When Chemists Attack

CNN has a brief article about a study to determine what goes on in the brain during romantic love. The title of the article, “Love is the drug”, should tell you a little about what they discovered. I’m not going to get into brain chemistry or anything like that (not my field, not a subject I’ve read a lot about, and not really what was studied in this article anyway), but there is an interesting quote at the very bottom of the article – because it’s a common complaint that folks have against science in general.

The interviewer asked whether studying love in this manner took away the “mystery and romance”. Here’s the reply from anthropologist Helen Fisher, who (with others) performed the study:

You can know every ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and you still sit down and eat that chocolate cake and it’s wonderful.

In the same way, you can know all the ingredients of romantic love and still feel that passion.

It’s a sentiment that scientists echo quite frequently, but probably not frequently enough. Understanding how something works doesn’t cheapen it. Consider Halley’s comet. Is it somehow less impressive because we understand why it glows and when it will come back?

It’s almost finals time, and as classes are winding down, I’ve been looking for stuff on the Internet to show my new students in the Spring. There’s some good stuff out there There’s also some crazy stuff, which is almost as instructive – especially when you’re trying to define for a class what science is, and what it isn’t.

This particular site is hawking the same "Living Water" purifier apparatus that I briefly looked at yesterday. I picked this one because a lot of the original site’s crazier documents were in the form of scanned PDF files, painful to view and print (and that’s not considering how painful the actual content is).

Water retains a memory in its electrical makeup… a memory for pollutants, viruses, and bacteria (regardless of how it is purified)… transferring that memory (including the possible diseases of former users) to everything it touches… BECAUSE… ALL WATER ON THIS PLANET IS RECYCLED… EVEN THE WATER YOU DRINK!!

While it’;s generally acceptes that even liquid water has some structural features (clusters of water molecules), I was unable to find any evidence of a true memory. Also, water’s a substance that self-ionizes. Individual water molecules react with each other, forming hydronium (H₃O⁺) and hydroxide (OH^–)ions, which last a little while and can recombine to form water molecules again. (A pH meter measures the amount of one of those ions – hydronium – in water.) These are not good for any "memory" effect.

And why is it that these people always claim the water only retains a memory of the bad stuff it’s had in it. Why can’t my tap water retain the memory of a beer?

I like the imagery in the last sentence, though. We are all recycled atoms. Or as the late Carl Sagan put it, "We are all made of star stuff".

Water is our most important food (nutrient). Today’s water is spreading disease all over the world at an alarming rate. Chlorine doesn’t even kill bacteria anymore (WaterNews Dec 88). Doesn’t your family deserve to drink and bathe in the best that nature has to offer? The information in this newsletter will change the way you look at water – forever!!

I will have to try to look up the citation, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it mentioned that some bacteria were tough enough to survive some cleaning agents. But I question the assertion that today’s water (presumably the author means after purification) is spreading disease – especially since life expectancies have been steadily increasing over the past century. That’s an extraordinary claim. And it requires extraordinary proof.

Here’s some of the proof:

“I have been involved in laboratory work for many years. My medical background and scientific degrees made it immediately apparent that you are on to a fundamental breakthrough with sufficient improvement in cell physiology for the body to heal itself of potentially fatal pathologies!”
– W.C., Pauls Valley, OK

Assuming this isn’t made up, it doesn’t really qualify as proof. It’s an argument from authority, and we aren’t given enough information to tell whether this guy is actually an authority on anything other than how to look up big words in a dictionary.

Water is a homeopathic (a natural medicinal solution). Even though we may filter the viruses, bad bacteria, and chemicals, the ‘vibration’ is still left within the water, known as a ‘marker’. When we put something into our body (food or water), we want that substance to have a healing vibration, for harmony within the body, as opposed to a negative vibration, which can only create discord and ill health. The Living Water machine is the only water system capable of erasing markers in our water.

Well, I finally got my defintion for what a "marker" was. Unfortunately, calling it a "vibration"isn’t any more informative.

If you put any water (other than Living Water) in a hot tub, without further treatment, the memory within the water causes it to develop a horrible smell as it reaches body temperature (98.6^oF) – because all water is recycled water! Only the Electron 3 Water and Air Machine (using a patented method of expansion and contraction of the water molecules several times per minute) will erase that memory!!

