OT: Liquid water is composed of 150-unit branching polymers

Here's a wiki article

GH

Sort of like cold fusion; same group dynamics.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

I'd never heard of it, before my time.

GH

Pure water is certainly an interesting fluid, but many of the myths surrounding it are simply not true. For example, structured water can exist, but for extremely short periods of time, on the order of one picosecond, or about 1e-12 second.

The idea of a wrench dissolving in pure water is interesting, but is certainly a myth. First, the water is pure, so it has no dissolved carbonic acid. Second, the wrench is made of high strength materials, such as chromium. These resist corrosion. Third, the wrench is sitting on the floor of the tank, which is certainly high strength steel and certainly grounded.

So there is no possibility of Galvanic Corrosion. There is no carbonic acid to assist, and there is no other means of dissolving the wrench.

I have had an exmample of 12 ga silver wire immersed in water for over 5 years. There is absolutely no evidence of any degredation of the wire. And I do not expect any.

There a wiki piece on that too. Like polywater, a few people refused to give it up after most everybody decided it was junk.

I guess that's good. Falsifying something could be group dynamics too.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

"Polywater" was clearly nonsense from its first conception. But at the time, in the 1960's, all sorts of drivel was treated as /possibly/ true by the USA, because there were rumours that the Russians knew more than the Americans, and could somehow make a secret weapon.

But you are right, it /was/ investigated scientifically for a while.

I am not going to buy and read a book just for that. (It may be an interesting book - but I have hundreds that are higher up on my to-read list.)

Oops, my fault. I meant I never heard of polywater. I was in grad school during cold fusion time. That was fun for a little while... dreaming of a little reactor in your basement.

George H.

It was an odd effect, with water apparently solidifying. It turned out (if memory serves; that was a long time ago) to be an unexpected gel that formed with some contaminants.

The 'it's a polymer' idea generated the name 'polywater' and was quickly discounted. That was a failed hypothesis, not a group delusion. It wasn't major, just widely discussed (and had a catchy name). Some of the research was Russian, and communication was slow; the whole affair took two or three years to blow over.

Why would anyone call it major? Or delusion? Slanted language and catchy names are media illusions, not scientific delusions.

No scientific groupthink explanation is indicated; that's just a JL hobbyhorse.

The current polymer-model is reminiscent of (but theoretical based, not subject to dirty glassware) the polywater hypothesis.

Why do you pick on JL? I see lotsa signs of science group think. It goes hand in hand with human group think. And in some ways it looks to be baked into our research funding system. To get a grant you need to publish and get cited. You get cited by being part of whatever is hot (no climate pun intended.) If you are interested in some backwater of science... well good luck, unless you are funding your self... or slip it in on the side.

Group think is a problem all scientists should talk about. (IMHO) Do you read Sabine H. on Backreaction?

George H.

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I was a graduate student back then. It was a plausible - if somewhat flakey - hypothesis at the time, and the silica contamination explanation didn't take all that long to falsify it. Nobody got all that excited about it.

The fact that you could stable chemical compounds out of the noble gases ha ppened at much the same time - XeF2 was first reported at the end of 1962 ( the lat year of my undergraduate degree) and the professor of inorganic che mistry at Melbourne promptly tried to make KrF2. Somebody else got there fi rst (in 1963).

That was real science.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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It wasn't.

It was a series of interesting results, being pushed by Boris Derjaguin (in Russia) who had an impressive reputation. The first publication was in 196

1, but nobody in the west took much interest until Derjagin presented some of his work in person on a visit to the UK, which persuaded other people to work on it, and they started getting mixed results, which eventually gave them a handle on what was actually going on.

In 1973 Derjagin published a letter in Nature which accepted the original r esults came from contaminated - rather than pure - water.

Why bother?

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Rather different science. The fact that "polywater" wasn't pure water meant that the results that had been obtained were comprehensible.

Cold fusion is sustained by the fact that occasional samples of hydrogen or deuterium loaded palladium produce more heat than they ought to.

The effect does seem to be real, but pretty much impossible to reproduce re liably.

The bafflegab about heavy entangled electrons and protons doesn't strike me as all that plausible, but the idea that individual palladium nuclei were ending up a neutron or so heavier makes sense, and you can invoke quantum m echanical tunneling to get there.

