That's the story anyway.
Speaker 3: And we should note that there actually is a form
Speaker 3: of ice known as ice nine, but it does not
Speaker 3: have any of the properties described.
Speaker 2: And I think cannot exist on Earth given the pressures
Speaker 2: that we have on Earth. So it's yeah, for many
Speaker 2: different reasons, this does not exist, and nothing like ice
Speaker 2: nine in the novel exists.
Speaker 3: Kind of like the polywater doomstay scenario for multiple reasons.
Speaker 3: Not something to worry about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now, are there things like polywater to maybe worry about. Well,
Speaker 2: maybe we'll get back to those, either later on in
Speaker 2: this episode or in a subsequent episode.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Okay, Robert, you cool if we jump here into
Speaker 3: sort of a historical sketch of the polywater affair.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do.
Speaker 3: It, Okay. So I'm going to try to run through
Speaker 3: a basic timeline of the polywater craze, and I want
Speaker 3: to mention a couple of my main sources here. One
Speaker 3: is an article called case Studies in Pathological Science published
Speaker 3: in American Scientist in the year nineteen ninety two. The
Speaker 3: author of this article is Dennis L. Rousseau, a PhD.
Speaker 3: Physical chemist who was a longtime technical staff member at
Speaker 3: Bell Labs. I looked him up and it looks like
Speaker 3: now he's affiliated with Albert Einstein College of Medicine in
Speaker 3: New York. But Rousseau is a great source on this
Speaker 3: because he not only has he's not only done the
Speaker 3: research to give this historical sketch and couch it in
Speaker 3: the framing of pathological science, he was also personally involved
Speaker 3: in polywater research on the skeptical side. He was the author,
Speaker 3: the lead author of one of the main experiments that
Speaker 3: really put the nail in the coffin of the polywater program.
Speaker 3: That was kind of the final embarrassment to it.
Speaker 2: I killed polywater.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I don't frame it like that, like he's
Speaker 3: trying to crow over it or be mean like that.
Speaker 3: I mean he approaches the subject, I think with some humility,
Speaker 3: but yes, he did put out an experimental result that
Speaker 3: was potentially kind of humiliating to polywater, even if it
Speaker 3: wasn't meant to be. The other source that I found
Speaker 3: really useful is a fantastic chapter in a book called
Speaker 3: H two OO, A Biography of Water by the British
Speaker 3: science writer Philip Ball, great science writer who I always
Speaker 3: like his work. This book was first published in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety nine, and Ball has a really good historical overview
Speaker 3: of polywater and again frames it within the context of
Speaker 3: pathological science. So research on polywater began in the Soviet
Speaker 3: Union in the early nineteen sixties, and it's worth pointing
Speaker 3: out that it was not initially called polywater. For the
Speaker 3: first few years, publications on this subject mostly referred to
Speaker 3: it as anomalous water. And I think that difference in
Speaker 3: naming may be more important than you might assume at first.
Speaker 3: We'll maybe come back and discuss that later, but I
Speaker 3: want to start off here kind of framing this within
Speaker 3: the environment of global science in the nineteen sixties. So
Speaker 3: obviously at this time, huge advancements were being made in
Speaker 3: a bunch of fields, you know, computer science, aerospace, molecular biology,
Speaker 3: and Philip Ball really flags this as well. Scientists were
Speaker 3: constantly making discoveries that they, in many cases correctly predicted
Speaker 3: would change the world. So it's a frothy time in
Speaker 3: the sciences. But the global advance of science at this
Speaker 3: time was made sort of awkward by the Cold War.
Speaker 3: For the most part, Western scientists published in British and
Speaker 3: American sometimes continental European journals, the majority of which were
Speaker 3: in English, while Eastern Bloc scientists mostly published in Russian
Speaker 3: language journals, And there was transmission of scientific information back
Speaker 3: and forth, like there was translation of journals going from
Speaker 3: each side to the other, but the transmission of information
Speaker 3: between the two spheres was limited in certain ways, for
Speaker 3: both intentional and unintentional reasons. And these reasons included everything
Speaker 3: from certain types of government restrictions on travel and communication
Speaker 3: across the Iron Curtain to simple things like the language
Speaker 3: barrier and the financial costs of acquiring Western journals in
Speaker 3: the Soviet Union. And it seems to me that motivations
Speaker 3: and outlook throughout the scientific community were very mixed. Like
Speaker 3: some scientists on both sides had a more global view
Speaker 3: of worldwide cooperation, very you know, for the good of
Speaker 3: humankind kind of approach to scientific work. Others were more
Speaker 3: partisan or nationalistic, you know, trying to advance their side
Speaker 3: in the Cold War and kind of jealous or suspicious
Speaker 3: of the other side. So while communication of cutting edge
Speaker 3: science between East and West did happen, it was sometimes
Speaker 3: limited or delayed, and in certain fields that were seen
Speaker 3: as more crucial for national security, it was more often
Speaker 3: tightly constrained or not shared at all, And a lot
Speaker 3: of times when new discoveries were shared between the two spheres,
Speaker 3: it happened at these international conferences, through lectures or even
Speaker 3: just individual chance meetings between scientists.
Speaker 2: We've discussed before on the show how this competitiveness in
Speaker 2: the Cold War it led also led to things like
Speaker 2: paranormal research on both sides, where a lot of it
Speaker 2: seemed to have been fueled by the idea that, like,
Speaker 2: there may be nothing to this, but if there is
Speaker 2: something to yes, we want we want to at least
Speaker 2: be on equal footing with the enemy. And of course
Speaker 2: there was nothing to any of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if the Soviets are training psychic assassins, we better
Speaker 3: check that out too and see if there's something going
Speaker 3: on here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even if in reality we might maybe we're even
Speaker 2: we're even falling into a trap, wasting our time, and
Speaker 2: that was the whole point. So yeah, we've discussed that
Speaker 2: on the show before, so similar energy in some of this, I imagine.
Speaker 3: So the timeline for polywater within this context starts in
Speaker 3: the early nineteen sixties. I think the first research would
Speaker 3: have been around nineteen sixty two when a Soviet researcher
Speaker 3: named Nikolai Fedyakin made a discovery while working at the
Speaker 3: Polytechnical Institute in Kostroma, which is a city on the
Speaker 3: Volga northeast of Moscow. And what Fedyakin found was that
Speaker 3: when you put water inside a very narrow glass capillary tube,
Speaker 3: so imagine like a tiny, tiny glass straw where the
Speaker 3: tube is only about as wide as a human hair,
Speaker 3: or even narrower. When you did that, it appeared that
Speaker 3: the water would somehow separate into two different columns of liquid.