Perhaps rolling around in the cat box before getting into the hot tub wasn’t such a good idea?

But seriously, can someone clue me in on what it is this guy is talking about? I’ve never been in a hot tub that released a horrible smell when it got to body temperature. Is he just making up an effect to "cure" water of?

We also learn here what this water purifier does. It is supposed to repeatedly expand and contract water molecules – it’s Bowflex for water! I bet those molecules are really strong after treatment!

It’s also not explained what vibrating the water molecules will do that their natural tendency to self-ionize will not do.

We show you how to remove that memory of things you may not want to know about. Once the water’s memory has been removed, tiny amounts of it can maintain fresh water in hot tubs, wells, and entire aquifers for years – the answer to environmental problems! This “memory” can be removed only one way… by expanding and contracting the molecules to an even greater extent than would normally be found in the environment. In the environment, the change in temperature at a particular instant is only a fraction of a degree or a few degrees… not enough to remove that memory.

Again, we don’t really have evidence of a memory effect – certainly nothing that lasts for "years". Water clusters have not been demonstrated to last anywhere near that long.

And … temperature? What’s that got to do with the current discussion?

The Living Water method has a repeated expansion and contraction of the molecules several times per minute. The Living Water unit also puts electrons into water, electrons that we need to survive!

This could be your water molecule. This is the number to call.

Oxygen levels have dropped from 38% (air trapped in fossilized amber) to as low as 8% (SciAmer). Obviously at 0% we will cease to exist but what happens if you slowly choke off oxygen below 8%? You probably won’t notice it or you may think your lack of strength, difficulty in breathing, or some other problem is merely “old age”! Disease becomes rampant because there aren’t enough electrons in the atmosphere to kill viruses, pathogenic bacteria, and parasites that mutate completely out of control. It’s happening right now. Again, chlorine doesn’t even kill bacteria anymore… they have mutated until they are untreatable!!

I was unable to find anything about this oxygen claim, but 8% sounds suspiciously low. The commonly accepted oxygen concentration in the air is about 21% at sea level.

Too much oxygen can be bad for you, though.

Skipping a bit..

While minerals, vitamins, amino acids, enzymes, etc, are vital in our diets, why must we have water and air daily to live? We can fare well during the day without everything else, but we must have air and water. Why do our bodies demand these two things? As we have learned from parents and teachers, we must have oxygen. Every time we breathe air and drink a glass of water we get the vital oxygen our bodies demand.

While I’m sure that we get the oxygen we need from breathiing air, I think that water’s a bit more than an oxygen source for the body. (Those vitamins, amino acids, and enzymes also contain oxygen. So does the carbon dioxide we breathe out.)

The answer, under closer examination, rests in our understanding of what is in the oxygen and hydrogen that is in the air and water we consume. What is in the oxygen and hydrogen? Answer: Electrons. Yes, there are other things, even smaller than the electrons in the atoms, but simply put, electrons surrounding the nucleus of the atom are the particles that sustain the chemical-biological exchange at the atomic level that fuels our bodies and allows chemical exchanges with minerals and other nutrients in our diets that keep us healthy.

While a lot of chemistry is about electrons, this quote is gibberish. There are electrons in oxygen and hydrogen, yes. Arsenic, per atom, contans even more. And a single lead atom contains more electrons than an arsenic atom a hydrogen atom, and an oxygen atom put together. So what?

Everything is electrons (energy). You are electrons (energy). Just as a pacemaker gives off electrons in the production of energy, you, too, give off electrons.

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship. (Anyone not know the source of this quote?)

I include the quote because it’s as relevant to the properties of water as the previous one. In other words, the author of this article is feeding us more gibberish.

Water comes in clusters (6, 8, 12 molecules). Think of those clusters of water molecules like the molecules in a wire. When you heat a wire it gives up free electrons… the principle of the vacuum tube. When you drink the water that has gone through our process, the clusters slowly give up electrons as the water reaches your body temperature of 98.6oF.

Very short-lived clusters. Water is too dynamic for these clusters to "live" for very long. And then there’s that pseky self-ionization and the interaction of water molecules with dissolved substances to have to deal with.