Palladium doesn't have right sort of nuclear excited states for Mossbauer s pectroscopy, but adding a neutron or two to a palladium nucleus releases a lot of energy, in the first instances as nuclear oscillations, which will d ecay by emitting high energy X-rays.

Palladium has a lot of stable isotopes - Pd-102, Pd-104, Pd-105, Pd-106, Pd

-108 and Pd-110 - and most of them (Pd-102's natural abundance is only 1.02 %) will be handy in any sample of natural palladium so the X-rays emitted a re likely to be at a wavelength that would be absorbed by an adjacent palla dium nucleus, producing the sort of distortion of that nucleus that would m ake proton or deutron capture more likely, so you might see the occasional burst of excess heat generation that people seem to find, but without the n eutron generation that "cold fusion" was supposed to produce (and never has ).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

But, not in polywater. No group in agreement. Maybe Blondlot and his assistants, with N-rays, fits that model.

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ther in an dense manner but on solidification they rearrange to a lattice w ith a fixed spacing. The slipperiness is because of this, applying pressur e melts the ice forming a thin layer of water which is a lubricant.

od solvent for non-polar materials. Ever hear of mixing like oil and water ?

Who told you that sucrose is not polar? It has eight OH groups which are v ery similar to the water molecule and create local dipoles which attract wa ter molecules allowing individual sugar molecules to dissolve.

Sugar may not be ionic, but it is very much polar.

Rick C.

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Nothing wrong with that. It is entirely reasonable for an area of research to develop around a new idea until it is proven wrong. The standard for a cceptance of results (from what I recall) was a statistical analysis with a threshold of 95% likelihood your results did not happen by random chance. That's not a high bar. That means 1 in 20 reports may be wrong. If say, three reports all agreed or correlated by chance (1 in 8000 chance of this happening) there will be some significant interest. So there will be false starts in science quite often really. Time and repetition will out the fa lse reports and keep science on the righteous path.

Rick C.

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The hard experimental sciences are usually [1] self-correcting fairly fast.

Lots of other "sciences" aren't subject to serious experiment, so can propagate mass delusion among their experts. Such fields are subject to wild swings, on the order of a generation, about 20 years.

[1] except string theory and multi-universe and a few things like that in physics.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

It is a /long/ time since my school chemistry. Thank you for the correction - I was mixing non-ionic and non-polar.

All science has self-correcting elements. Rarely is science 'corrected' by anything other than scientific works... though some frauds have been corrected forensically, that were billed as 'science'.

String theory is a large class of math models, is more in need of weeding than of correcting. And 'multi-universe' is a philosophical model, more for the purpose of providing alternate frameworks for understanding than for testability. There won't be any 'correction' possible until we can connect either evidence, or other theories, to that puzzle piece.

The naiive ideas of 'correct' 'wrong' and such, are useful for true/false tests, but rarely if ever show up in science. 'Interesting', 'fertile', 'calculable' are the kinds of virtues one should ask for, and even the much-maligned string theory has several such virtues. Einstein's cosomological constant, too, has been considered, rejected, reconsidered, incorporated, estimated... we're not sure if it's wrong or not, but it can't be avoided.

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gether in an dense manner but on solidification they rearrange to a lattice with a fixed spacing. The slipperiness is because of this, applying press ure melts the ice forming a thin layer of water which is a lubricant.

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good solvent for non-polar materials. Ever hear of mixing like oil and wat er?

re very similar to the water molecule and create local dipoles which attrac t water molecules allowing individual sugar molecules to dissolve.

Just as a foot note, it is the combination of a long chain hydrocarbon with a very polar acid group that makes soaps to dissolve non-polar molecules i n water. The hydrocarbon part attracts other hydrocarbon molecules (hydro- phobic) and the polar end (hydro-philic) attaches to the water molecules.

These same soap molecules will stick to themselves at the hydro-phobic end with the hydro-philic end outward to form a double layer of molecules in a sheet. (An illustration here would be worth it's weight in golden understa nding) This sheet can wrap around to form soap bubbles with a water on the inside and outside. When the water evaporates enough the layer will separ ate and the bubble pops.

Rick C.

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