Speaker 3: So think about like you ever mix up a salad dressing.
Speaker 3: You're mixing up oil and water. If you don't have
Speaker 3: a good to mulsifier in there, you might shake it
Speaker 3: up and it'll get all mixed up, but then over
Speaker 3: time the suspension will separate and the oil will float
Speaker 3: to the top. Fadyakin was watching something like this happen
Speaker 3: over a period of days or weeks inside these extremely
Speaker 3: tiny glass tubes, except it wasn't oil and water, it
Speaker 3: was just water. So it was like pure water was
Speaker 3: separating into water and question marks something else. What could
Speaker 3: it be? And this anomolus secondary substance would tend to
Speaker 3: appear at the top of the column in the tube,
Speaker 3: and it seemed to grow in volume proportional to a
Speaker 3: loss of water at the bottom of the tube. It
Speaker 3: wasn't like all of the water became the stuff at
Speaker 3: the top, but it looked to Fedyakin like some of
Speaker 3: it turned into this water at the top. So it
Speaker 3: really seemed like what was happening was that the regular
Speaker 3: water was evaporating from below and then condensing above, having
Speaker 3: been transformed into something else. But there was no physical
Speaker 3: reason it should have been evaporating and condensing somewhere else,
Speaker 3: because the temperature and the pressure in the tubes were
Speaker 3: supposedly held constant throughout. So the only way this would
Speaker 3: really make sense was if the secondary water was somehow
Speaker 3: different from the primary water, with a lower vapor pressure
Speaker 3: meaning a higher boiling point, and Fedyakin believed this secondary
Speaker 3: liquid was still water, but it was a new form
Speaker 3: of water, chemically identical irregular water, so still h two oz,
Speaker 3: but with a different physical structure that gave it different
Speaker 3: properties at scale. For example, it seemed to be denser
Speaker 3: than normal liquid water. And I'll come back to those
Speaker 3: properties in just a minute. But here we have the
Speaker 3: intervention of a figure who will become incredibly important in
Speaker 3: the history of polywater. After Fedyakin publishes his findings in
Speaker 3: a Russian journal, they catch the attention of an extremely
Speaker 3: distinguished and important Soviet chemist and named Boris V. Der Yagan. Deryagan,
Speaker 3: working out of Moscow, believed this anomalous water to be
Speaker 3: of immense scientific and technological importance, so he started a
Speaker 3: collaboration with Fedyakin, and then it seems he effectively took
Speaker 3: over research on the subject. So for a while, Derriagan
Speaker 3: would become sort of the anomalous water guy. He's the
Speaker 3: main advocate for this program, and he and his colleagues
Speaker 3: published ten papers on the anomalous water by the time
Speaker 3: he presented on this subject at a conference in nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty six. So we mentioned earlier what some of the characteristics,
Speaker 3: the alleged characteristics of this anomalous water were, but I
Speaker 3: just want to run through them briefly again here. The
Speaker 3: numbers cited tend to be different in different sources, and
Speaker 3: I think this probably reflects a range of reported results
Speaker 3: in the primary literature, so I'm trying to kind of
Speaker 3: put them all together here. This water somehow did not
Speaker 3: boil at the regular boiling point of water, so did
Speaker 3: not boil at one hundred degrees celsius. It had a
Speaker 3: much higher boiling point. Some sources place it at about
Speaker 3: two hundred degrees cee. Others say more like three hundred degrees.
Speaker 2: That's going to definitely hurt your soup thickening applications here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, some problems here. Its freezing point seem to also
Speaker 3: be more of a range, beginning at about negative thirty
Speaker 3: degrees celsia, and then I've seen other sources say negative
Speaker 3: fifty degrees celsius. And again it was said to be
Speaker 3: more dense and viscous than normal water. So we get
Speaker 3: a range of figures, but it's up to like forty
Speaker 3: percent denser than normal water and fifteen times more viscous.
Speaker 3: Sources describe its consistency as similar to that of petroleum
Speaker 3: jelly like vacilline, or sometimes compare it to paraffin wax.
Speaker 3: I want to emphasize though here there was very little
Speaker 3: of it being made, So this wasn't like they were
Speaker 3: making bowls of it and sticking their hands into it
Speaker 3: and saying, oh, it's like vacoline. They were making microscopic
Speaker 3: quantities and then extract extrapolating from those microscopic quantities into
Speaker 3: what they thought the macroscopic qualities would be.
Speaker 2: Okay, reminds me a little bit of our recent episode
Speaker 2: on the idea of manufacturing gold and what is currently
Speaker 2: possible like small unstable amounts so forth.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, this is a somewhat
Speaker 3: similar It is a manufacturing program of this very interesting
Speaker 3: and potentially quite valuable new material. But they can only
Speaker 3: make tiny, tiny amounts at a time. So this anomalous water,
Speaker 3: if it really existed, would have bizarre and fascinating implications.
Speaker 3: For one thing, Philip Ball explains this in his chapter,
Speaker 3: it might not even make sense to call this new
Speaker 3: water anomalous water, because really this form of water, with
Speaker 3: the lower vapor pressure would potentially be the more stable
Speaker 3: form of water. So really it would be the regular water,
Speaker 3: and the water that we know would be the weird
Speaker 3: water that would be it would be the unusual form.
Speaker 3: It might be what can mists call meta stable. Meta
Speaker 3: stable would mean it's in a semi stable form occupying
Speaker 3: a local energy minimum, which, given the right conditions to
Speaker 3: get past that energy barrier, will hop down and transform
Speaker 3: into the more stable lower energy form. As a rough analogy,
Speaker 3: you can think of meta stability as the chemical equivalent
Speaker 3: of like a ball sitting in a bowl on the
Speaker 3: edge of a table. So the ball is stable sitting
Speaker 3: in the bowl. It's not going to suddenly fall through
Speaker 3: the bottom of the bowl and through the table onto
Speaker 3: the floor. But if it's somehow perturbed, like if it
Speaker 3: is knocked over the lip of the bowl and off
Speaker 3: the edge of the table, gravity will act on it
Speaker 3: and pull it all the way down to the floor.