This is a monumental discovery because electrons kill viruses, pathogenic bacteria, and parasites.

As with the water memory issue, I am left wondering why it’s only the "bad" things that get killed by these electrons.

We have also come to learn that there is a substantial amount of electricity in our bodies, particularly in the brain. We are electrical. Within every square inch of our bodies there is an average of 10,000 volts of electricity! The normal fat in our bodies prevents our bodies from going up in flames due to the incredible amount of electricity within us.

It’s not the volts that can kill you, it’s the amps. Take a look at this Van de Graaff Generator. A hundred thousand volts and this sadistic professor has people grabbing the thing! 🙂

And this is the first time I’ve heard that our body fat is the only thing that prevents us from bursting into flames due to the electricity in our bodies. (Why don’t our clothes burst into flames after we walk across a rug in the wintertime? No fat in there.)

Therefore, when our bodies begin to lose the electricity, we begin to lose energy. Without the electricity being replaced within our bodies, we die. Then it is obvious why we must constantly breathe the air and regularly drink water. As water is the medium for carrying the electrical energy throughout our bodies, deep into every cell, likewise it is clear to us that the air we breathe immediately hits the blood in our lungs so that the blood becomes the critical life-force medium that also carries the electrical energy throughout our bodies. In this aspect we realize the chemical/electrical basics of how our bodies function.

So, uh, what happened to the oxygen?

And so the real no-nonsense, no-hype reason why this invention has the miraculous health aspects that it has is because it produces water and air that is loaded with electrons. Thus it is loaded with energy in the form that our bodies require… naturally… the way our bodies were designed to handle. But don’t let this simplicity gloss over your ability to perceive the awesome dynamics of this concept. It is a matter of life and death.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to just stick a fork in an electrical socket and be done with it?

Water consists of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom (H2O). “Normal” tap water consists of a water molecule cluster containing 10-13 water molecules that have a weak bond, while the water molecule cluster produced by the Living Water machine contains many more water molecules.

Remember, these water clusters aren’t found to be long-lived. And there’s no mention of how the claim of "bigger clusters" was verified. (My guess – it wasn’t.)

Not only are there many more molecules in the water molecule cluster, these clusters have a stronger bond, and they are bonded together into an amazing 12-faced crystalline cluster.

And how was that determined?

And we have learned that crystalline structures have the ability to store and transmit energy. Considering this, we can begin to see the unique properties of this cluster. Since it is larger, it holds many more electrons.

Many more electrons. Like benzene. I think I’ll pass.

The reason why this happens is because the water molecule is stretched in the Living Water’s distillation process, and the shape of the water molecule is changed. Labs have confirmed that there is a 10-degree increase in the distance between the two hydrogen atoms bonded to the one oxygen atom. Therefore, we have a “new puzzle piece that forms a different puzzle.” It is believed that this is how water once was long ago. This large crystalline water molecule cluster appears to be the ultimate water molecule cluster… the best it can be. The addition of an ozone bulb to the Living Water machine now produces a super-charged water molecule cluster.

i’m not sure how this claim is evaulated. The article doesn’t say by whom or how they were able to monitor the bond angle of the water, as usual. The ang;e between the hydrogen atoms is largely due to the repulsion between the hydrogen atoms combined with the repulsion between the hydrogen atoms and the unbonded electrons of the oxygen atom. If the oxygen didn’t have these unshared electrons, the hydrogen atoms would be as far apart as possible (180 degrees). The unbonded electrons on the oxygen, though, take up space and force the hydrogen atoms closer to each other – to an angle a little less than 109 degrees. (For more details, look up the VSEPR model.)

You’d think that forcing more electrons on there would push the hydrogens closer together instead of farther apart.

Here’s a picture of the water molecule, generated with a freely available molecular modeling package called ghemical.

The colored shape around the water molecule is the electrostatic potential – blue for negative, red for positive. So, electron-rich regions of the molecule appear blue, while electron-poor regions are red. (I put this here because this uneven distribution of charge is one of the reasons water molecules attract each other like they do. Plus, it looks cool. 🙂 )

Are you beginning to see the bigger picture? Our bodies have been striving to function in a modern-day environment which has air and water that has been depleted of vital electrons. We have suffered more “disease” and fatigue because of this simple fact. Our bodies have strived to get the energy they need to function from those pitiful, tired and abused water and air molecules.

