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Comment by dluan | Hacker News Reader

Most biological perspectives think that water behaves a certain way, which is like bulk water, when in fact at certain scales it behaves very differently, especially at interfaces and surfaces. For example, it's possible to draw flow across a charged surface where you can use it to effectively purify or separate water from things floating in it. This is useful when trying to filter out baddies like viruses and bacteria.

I was working in a research lab that was trying to do work re-examining these fundamental assumptions in a bioengineering context, but it often was difficult to not get dismissed by the academic establishment and put in the looney bucket, especially when Luc Montagnier left such a sour taste in a lot of peoples minds. Oh well. Science moves forward one funeral at a time.

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Because I had to look it up :

> 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)

> During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier was a promoter of the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus, was deliberately created in, and thereafter escaped from a laboratory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier

Considering the Chinese response to that: Not unlikely.

I like how framing a hypothesis against the norm was framed as a conspiracy. Ha.

Now we know that there were GoF research proposals by the same scientists squashing these ‘conspiracies’. Wups conflict of interest.

If it is man-made, and they are keeping that from us, then it is a conspiracy. Therefore, conspiracy theory.

It's not because it us "against the norm", it is because the theory itself clearly involves a conspiracy.

> If it is man-made, and they are keeping that from us, then it is a conspiracy. Therefore, conspiracy theory.

No, it's the theory that it is a conspiracy, or more likely, a cover-up. (As I doubt there was a conspiracy to release the virus).

"Conspiracy theory" has a specific negative connotation, and has "specific characteristics ... such as an opposition [to those] who are qualified to evaluate its accuracy." [1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory

Literally the first line from wikipedia is:

> A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy

You've missed the rest of the sentence.

> A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation,[3][4] when other explanations are more probable.[5][6]

And the distinction is clearly drawn.

> A conspiracy theory is not the same as a conspiracy

"Conspiracy theory" is usually used in the non-technical sense of the word to be derogatory, or imply that the theory is false; conspiracy theories that the writer doesn't want to imply as false (e.g. Epstein didn't kill himself, members of Congress engaging in insider trading) seem to not usually be described using the specific phrase "conspiracy theory" - even when that's what they are.

I get the derogatory nature of the term, but both of your examples include groups of people keeping information from the rest of us. I'm curious if you have an example of a derogatory conspiracy theory that doesn't have a literal conspiracy in it.

My point was that the above example was called a conspiracy theory because it was against the norm, not merely because it was a conspiracy, because there are conspiracies that aren't called that because of the connotations of the term. I'm not saying that the term describes non-conspiracies.

I think GP was referring to Montagnier's support of the water memory theory (a fraudulent theory made up to support homeopathy), rather than his comments on covid 19.

Exactly [1]:

> In January 2009, Luc Montagnier, the Nobel Laureate virologist who led the team that discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), claimed (in a paper published in a journal that he set up, which seems to have avoided conventional peer review as it was accepted three days after submission) that the DNA of pathogenic bacteria and viruses massively diluted in water emit radio waves that he can detect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory#Other_scientists

This makes me wonder if that team discovered HIV despite his contributions, not because of them.

Or it is uncorrelated. I personally met a successful local technical innovation guy who believed in perpetual motion / free energy devices and told me stories about their “presentations”.

Highly likely. Very smart people can believe in very weird stuff without seeing any proof.

...and he's a "vaccines cause autism" crank as well. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/05/27/nobel...

Looks like he'd gone that route well before any of the COVID-19 stuff.

Ho, M. W. (2014). Large supramolecular water clusters caught on camera-A review. Water, 6, 1-12.

Here they show pictures supposedly in support of water structure.

Quite a bit of work in the area.

The paper by this author? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae-Wan_Ho#Institute_of_Scienc...

Not the most ringing endorsement.

Yes. That’s why the pictures and article are worth checking out. Anything having to do with “water structure” rankles scientists. But see for yourself.

Oh woops I'll admit I didn't read that far down the wikipedia entry.

The five things mentioned in the article are clearly observed unknowns about water. Water memory and other “out there” theories are exactly that - out there with minimal or no evidence (if not mainly evidence to the contrary), so most people don’t give it a serious thought. You’re free of course to still formulate the hypothesis and test it, but it’s not totally surprising you’re not able to convince more people to take it seriously until you show real data. Not that I appreciate the way academia works but we can’t blame them for our inability to prove our pet theories.

I bet when you told people about your work, you had some actual loonies get reaaal excited to.

There is something about water that tickles the imagination in a way conductive to spiritual/magical thinking. When I read in an Ian Banks novel that Water would form ice under sufficient pressure from gravity regardless of temperature, making hot ice possible....

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