Speaker 3: So in this analogy, the bowl is the liquid water
Speaker 3: we know and the floor is the anomalous water. Here
Speaker 3: we get back to that scary image.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, scary is a good description because it does
Speaker 2: remind me of a number of the concepts that you
Speaker 2: encounter in cosmic horror. You know, where there's generally some
Speaker 2: sort of a scenario by which reality, be it inner
Speaker 2: reality or outer reality as we know it turns out
Speaker 2: to be in a lot more fragile a place. Yes,
Speaker 2: and just by knowing about its fragility, you put it
Speaker 2: at risk.
Speaker 3: Yes. Yes, that the horror of what you thought was
Speaker 3: normal is actually the brief exception, and we were about
Speaker 3: to return to the more normal state of reality, which
Speaker 3: is horrifying to us.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I feel like I need to emphasize again that
Speaker 3: this was by no means agreed on by all proponents
Speaker 3: of the new water. But to some it seemed possible
Speaker 3: that thermodynamically all water wanted to be the anomalous water,
Speaker 3: and with the right push, like some kind of seed crystal,
Speaker 3: it could turn into polywater. So what would have been
Speaker 3: the theoretical reason that water took this different form. Philip
Speaker 3: Ball's account here again has a great section explaining the reasoning.
Speaker 3: One thing that is absolutely true is that molecules of
Speaker 3: liquid water behave weirdly and assume new structures when they
Speaker 3: come into contact with a surface or a wall. At
Speaker 3: the interface with a surface, several layers of liquid water
Speaker 3: molecules nearest the surface will often form unusual patterns and arrangements,
Speaker 3: so they'll act differently than water. Just in the center
Speaker 3: of a mass of liquid water, right up at the wall,
Speaker 3: they start to arrange themselves in different ways. Boris Deriagan
Speaker 3: knew something about this and proposed that something about the
Speaker 3: interaction with the glass surface on the inside of the
Speaker 3: capillary tube caused the water to assume this new structure
Speaker 3: and then, even more remarkably, somehow remember or retain this
Speaker 3: new structure even after evaporating and condensing again. So Derriagan
Speaker 3: and his team they started, you know, they fired up
Speaker 3: production and started making samples of this anomalous water. They
Speaker 3: came up with a faster system than Fidyakin had used,
Speaker 3: though the amounts they were able to produce it at
Speaker 3: a time were still very, very small, because the tubes
Speaker 3: were tiny, Like the tubes were like a tenth of
Speaker 3: a millimeter in width, and the columns of this anomalous
Speaker 3: water they were making, you know, might only be a
Speaker 3: millimeter tall. So you're talking tiny, tiny amounts. And one
Speaker 3: thing we're thinking about is that when you've got that
Speaker 3: little of a sample to work with, with these tiny,
Speaker 3: tiny amounts, you really need to be conscious of the
Speaker 3: dangers of contamination. Philip Ball flags this and Rousseauta talk
Speaker 3: about this in his paper as well. You're making so
Speaker 3: little of it that even a tiny amount of contamination
Speaker 3: in total in the capillary tubes would be a significant
Speaker 3: part of the final product and could change its properties significantly. So,
Speaker 3: you know, there were all these efforts made to ensure
Speaker 3: that the samples were of the highest possible purity, Like
Speaker 3: Derriogan and colleagues they used. They made sure that the
Speaker 3: silica used to make the glass capillary tubes was made
Speaker 3: was very pure. It was made from pure quartz, and
Speaker 3: this was to prevent like trace inorganic materials getting mixed
Speaker 3: in with the glass and then some leeching into the
Speaker 3: water in the tubes. And they also worked very hard
Speaker 3: to ensure that the water used in the experiment was pure.
Speaker 3: So they're of the you know, if you suggest to
Speaker 3: them that their samples are contaminated, they're like, no, look
Speaker 3: at all these links we go to to make sure
Speaker 3: that the samples cannot be contaminated. It's very very pure.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, it was still quite laborious
Speaker 3: to produce the anomalous water and very little was available,
Speaker 3: which limited the testing that could be done on it.
Speaker 2: So this is happening kind of in a bubble for
Speaker 2: a while, right, but eventually polywater is going to leak out.
Speaker 3: That's right. So the Western scientists start catching on to
Speaker 3: polywater beginning in around nineteen sixty six, Derriagan gave some
Speaker 3: conference presentations on it. Gave one in nineteen sixty five
Speaker 3: in Moscow, another in England in sixty six. Some scientists
Speaker 3: did attend these, but not many took notice, but a
Speaker 3: few did so ballflags a few scientists who got interested
Speaker 3: from these earliest talks. One was named Brian Pethica, who
Speaker 3: was a director of Unilever Research Laboratory at Port Sunlight
Speaker 3: in England. And another one is a figure I mentioned
Speaker 3: earlier in the episode, John Desmond Bernal, very famous and
Speaker 3: respected crystallographer, and supposedly after one of these I think
Speaker 3: it's the presentation in England, Bernal took der Yagan back
Speaker 3: to his lab at Birkbeck College in London and they
Speaker 3: had a talk where they were talking they were like
Speaker 3: talking about the procedure for making the anomalous water. And
Speaker 3: this was at this meeting. This was when Bernal allegedly
Speaker 3: said that this is going to be, you know, one
Speaker 3: of the most important discoveries of the century. So the
Speaker 3: two scientists I just mentioned in their associates, they start
Speaker 3: cranking on trying to do polywater research. It's not called
Speaker 3: polywater yet though, it's still anomalous water. And then meanwhile
Speaker 3: some American scientists get interested as well. You have Robert
Speaker 3: Stromberg of the National Bureau of Standards in Maryland, and
Speaker 3: then also Ellis Lippencott of the Center for Materials Research
Speaker 3: at the University of Maryland. They start cranking on polywater
Speaker 3: search as well. I think this was roughly nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 3: and then anomalous water really started to break out into
Speaker 3: the open in sixty nine, when you had Pethica's team
Speaker 3: publish a paper in Nature. They reported their attempts to
Speaker 3: recreate the substance via dir Yogan's methods, and they started
Speaker 3: talking about the properties of the new water. Very importantly.