The only picture I see is one of a duck. Quack! Quack!

And where is the evidence that the fundamental structure of water molecules has changed through history. Surely a claim like that needs some supporting evidence?

And there’s the disease thing again – despite the evidence showing that life expectancy has increased continually over the past century. Diseases that help you live longer – who knew?

We have done everything we can imagine to change water back to its pristine condition… oxygenating it, ozonating it, ionizing it, you name it… but we have not been successful. But now, we have the opportunity to utilize a powerful, electrically-charged water molecule cluster because of John Ellis’ invention. It has the potential to change our environment significantly for the better. It is considered one of the most important health contributions in modern history.

Again, I’d like to see the evidence for the structure of water molecules changing radically over the past century (as the John Ellis site implies with its claims on cancer).

The Living Water patented method of expanding and contracting the molecules, changes water so the clusters of molecules can hold more electrons as nature intended… increasing energy to incredibly high levels.

So what happens when that water self-ionizes, forming hydronium and hydroxide ions? When these ions recombine or interact with other molecules to reform water, what kind of water is formed then? The beefed-up Bowflex super-water? Or the tired old regular water?

In biblical times, people lived hundreds of years (scientists found 38% oxygen in fossilized amber). Now, for the first time, you can again get electrons from water to make up for the loss of electrons in the air.

The Bible may be many things to many people, but it is not a science textbook. (And there’s that darned oxygen toxicity problem to deal with…)

Ordinary distillers should not be used to make healthy drinking water for a number of reasons:
1: They concentrate the very chemicals you want to remove.

I’m sure folks that make water purification systems would be interested to know that they are actually concentrating the chemicals in the water.

Any lab will tell you, these other methods can’t work without the electrons found in charged water. Because oxygen levels have dropped to as low as 8%, today’s water molecules are smaller and can’t hold the additional donor electrons (from oxygen) needed to make them work!!

By all means, talk to a lab. Odds are very good that they’ve never heard of any of this.

This is a momentous breakthrough because electrons kill viruses and return wells to purity. Stretched molecules remain that way (stretched). Only a small amount of Living Water changes a lot of ordinary water. It stores indefinitely (you can’t do that with ordinary water… look at the expiration dates), and purifies itself.

So all it would take to save the world would be for someone to buy one of these filters and then pour a bit of it into the ocean. (Sounds a lot like Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, doesn’t it?)

an ordinary water molecule is too small… any lab that studies the properties of water can prove it to you. Don’t listen to all the scientific jargon about products. All you need to ask is this – is the water molecule larger? If it isn’t, the product can’t work regardless of what anyone tells you. A Biotech firm that tested two of our fine-tuned machines in their labs recently confirmed this again.

What is the name of this "Biotech firm"? Where is the data published?

Scientists have found the angle between the hydrogen atoms is 10 degrees greater, the viscosity is different, and it has a beautiful crystalline structure at room temperature that’s duodecahedronal (12 planes).

Same question. Where is the data?

Viruses are so tiny they pass through any air filter, water filter, reverse osmosis machine, ozone machine, or ordinary distiller with bacteria that also survive the other methods.

Nobody can filter that kind of stuff out, apparently.

Let me quote from the GE source in the second link, just to rub it in: "[Reverse osmosis] can meet most water standards with a single-pass system and the highest standards with a double-pass system. RO rejects 99.9+% of viruses, bacteria and pyrogens."

I’ve about reached my daily limit of chemical insanity, but I thought I’d pass on one more bt from the article:

Research chemist Herman Meinke has grown 18-foot corn plants and gigantic vegetables with Living Water.

At last! A name! Let’s look him up. Found him, but he doesn’t really sound like much of a research chemist. More like a promotor of "orgone energy" a rather bizarre idea by Wilhelm Reich. If this is the best the Living Water folks can do, color me less than impressed.

4/5/06: The John Ellis site appears to have been rearranged. You cas still find most of the crasy stuff linked from here.

Sometimes, the Internet seems like a vast ocean of insanity.

