The Curious Case of Polywater | Hacker News Reader

The Curious Case of Polywater

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165 pointsvenutip40 comments

I think it's unfair to lump the faster-than-light-neutrino experiment in as bad science. They pretty much said "this is really odd, please suggest your explanations".

Media overhypes a cautious plea for assistance made by scientists. Scientists receive their assistance, and announce that the discrepancy has been resolved. Media looks foolish, and claims the entire incident is indicative of flaws in the current state of science.

Good times.

Then there was the part where the scientists resigned/were forced to resign. That part was truly overkill.

better than the ones that could be criminally convicted for earthquake prediction failures. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-23/italian-scientists-con...

That case is more complicated. Notwithstanding the screwed up nature of the Italian courts, those scientists didn't just fail to predict an earthquake they actively encouraged people to ignore the danger. The scientists in question claimed that the tremors removed energy from the fault zone and actually made the situation safer and that there was "no danger".

Now, I think it's still open for debate whether what the scientists did justifies charges of manslaughter, but the idea that they were charged merely for failing to predict earthquakes is very wrong.

Agreed. Everyone in the physics community pretty much knew that the FTL neutrino problem had to be a measurement error, including the group who published it. I think one individual had to resign because they jumped the gun a bit on the initial announcement, but overall they hit a situation with a pretty crazy and groundbreaking result and none of them could poke holes in it, and all of them were skeptical about it. They published that information in the most responsible manner possible, but the media handled it pretty poorly.

Some other cases are the first two "discoveries" of the top quark, which were both wrong (and the one in 1984 was by Rubbia who won a Nobel Prize for the W and the Z so he wasn't really a lightweight). Recently, CDF at Fermilab had to retract their W+multijet mystery which might have been a leptophobic Z' boson, but was just that they didn't understand their background (again, everyone kinda saw that one coming as well). Also a couple of the dark matter detectors thought they had some signal, but the recently announced LUX experiment negative results pretty much crushed them. This kind of back-and-forth actually happens all the time. That isn't bad science, that's just science.

<Minor Spoiler Alert> A very similar experiment today - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120709-arsen... The Arsenic Life claim that was much ballyhooed by NASA but turned out to to be bad controls in the experiment protocols.

In that case as in the Poly-water case, the reason for the initial strange results turned out to be contamination of the Samples. In the Arsenic Life case however the authors continue to deny it and still claim their results are valid. The lead author is now attached to a prestigious institution still doing "science".

When ever I read articles like this, as well as they are written, I always feel like cutting to the chase: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater

Absolutely agree. It's written like a badly scripted History Channel "documentary"... "But what was discovered in the tomb? Find out after the commercial break."

Ugh!

My new PVR can play at 2x speed with audio adjusted to sound normal. It is a godsend. You can really churn through the 30 minutes of bullshit to extract the 5 minutes of gold in double quick time (pun!).

My favorite part about all this is the fear of a "Polywater Gap."

Mandrake, how does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual.

MR. PRESIDENT?! I WILL NOT ALLOW A MINESHAFT GAP!!!

...and then all the parallels with the Cat's Cradle novel, by Kurt Vonnegut, heaped on top.

It's like everyone in national security sits around watching movies and reading novels, and then goes out into the world the very next day, and tries to act them out as part of some warped vision of what they think reality should be, given their advantage for shaping world events.

There's something seriously bizarre and disturbing about that.

Reminds me of a lot of political discourse - it is easy to be skeptical of people you want to be wrong, it is hard to be skeptical of people you agree with.

Known as confirmation bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Even more curious is that if Peter Kollman (referenced below) hadn't died of cancer, he would likely have shared this year's Nobel Prize for molecular dynamics:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v233/n5321/abs/233550a0...

Whoever said there are no second acts in America was crazy.

Water is pretty weird without going too far out of your way to come up with new weirdnesses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice#Phases

A much closer parallel is the case of N-Rays [0]. Major scientific sensation that eventually turned out to be wishful observation.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-rays

> They proposed that instead of the Van der Waals forces that normally draw water molecules gently together, polywater was composed of molecules locked in place by stronger chemical bonds, somehow catalyzed by the quartz capillary tubes.

Aren't water molecules held together by relatively strong Hydrogen bonds? And if there are stronger bonds in polywater, what are they, then, covalent bonds?

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Actually a single water molecule is held together by covalent bonds between the O and two H's, and hydrogen bonds (not Van der Waals) are the intermolecular forces responsible for the properties like surface tension and high boiling point.

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Yup, misread OP.

Notwithstanding the error, the properties described seem like they might be useful in some contexts, eg the low freezing point.

Yes, but I don't think there was anything new about adding salt to water to lower the freezing point.

There isn't, but it went quite a bit lower than the freezing point of seawater.

This book is an excellent account of the whole fiasco: http://www.amazon.com/Polywater-Felix-Franks/dp/0262560291/r...

lets hope graphene is real :)

Heh - spoilers for Cat's Cradle.

Yeah, I was thinking that the plot sounded interesting and I should look for the book... then he said how it ends. Poop.

Knowing the ending does not ruin the book. Even if you hadn't heard anything about the plot, it becomes clear very quickly how it is going to end. The suspense comes from how it all goes down. Classic Chekhov's gun.

It's an excellent book and I highly recommend it. Very short too, so it's not much of a time commitment.

Agree; actually it even starts after the global freeze.

I thought the whole Ice-Nine thing in Cat's Cradle was pretty famous by this point. It's like Janet Leigh dying in the shower in Psycho — everyone knows about the twist, but they like it anyway.

How many pop culture references to Cat's Cradle have you seen? Even that shower scene - I've seen references, jokes, even the scene but I have not seen the film and don't know who Janet Leigh is. And don't say everyone. There are people who have not even heard of Psycho and there are people who REALLY hate spoilers.

There's a reference (that prompted me to read the book) in a movie by Al Pacino and Colin Farrell (The Recruit.) Not an incredibly good movie (good for a lazy Saturday afternoon.)

At the end, the Titanic sinks.

Difference being that the ending to Titanic was 'spoiled' for me before the screenplay was ever written.

In the book, it didn't really freeze the oceans "in an instant." It took several days.

With any of these scientific breakthrough the proof is in the pudding. They've got to get some sort of prototype invention that uses their science to validate it. If they can't get their prototype device to work then something's wrong with the science.

Yes and no: in that flying and computers have been possible since the dawn of time. But they emerged at specific times. So this leads folks to always be cautious to reject. But to your point: it isn't definitely true until proven.

Spoiler alert: Something was wrong with the science.

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