Speaker 3: Their publication included photographs, so now there's something to look at.
Speaker 3: You can see these microscopic columns, something that had condensed
Speaker 3: in the tubes. But one thing here is that Pethica's
Speaker 3: team offered some reasonable caveats For example, they said, we
Speaker 3: can't rule out that something is leeching out of the
Speaker 3: pyrex glass tubes and mixing with the water to form
Speaker 3: a gel. That's possible, but they thought that might explain
Speaker 3: our results. But it doesn't explain Deryogan's results because they're
Speaker 3: not using just like normal pyrex glass. They're using this
Speaker 3: special pure quartz silica glass. And then also they mentioned
Speaker 3: that their attempts to figure out what this stuff was
Speaker 3: were severely limited by how little of it could be produced.
Speaker 3: Microscopic amounts are hard to study. There is a quote
Speaker 3: attributed to one of JD. Bernell's students saying, if only
Speaker 3: we could make a thimbleful, but the anomalous water would
Speaker 3: really become a sensation. A few months later, when Stromberg
Speaker 3: and Lippincott published their own research in the journal Science,
Speaker 3: and their research was a big deal because it used
Speaker 3: the technique of infrared spectroscopy. So spectroscopy is a powerful
Speaker 3: tool of analysis that lets you study a substance by
Speaker 3: measuring how it absorbs, emits or scatters various kinds of
Speaker 3: electromagnetic radiation, like infrared or UV light or visible light.
Speaker 3: Each molecule has its own special pattern of absorption or
Speaker 3: emission or scattering, determined by things like the atomic makeup
Speaker 3: and the chemical bonds within it. So you can make
Speaker 3: a spectrum graph of a substance and that will tell
Speaker 3: you things about its molecular makeup and structure which are
Speaker 3: too small to see with the naked eye. Spectroscopy is
Speaker 3: used all throughout various kinds of sciences. It's not just
Speaker 3: in chemical analysis, you know, it's used in like astronomy.
Speaker 3: We use spectroscopy to try to figure out what elements
Speaker 3: are in the atmosphere of another planet we're looking at,
Speaker 3: or something like that. Stromberg and Lippincott publish their paper
Speaker 3: in the journal Science in nineteen sixty nine, and they
Speaker 3: were building on some previous research that had also used spectroscopy,
Speaker 3: but they were trying to show that the anomalous water,
Speaker 3: because it produced this different spectrum, had a different structure
Speaker 3: from familiar water, and they proposed that it was something
Speaker 3: like a stable polymer. And this paper is where we
Speaker 3: get the term polywater. It was the paper's title. And
Speaker 3: I think we should pause here to think of this,
Speaker 3: because I think it's wise not to overlook the power
Speaker 3: of giving something an intriguing name. Naming is persuasive. Naming
Speaker 3: is rhetorical. I think in a lot of cases, giving
Speaker 3: a concept an evocative name really affects how it is
Speaker 3: received in multiple ways. For one thing, if there's a
Speaker 3: name for something, instead of just talking about something in
Speaker 3: descriptive terms, like anomalous water, if there's a specific new
Speaker 3: name for it feels like it's something that really exists,
Speaker 3: doesn't it. You know, why would it have a name
Speaker 3: if it didn't exist? And then the qualities of the
Speaker 3: name affect how we think about the thing. To me,
Speaker 3: when I hear polywater sounds new, sounds exciting, sounds like
Speaker 3: a product almost. In fact, that may be one reason
Speaker 3: why it could have been appealing to adopt as the
Speaker 3: name of a product line actually, which you were talking
Speaker 3: about earlier.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a great point though. Yeah, once you've
Speaker 2: given it an intriguing name, polly water, it's like a
Speaker 2: like the brain kind of chews on it when it
Speaker 2: absorbs the term, because you know, water as mundane as
Speaker 2: it and as it gets also being you know, essential
Speaker 2: to pretty much everything. But that what does polywater mean?
Speaker 2: Like you have to sort of like break down what
Speaker 2: the con what it even means and it doesn't sound
Speaker 2: overtly evil or anything. It's not like they called it
Speaker 2: doom water or and it's also not super goofy. They
Speaker 2: didn't call it like, I don't know, ranch water or something,
Speaker 2: but polywater. It just it begins to raise questions in
Speaker 2: the mind. And it does kind of feel like the
Speaker 2: sort of thing like like it's like it's it's hiding,
Speaker 2: you know, like it's it could be secretly bad, but
Speaker 2: we just don't know how to feel about it. Just
Speaker 2: based on that that that term.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, these authors, I think we're not making the
Speaker 3: case it was secretly bad.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: They were not one of the ones saying, oh, it's
Speaker 3: gonna it's gonna take over the earth and and olar
Speaker 3: water into vasoline.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, now that the substance had an and I should say,
Speaker 3: by the way, that at this point a bunch of
Speaker 3: people writing about anomalous water now polywater, were proposing physical
Speaker 3: molecular structures for the polymers. Some of them were saying, oh,
Speaker 3: it's a square form with four linked water molecules. Others
Speaker 3: were saying it's a hexagon form forming these sheets of
Speaker 3: water molecules. This was, again without having actually established firmly
Speaker 3: that it was water, but they were you know, they
Speaker 3: were moving on quickly to the theoretical stage and trying
Speaker 3: to say like what can how does it work before
Speaker 3: firmly establishing that it actually is something.
Speaker 2: Well, and then also the fact that it's being picked
Speaker 2: up increasingly by science communicators, by writers, right, yeah, because
Speaker 2: in bringing a concept like this to a wider audience,
Speaker 2: you you kind of do have to to get beyond
Speaker 2: like just the pure chemistry and speculative structure of the thing,
Speaker 2: and you have to end up talking about the practicalities
Speaker 2: or hypothetical practicalities in order to make people understand like
Speaker 2: what you're talking about, you know, you have to sort
Speaker 2: of work back from that to communicate the chemistry that's right.
Speaker 3: So yeah, now that it had been named I think,
Speaker 3: very importantly and had been given credibility by respected scientists
Speaker 3: in a Western journal, it was kind of polywater fever,
Speaker 3: you know. In nineteen sixty nine, a lot of researchers
Speaker 3: in relevant fields took notice. They started talking and writing
Speaker 3: about the subject. There was a division of opinion. Some
Speaker 3: were skeptical about it. Some were like, are we sure
Speaker 3: this isn't just contamination or impurities? Others were more bullish
Speaker 3: on it. You know, they're like, no, this is real.