In a comment thread on Pharyngula, I found a gem of a web site. Have a look at the Crystal Clear site. It’s one of those sites that makes claims so bizarre that I wonder if it’s not really a parody site in disguise. Assuming it’s not a parody, it’s frightening how the site author tries to wrap his device (a water purifier) in scientific-sounding gibberish, hoping that some poor soul will send in $1500 to $2800 to get this “answer to cancer”.

Let’s look at one of the site’s claims: Everybody is drinking someone else’s disease.

1: Today’s water is low in Electrons that destroy free radicals that cause disease

Low relative to what? How is this detected?

2: The disease markers of former users are still in the water!!!

What are these “disease markers”? How are they detected?

One sure sign of a quack is that he won’t reveal his methods. Let’s continue reading.

That’s why water from the purest water products goes bad in a bottle or quickly develops such a horrible smell in a hot tub, you couldn’t get in the hot tub if it’s not treated!

I’m not exactly sure what he’s getting at here (but it isn’t backing up his claim). I don’t observe the water coming from my laboratory deionizer going “bad” in its nalgene bottle over a noticable period of time.

And as for hot tubs, wouldn’t the need for treating the water have to do with the fact that the typical hot tub is exposed to lots of sources of bacteria and other contaminants – not the least of which would be the people that sit in the hot tub? I don’t see how this guy connects the fouling of water in a hot tub to some intrinsic property of the water molecules.

For centuries (vapor to rain), the disease markers from the waste products of billions and billions of people and animals spread diseases everywhere!

“Disease markers” again. Which are what?

My patents and proprietory secrets prove that I am THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD that can find disease markers in water and as a result, unlike cigarette manufacturers that have a warning label, there are grounds for legal action against sellers of bottled, ordinary distilled, reverse osmosis, ozonated, filtered, alkaline and spring water products for causing any problem you can name!!

Even if you’ve never had a chemistry course before, you can immediately tell that this guy is spouting B.S. and not doing science. Not only will he not tell us what these “disease markers” are, he claims that he’s the only person in the world who can find them! If you can’t reproduce your findings and describe them in such a manner so that other people can reporduce them as well, you sure as heck aren’t doing science. Telling people how to spot these “disease markers” would mean that more people would buy his water-purifying machine, right?

Bonus points for anyone else who can figure out what the rest of that sentence means.

And now … the proof we’ve been waiting for!

Proof! I have copies of a certified letter that I sent to the authorities where they now have the high est cancer rate in the country in spite of using these products!!

That he sends a letter to “the authorities” is proof of what, exactly. The presence of these “disease markers”? That water is “lower in electrons” now than it used to be?

Shuw us the data!

4/5/06: The John Ellis site appears to have been rearranged. You cas still find most of the crasy stuff linked from here.

One thing about science that people who have had no exposure to it find hard to grasp is the role of being wrong. Being wrong is usually thought of as a bad thing, but it’s a necessary part of science. In short, acknowledging when science is wrong lets science get better.

As an example, I’ve pulled out my old-but-not-too-moldy copy of Richter’s Inorganic Chemistry (5^th American edition, published in 1900 – pages 243-250). What can a hundred -and-five year old book tell us about science? Plenty, if we’re looking for how science has progressed in that time.

In 1900, the periodic table was somewhat new, and didn’t quite have its modern form. What it did have were groups and periods. Chemists had long known that some elements were strikingly similar to others in terms of how they reacted with other elements. Sometimes that similarity even went as far as physical appearance and other properties. Mendeleev had, in the 1800s, surmised that if you arranged the elements in order of atomic weight (a relatively new measurement at the time), the properties of the elements would repeat at regular intervals. This became known as the periodic law, and enabled early chemists to arrange elements in a new way. Elements with similar chemical properties were placed into groups. Periods were essentially runs through the different groups. In other words, the first period contained the lightest member of the first group, the second group, the third group, etc. until the next element belonging to the first group was reached. Then the next period started. There’s a little more to it, but that is the essential idea.

The periodic law, organized as a table, looked like this in 1900. The numbers by the elements are the relative atomic weights of each element as known in 1900. Elements that had not yet been discovered but were thought to exist based on the periodic law are the “???”s.

