The Rise and Fall of Polywater | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of Polywater

sciencehistory.org

82 pointsanarbadalov32 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/health-issues/the...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highly recommend it, it's got cool scifi elements but isn't hard scifi with a lot of world building. The story telling is great though, it's funny and poignant. One of the few books I've read multiple times.

Yep. It's brutal satire, not hard scifi.

i wish i could read this again for the first time. so much brilliance in these pages, and a perfect reflection of Vonnegut's bizarre imagination.

Couldn't say I liked Cat's Cradle but Slaughterhouse 5 was one of the best and most moving books I've ever read. I guess try them both and decide.

Note: I made this comment when this thread linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater instead of the current page.

It's great. Player Piano is another of Vonnegut's books i really like.

I think the most underrated is Sirens of Titan. It's a bit strange and convoluted.

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

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

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

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

This is a quick, fun read.

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

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

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

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

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

That is an amazing punchline.

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

“It was all water under the bridge now.”

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

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

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

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

It only takes a little work to answer such things. Both https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org or https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... lead to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23248733, which contains the answer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249978

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

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

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

Tl;DR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater

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