Speaker 3: You know, this is going to change the world. There
Speaker 3: was this proliferation of theoretical work on the structure of
Speaker 3: poly water, but as you alluded to by it was
Speaker 3: by the summer of nineteen sixty nine really that the
Speaker 3: mainstream press caught wind of it and started going going bananas.
Speaker 3: So Philip Ball mentions that once the subject move from
Speaker 3: professional and scientific journals into the mainstream press, the mainstream
Speaker 3: press kind of became the preferred venue for even the
Speaker 3: scientists themselves to communicate on the subject. Maybe not all
Speaker 3: of them, but some of them, the most you know,
Speaker 3: the most eager to argue, wanted to go straight to
Speaker 3: the mainstream press. And you know what, you still see
Speaker 3: versions of this phenomenon today, don't you. Like, somebody has
Speaker 3: a revolutionary new idea, it's not really getting traction with
Speaker 3: their professional colleagues. So you can just bypass your expert
Speaker 3: colleagues and take your claims straight to the daily mail,
Speaker 3: or you know, you go straight to some kind of
Speaker 3: blog or popular press, or now even easier, you go
Speaker 3: to social media or the podcast circuit.
Speaker 2: That's right, Yeah, then you're you're avoiding then the the
Speaker 2: peer of scrutiny that you would otherwise go through, and
Speaker 2: you're also throwing out, you know, what may be just
Speaker 2: a very loose hypothesis into the public arena where there
Speaker 2: may be less of an understanding at times regarding you know,
Speaker 2: the nature of hypothesis and and how these ideas work.
Speaker 2: And indeed, the enterprise of science that that every scientific
Speaker 2: idea that is presented is not is not one solidified yet,
Speaker 2: that we go through this process. So so, yeah, you
Speaker 2: can see where the problems emerge here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, process is so important that that science is a
Speaker 3: process of gradual understanding and clarification that you know, over time,
Speaker 3: you you bring things into sharper focus and you figure
Speaker 3: out you're able to weed out what you thought yesterday.
Speaker 3: You know, the things you thought yesterday, some of them
Speaker 3: actually do make sense and are are borne out by
Speaker 3: results and some are not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and when you do realize that, okay, polywater never existed,
Speaker 2: like that is part of the scientific process. That is
Speaker 2: like a natural part of it. That's not like ohe
Speaker 2: science messed up. Yeah, you know, the mistakes are part
Speaker 2: of the of the whole process.
Speaker 3: Though I think it's important to be fair and be
Speaker 3: clear about the fact that polywater was not something that
Speaker 3: was roundly rejected as fringe crankery by by prestigious scientists
Speaker 3: at the time. A lot of very respected scientists were
Speaker 3: buying into it. Certainly not all the were sceptics too,
Speaker 3: but it was treated as a legitimate, lively debate.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, in the popular media, you had all this you know,
Speaker 3: wild stuff. We mentioned earlier, the idea that you know,
Speaker 3: they were saying, we're going to use it as some
Speaker 3: kind of super lubricant or it's going to be in
Speaker 3: nuclear reactors. Philip Ball highlights that quote from the Wall
Speaker 3: Street Journal about how our furniture is going to be
Speaker 3: made out of polywater.
Speaker 2: How is that? How would that even work?
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's like waterbeds sort of.
Speaker 3: I didn't. I didn't dig in and get to the
Speaker 3: bottom of that, but I would like to know more.
Speaker 2: I'm guessing stuffing of couch cushions with polywater.
Speaker 3: But anyway, here's one detail. This is also mentioned in
Speaker 3: Ball's account that I love the idea came up in
Speaker 3: some popular media that, h what if the lunar regolith
Speaker 3: that was that was sticking to the astronaut's boots during
Speaker 3: the moon landing was actually a kind of polymer moon mud.
Speaker 3: It was lunar soil with polywater mixed in. Like, wouldn't
Speaker 3: that be a cool way that the Moon could have
Speaker 3: retained water over the past billions of years.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's just like essentially oceans of water pudding.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, moon mud, polymud, And again other articles we're
Speaker 3: talking about, Oh, it's it's going to be the key
Speaker 3: to understanding how how life works, or it's going to unlock,
Speaker 3: you know, the secrets of eternal life. Maybe it plays
Speaker 3: some role in cells. And this is also, of course,
Speaker 3: the time we get to that letter Thatajo sends to
Speaker 3: Nature about how polywater is potentially the most dangerous substance
Speaker 3: on Earth and its containment was of absolute necessity. Now
Speaker 3: we already explained early on what Donahoe's reasoning was there
Speaker 3: that okay, so a bit of a bit of this
Speaker 3: polywater acts as a seed crystal. It transforms all of
Speaker 3: the water in the environment into the more stable form
Speaker 3: of water, which is polywater, and then if there is
Speaker 3: no ambient mechanism to turn it back, then we're really
Speaker 3: in a bad situation. There However, in the next issue
Speaker 3: of Nature, Donahoe's note was rebuked by responses from multiple
Speaker 3: esteemed scientists, including Bernal who I mentioned earlier, who is
Speaker 3: a very very dogged proponent of polywater, very much a believer,
Speaker 3: also by a British chemist named Douglas Everett, and their
Speaker 3: point was like, well, you are getting way ahead of yourself,
Speaker 3: and there are good reasons for thinking that this is
Speaker 3: not going to happen. So they've pointed out, for example,
Speaker 3: we've seen polywater in contact with regular water already. We've
Speaker 3: seen that in the laboratory, and we have not observed
Speaker 3: it transforming the normal water through touch alone. So it's
Speaker 3: not like water comes into contact with polywater and then
Speaker 3: is all transformed. That's not what we observe. And then
Speaker 3: second they say, you know, if polywater exists, it must
Speaker 3: occur sometimes in nature because there are natural quartz surfaces,
Speaker 3: some must have pores and capillaries like the tubes in
Speaker 3: our experiments. And it is not already the case that
Speaker 3: all of Earth's water has been transformed into polywater. So
Speaker 3: if that were going to happen through exposure to poly water,
Speaker 3: it would have already happened in the past four and
Speaker 3: a half billion years. If it hasn't already happened, it's
Speaker 3: not going to happen.