	Group I	Group II	Group III	Group IV	Group V	Group VI	Group VII	Group VIII
Period I	Li, 7	Be, 9	B, 11	C, 12	N, 14	O, 16	F, 19
Period II	Na, 23	Mg, 24	Al, 27	Si, 28	P, 31	S, 32	Cl, 35.4
Period III	K, 39 Cu, 63	Ca, 40 Zn, 65	Sc, 44 Ga, 70	Ti, 48 Ge, 72	V, 51 As, 75	Cr, 52 Se, 79	Mn, 55 Br, 80	Fe, 56 / Ni, 59 / Co, 59
Period IV	Rb, 85 Ag, 108	Sr, 87 Cd, 112	Y, 89 In, 114	Zr, 90 Sn, 118	Nb, 94 Sb, 120	Mo, 96 Te, 127	???, 100 I, 126.5	Ru,102 / Rh,103 / Pd, 106
Period V	Cs, 133 ??? ??? Au, 197	Ba, 127 ??? ??? Hg, 200	La, 138 ??? Yb, 173 Tl, 204	Ce, 140 ??? ??? Pb, 207	Pr, 140 / Nd, 144 ??? Ta, 183 Bi, 208	??? ??? W, 184 ???	Sm, 150 ??? ??? ???	??? Os, 191/ Ir, 193 / Pt, 195
				Th, 232		U, 239

The periodic law worked very well. According to Richter’s:

[Mendeleev], on the basis of the periodic system, predicted […] the existence of new, not yet known, elements which correspond to unoccupied, free gaps in the table. In fact, three such gaps have been filled by the discovery of gallium, scandium, and germanium; their properties have shown themselves to be perfectly accordant with those deduced from the periodic system.

Score three for the periodic law! (Side note: Useful scientific ideas are predictive; in addition to telling us something we do know, they predict things that we don’t. Then we can try to find out if the predictions are correct!)

But it was wrong.

I have two elements on the table above in bold: tellurium (Te) and iodine (I). According to the periodic law, as you go from group to group, the atomic weight should increase. But tellurium’s weight is larger than iodine’s. Not by much, but it is still larger.

This is a big problem for the periodic law, and demanded an answer. Some other elements had been out of order as well (and were redetermined). Atomic weight measurements weren’t as easy then as now, so it was natural for there to be some flux in the atomic weights.

The problem? Tellurium and iodine wouldn’t go away!

Richter’s makes a statement.

We are consequently justified, until we have more evidence to the contrary, in assuming that the determinations of the atomic weight of tellurium have placed that value too high. If it should finally be proved to be greater than that of iodine, then the periodic system would be seriously affected in its foundations; it would then lose its claim to being a natural law – for this would not tolerate an exception.

Science is always at the mercy of the data. Eventually, it was proved that tellurium had a greater atomic weight than iodine. The periodic law, for all its successes, was wrong, wrong, wrong! So why do we teach the periodic table in chemistry classes, when the periodic law was wrong? Because science revises itself. The periodic law was wrong, true, but it also contained a lot that was right. The properties of the elements do vary with a regular pattern. Where the periodic law had it wrong was assuming this variation was based on the weight. It’s actually based on something else – the number of positively charged particles (protons) in the nucleus of an atom. That has a relationship to the atomic weight, but it’s not the same thing. That insight, which required us to figure out what was inside an atom, didn’t come until much later.

But it might not have come at all if the periodic law wasn’t wrong! If we thought the periodic law completely described the nature of atoms, we might not have tried to find out more about them.

There are a few points to make about the periodic law and the progress of science. First, good scientific ideas are predictive. They not only explain what we know, but also predict some things we don’t (yet) know. The validity of a scientific idea rests on how well these predictions turn out – not only on whether it agrees with all data that’s already available. If it doesn’t predict anything, it’s not very useful for science.

Second, science works best when everything is out in the open. The problems with the periodic law were out in the open for everyone to see and work on. While the reference quoted here says that the problems were likely due to experimental error (even though they weren’t), there’s no attempt to hide the discrepancy. Think about that the next time you read something about vast conspiracies of scientists trying to hide the truth from the masses. Science doesn’t progress that way.