Speaker 2: Right, Right, because to be clear, like, it's not like
Speaker 2: the invention of glass and putting water in glass tubes
Speaker 2: created a drastically different environment that it never existed on
Speaker 2: Earth before, right, And.
Speaker 3: These seem like reasonable arguments to me, though again it's
Speaker 3: this double confusion to sort through when you're trying to
Speaker 3: figure out whether it's reasonable to fear a doomsday scenario
Speaker 3: from a substance that within a few years everyone would
Speaker 3: agree does not exist at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really fascinating to think about, especially the scientist's
Speaker 2: point of view and all of this at the time.
Speaker 2: And you see this in various other scenarios that are
Speaker 2: similar to the poly water scenario that we'll get to later,
Speaker 2: where you know, how do you proceed if you're faced
Speaker 2: with even a slim possibility of a disastrous consequence? Do
Speaker 2: stop researching? Do you put up you know, you know,
Speaker 2: blockers and you'd refuse to go forward? Do you run
Speaker 2: more tests? Like how how does science proceed? Because we've
Speaker 2: talked about before, like science, you know, we think of
Speaker 2: it as kind of like a slime mold and a maze,
Speaker 2: and it's branching out and it's going through the different
Speaker 2: corridors of the maze. But then if you say no
Speaker 2: slime mold, you don't go down this corridor, like that's
Speaker 2: that's you know, that kind of runs against the whole scenario.
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, like there are definite there
Speaker 2: are definite times and places where you where we as
Speaker 2: a culture have to say no, we can't, we can't
Speaker 2: test like this, We can't, we can't or shouldn't go
Speaker 2: after this. But it becomes a very nuanced conversation regarding
Speaker 2: some of those corridors.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's hard to know where the line should be,
Speaker 3: especially I think when you're dealing. I mean, it's clear
Speaker 3: if it's like there's a pretty good chance of very
Speaker 3: catastrophic danger, Okay, then it becomes very clear we should
Speaker 3: do what we can to limit this research. What if
Speaker 3: it's like the danger would be absolutely apocalyptic if if
Speaker 3: it became real, but the chance of it happening is
Speaker 3: considered very very low. What do you do there?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and then yeah, what are the potential of
Speaker 2: positive outcomes and so forth. So again we'll come back
Speaker 2: to some other scenarios that also have these parameters in place.
Speaker 3: By the way, while all of this media frenzy is
Speaker 3: going on and all of this debate is raging back
Speaker 3: and forth, Philip ballflags something that I think is really
Speaker 3: worth noting. He says, while all this is happening, there
Speaker 3: still has not been a single high quality chemical analysis
Speaker 3: of polywater published anywhere. So while we're arguing about what
Speaker 3: its polymer structure is, about whether or not it's dangerous,
Speaker 3: nobody has actually shown definitively that it is water. There's
Speaker 3: been no experiment that has demonstrated this, and again it's
Speaker 3: difficult because of how little of it there is. So
Speaker 3: let's check in with the polywater skeptics at the time,
Speaker 3: mentions one named Arthur Cherkin of the Veterans Administration Hospital
Speaker 3: in Sepulvada, California. Churkin is out there suggesting, are we
Speaker 3: sure this is not just contamination from the glass tubes,
Speaker 3: Like what if particles of silica from the glass or
Speaker 3: getting into the water turning into a kind of gel
Speaker 3: or being dispersed in the water, and that is affecting
Speaker 3: the properties of the water. Of course, again, the polywater
Speaker 3: advocates were as they often said. They were like, well,
Speaker 3: maybe your samples are contaminated, but ours are pure. So
Speaker 3: you know, the fact that you might find a contaminated
Speaker 3: sample doesn't show that there's anything wrong with ours. Also
Speaker 3: want to mention a polywater skeptical researcher named Robert Davis
Speaker 3: of Purdue University. He had his own theory about the
Speaker 3: origins of polywater. He said, I think it's sweat, and
Speaker 3: he actually this wasn't original to him. He highlighted a
Speaker 3: previously little notice finding that had been public in a
Speaker 3: Russian language journal years earlier in nineteen sixty eight, which
Speaker 3: tried to create the anomalous water and had determined that
Speaker 3: it was almost entirely made of organic contaminants, which Davis
Speaker 3: interpreted as mostly sweat. Oh wow, And here's where the
Speaker 3: author of the case Studies in Pathological Science paper comes in.
Speaker 3: The author Dennis Rousseau. He talks in the paper about
Speaker 3: how he started studying polywater when he was an associate
Speaker 3: of the professor Sergio Porto at the University of Southern
Speaker 3: California around nineteen sixty nine. They initially they got very
Speaker 3: excited about polywater. They thought, actually, I'm going to read
Speaker 3: a quote from his paper, he said, quote could polywater
Speaker 3: alter biological processes? We wondered if polywater could extend longevity,
Speaker 3: possibly being the long awaited fountain of youth. So they
Speaker 3: got excited, but they started their own experiments. They tried
Speaker 3: to do a Raman scattering measurement. This is another type
Speaker 3: of spectroscopy experiment where you're going to try to measure
Speaker 3: vibrational modes of the molecule. So you shoot the sample
Speaker 3: with a laser and then you examine the spectrum of
Speaker 3: the scattered light. However, they hit a snag here. I'm
Speaker 3: going to read from Rousseau. Quote as soon as we
Speaker 3: directed our laser on polywater, it turned into a black char.
Speaker 3: Doesn't seem right?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 3: He goes on to say, quote, this was no polymer
Speaker 3: of water, but more likely a carbonaceous material. We quickly
Speaker 3: abandoned our grandiose plans for exploiting polywater's immortal qualities. So
Speaker 3: something has gone wrong here. Water is not supposed to
Speaker 3: burn up and turn into a carbon soot under a laser.
Speaker 3: Obviously the polywater they had was not water.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Even the worst chefs among us have not managed
Speaker 2: to burn water like this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, So they talk about how they also did
Speaker 3: some research trying to do some chemical analysis of supplied
Speaker 3: polywater samples, and they discovered that the samples were heavily
Speaker 3: contaminated with sodium. In fact, so heavily contaminated that they
Speaker 3: were mostly contamination. Somewhere between twenty and sixty percent of
Speaker 3: their polywater samples were by weight were sodium. They also
Speaker 3: had some potassium, some sulfate, chlorine, and trace amounts of
Speaker 3: other stuff. So it wasn't just that it was contaminated,
Speaker 3: it was like almost all contamination. So Rousseau goes on
Speaker 3: to explain that his experience did not end after the
Speaker 3: laser incident. He moved on in his career and became
Speaker 3: a researcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the summer of
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty nine, where he there found his colleagues and
Speaker 3: managers in a state of excitement about polywater. They were
Speaker 3: trying to figure out what all this meant, and he
Speaker 3: recounts being invited to one meeting to discuss whether polywater
Speaker 3: could be to blame for dielectric losses in transatlantic telephone cables, Like,
Speaker 3: was polywater somehow is it seeping into the cables? And
Speaker 3: changing the properties of the cable or the insulating material.
Speaker 3: So he was put in charge of investigating polywater at
Speaker 3: Bell Labs or I don't know if he was the
Speaker 3: head guy in charge, but he was given he was
Speaker 3: tasked with investigating it, and he kept he was By
Speaker 3: this point he was pursuing the idea, I think we've
Speaker 3: got a serious impurities and contamination problem, and that may
Speaker 3: be to explain what's going on with polywater. Again, he
Speaker 3: got the response we've mentioned earlier, these these kind of
Speaker 3: handwaving responses from the polywater proponents that are like, well,
Speaker 3: maybe the sample you tested was contaminated, but our samples
Speaker 3: are not contaminated. So Rousseau attacked to this in several directions.
Speaker 3: One experiment he did was that he he tried to
Speaker 3: make polywater using not regular water but heavy water. We've
Speaker 3: done episodes on heavy water in the past, but heavy
Speaker 3: water is made with the hydrogen replaced with a heavier
Speaker 3: isotope of hydrogen known as deuterium. And when he made
Speaker 3: polywater following the standard method with heavy water, and then
Speaker 3: he did infrared spectroscopy on it, he got the same
Speaker 3: line that they had showed in the original polywater spectroscopy experiment.
Speaker 3: So that shouldn't be right, you know, it shouldn't be
Speaker 3: looking the same with heavy water, So it kind of
Speaker 3: makes it look like the stuff we're calling polywater isn't water.
Speaker 3: And then he writes quote, Determined to understand polywater's infrared spectrum,
Speaker 3: I turned to my athletic passion handball. After a lively game,
Speaker 3: I returned to the laboratory with my sweaty t shirt
Speaker 3: and wrung the perspiration into a flask. When I placed
Speaker 3: the sweat in an infrared spectrometer, the spectrum looked strikingly
Speaker 3: similar to that of polywater. And then he shows the
Speaker 3: graph side by side and they look almost exactly the same.
Speaker 3: So what did this mean? This was some pretty strong
Speaker 3: evidence that polywater was not water. It was probably in
Speaker 3: different experiments, different things, but at least in the experiment
Speaker 3: that had produced this famous spectrum graph that everybody was
Speaker 3: using as proof that this is really different than the
Speaker 3: structure of regular water. In that case, it was probably
Speaker 3: a result of organic contamination of the capillary tubes where
Speaker 3: it was being condensed, and that contamination may well have
Speaker 3: been sweat. And he says, you know, after he published
Speaker 3: this result, research on polywater really pretty quickly started to
Speaker 3: grind to a halt. There was still some stuff going
Speaker 3: through the peer review process that would continue to kind
Speaker 3: of trickle out over the next couple of years, but
Speaker 3: new research stopped pretty quick and eventually even borister Yagan
Speaker 3: and the pro polywater Associates they admitted that the entire
Speaker 3: phenomenon was probably just a mistake. Is probably a result
Speaker 3: of biological contaminants like sweat being mistaken for a type
Speaker 3: of water.
Speaker 2: Given the amount of time and energy invested in it,
Speaker 2: I think it's like this noble though, yeah, to say,
Speaker 2: you know, actually we got it wrong and not like
Speaker 2: double down and then enter into like a realm of
Speaker 2: true ignorance on the topic. You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it sounds like they took some mighty convincing, but
Speaker 3: they did eventually admit it, and that's more than you
Speaker 3: can say for you know, a lot of people out
Speaker 3: there today pushing their own pet theories. Who are They're
Speaker 3: never going to admit that they were wrong, you know, right,
Speaker 3: So hats off to der Augen for finally getting there
Speaker 3: saying like, yeah, it looks like this was a mistake.
Speaker 2: Now as we get closer to the end of this episode.
Speaker 2: Joe We mentioned pathological science earlier, what what is pathological
Speaker 2: about the polywater scenario here?
Speaker 3: Well? So, Rousseau in his article compares the history of
Speaker 3: polywater with other cases of what he calls pathological science,
Speaker 3: like cold old fusion and infinite dilution. He says, in
Speaker 3: all cases, these were research programs where proponents could have
Speaker 3: performed definitive experiments that would have immediately answered the question
Speaker 3: once and for all, that would have shown whether the
Speaker 3: discovery was real or an illusion, but that these definitive
Speaker 3: experiments were always kind of avoided somehow, with proponents preferring
Speaker 3: to expand on and nibble around the edges of whatever
Speaker 3: initial result inspired the craze. And he takes that as
Speaker 3: kind of a a fear of confronting, you know, the
Speaker 3: final Like there is some indication that there's a fear
Speaker 3: of what if I'm wrong about this, and so you
Speaker 3: don't want to just like find out once and for all.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So for you know, like I mentioned, for so long
Speaker 3: with poly water, there were these seriments or not experiments,
Speaker 3: theoretical work trying to get into the polymer structure of
Speaker 3: it when no one had fully done a like rigorous
Speaker 3: chemical analysis to prove yes, this is h two OZ.
Speaker 3: So maybe we can save some of Rousseau's core ideas
Speaker 3: about like the characteristics of pathological science for the next episode.
Speaker 3: But there are a couple of peripheral pathological science related
Speaker 3: ideas I want to visit here right before we wrap
Speaker 3: up today. One thing I want to say is, I
Speaker 3: think the wrong takeaway from the Polywater episode is that,
Speaker 3: you know, we should look at these people and think, oh,
Speaker 3: what a bunch of idiots, you know, that we should
Speaker 3: feel superior to them because they fell for an erroneous enterprise.
Speaker 3: I think it's a lot more useful to acknowledge that
Speaker 3: these are smart people. They knew what they were doing
Speaker 3: in various ways, but they they got tricked, they fell
Speaker 3: for something that wasn't true, and so it's much more
Speaker 3: useful to look for ways that we can all learn
Speaker 3: from this episode because we're all fallible in this way.
Speaker 3: We can all get wrapped up in an idea that
Speaker 3: we're stuck on for some reason, for maybe emotional ego reasons,
Speaker 3: or we just found ourselves really convinced of it, you know,
Speaker 3: at a certain time and place in which you know,
Speaker 3: we wanted to hear something like this, and for whatever reason,
Speaker 3: we're stuck on it and we can't see the good
Speaker 3: reasons for doubting it, and so like, are there patterns
Speaker 3: to be aware of, to watch out for so we
Speaker 3: don't find ourselves falling for the next polywater. That's a
Speaker 3: big part of what the pathological science idea is about.
Speaker 3: And again we can come back to that next time.
Speaker 3: But another thing I want to talk about is something
Speaker 3: that Philip Ball mentions in his chapter. He highlights some
Speaker 3: comments by a scientist and named Felix Franks, who wrote
Speaker 3: a book about the polywater controversy in nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 3: and Franks argues that part of what made the polywater
Speaker 3: illusions so powerful and so irresistible was the role of
Speaker 3: the mass media. It was because it wasn't just happening
Speaker 3: in the scientific journals and with you know, written correspondence
Speaker 3: going back and forth there, that it's spilled over into
Speaker 3: the mainstream press and the popular media. And there were
Speaker 3: multiple problems with this, Like, of course people in the
Speaker 3: media without expertise or understanding of the subject would engage
Speaker 3: in their own wild speculation, but they would also encourage
Speaker 3: scientists to do the same sort of encouraging the worst
Speaker 3: tendencies of certain scientists involved in this controversy. It also
Speaker 3: provided an outlet with a less discerning audience. You know,
Speaker 3: that's not to insult people like us, you know, the
Speaker 3: regular readers, non scientists, but we don't have the expertise
Speaker 3: always to understand whether what a supposed authority says is
Speaker 3: reasonable or not. So instead of talking to knowledgeable, skeptical peers,
Speaker 3: you're now talking to people who have no idea if
Speaker 3: they should take what you're saying seriously. And then one
Speaker 3: thing that I think is especially probably toxic about this
Speaker 3: and is very relevant I think to the world today
Speaker 3: is the increasing velocity of public comment. How Like, if
Speaker 3: things are going back and forth in scientific journals, there
Speaker 3: is a delay, and that can have some downsides, like
Speaker 3: it can slow down scientific progress obviously, but it also
Speaker 3: has a lot of upsides, like you are more considered
Speaker 3: in your responses if you have to wait, you know,
Speaker 3: there's a waiting period before you can get your comment
Speaker 3: in response out in public. And if you speed up
Speaker 3: the ability to respond back and forth between you know,
Speaker 3: between people who are criticizing each other or arguing about something.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of times that degrades the quality
Speaker 3: of the argument. It increases the likelihood of people making
Speaker 3: responses and arguments that really, if they had time to
Speaker 3: think about it, they would know or not great or
Speaker 3: not the best way to reply.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. And really, like the
Speaker 2: media often ends up filling that space between the peer
Speaker 2: viewed correspondence and the more scientific correspondence. This is happening.
Speaker 2: I mean, like, I just think of various cases where
Speaker 2: there'll be some sort of amazing headline grabbing the finding,
Speaker 2: and you know, there's going to be kind of a
Speaker 2: balancing that occurs in the aftermath of something like that usually,
Speaker 2: but if it just hits the headlines, then it kind
Speaker 2: of solidifies out there for so many different people, people
Speaker 2: who may not tune in for the follow up studies
Speaker 2: and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Okay, well, should we wrap it there for today
Speaker 3: and then come back in our next core episode to
Speaker 3: talk some more about the relationship of polywater to the
Speaker 3: idea of pathological science and then also maybe to other
Speaker 3: cases where there have been proposed containment dangers of speculative
Speaker 3: technologies or scientific experiments, some that might be more actually
Speaker 3: dangerous or more potentially actually dangerous than the polywater scare
Speaker 3: turned out to be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, yeah, definitely. I mean there's some that
Speaker 2: we're living through right now and others that are maybe
Speaker 2: a little bit more far fetched. But we again come
Speaker 2: back to the scenario we're talking about with polywater researchers,
Speaker 2: where hindsight is twenty twenty on all of these things,
Speaker 2: and like when you're in the moment and you're staring
Speaker 2: down some potential catastrophe in the future based on new
Speaker 2: avenues of research, new scientific findings, like, how do you respond?
Speaker 2: And so in the next episode we'll get into some
Speaker 2: of that as well. Now, as for how you respond
Speaker 2: a listener, you can certainly email us. We would love
Speaker 2: to hear from you. We're going to throw out that
Speaker 2: email address in just a minute here, but yeah, if
Speaker 2: you're new to the show, people write in all the time,
Speaker 2: and we love it if you have additional insight based
Speaker 2: on your profession or your passions, your travels, or just
Speaker 2: your day to day reality. Yeah, right in, tell us,
Speaker 2: tell us what's up. We also take episode suggestions and
Speaker 2: just you know, just right in to say hi if
Speaker 2: you like. As well, just to remind you here that
Speaker 2: the stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
Speaker 2: and culture podcast. Again, we've been around for years. You
Speaker 2: can find all of our episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: Just look for Stuff to Blow your Mind. We have
Speaker 2: our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays usually, and on
Speaker 2: Wednesdays we do a short form episode and on Fridays
Speaker 2: that's when we set aside most serious concerns and we
Speaker 2: just talk about a weird movie on episodes that we
Speaker 2: call Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: As Rob said, if you would like to get in
Speaker 3: touch for any reason, if you want to suggest a
Speaker 3: topic for the future, if you want to give feedback
Speaker 3: on this episode, or if you just want to give
Speaker 3: us a friendly hello, you can email us at contact
Speaker 3: at stuff to blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.