The Doomsday Water, Part 2: Pathological Science

go back and check that one out. Today, I think we're going to add a few more details on the history of polywater and then have some discussion about ideas that kind of bloom out of the ashes of this failed scientific project.

into two different substances. You've got regular water and then something else, this other anomalous form of water which seems to be denser than normal water and have weird properties like an extremely high boiling point and a very low freezing point. So this is kind of hard to imagine because we normally think of water as just water. But maybe the easiest way to do it is imagine another

phase of water that you've never seen before. So you can think of liquid water, ice and steam, and no imagine the same exact substance also has a form that is something like the consistency of wax or vacilline. Rob I was actually thinking about it in between when we recorded the last episode and this one, Like, why is it so hard to imagine this hypothetical alternative form of water Because we watch phase transitions of water all the time.

It's like totally normal to observe that liquid water becomes ice and then you boil it and become steam. These different phases don't look or feel like each other at all, and we would just watch them shift back and forth and nothing is strange about that, But trying to imagine this other phase is just kind of impossible. It feels like, well, if it was this other way, if it had this other consistency and feeling and appearance, it just wouldn't be water.

day interaction with. But so anyway, this initial result by Nikolai fed Yakin gets the attention of an esteemed Soviet chemist named Boris de Yagan, who replicates the procedure for making this anomalist water and then starts publishing papers on

it in Russian language journals. Derriagan believes this alternative, this alternate form of water could be immensely important, of immense scientific and technological significance, and then in roughly the years nineteen sixty six to sixty eight, Derriogan gives presentations on the anomalous water at international conferences and gradually starts to get the attention of Western scientists, especially in Great Britain

and the United States. Several of these scientists begin their own anomalous water research program, copying the initial methods for making it from the Soviet Union, and then in the year nineteen sixty nine, the anomalist water has a breakout moment.

There is one paper by a group of American scientists showing infrared spectroscopy results from the substance that appear to show a different signature than that of regular water, which is interpreted to mean that well, it is water, but it's got a different molecular structure than normal water, which is what gives it this different spectrum. It is hypothesized

to be something like a polymer form of water. So a polymer is a long, long or large molecule made out of repeating units, and they hypothesize that maybe there is a hexagonal arrangement of water molecules forming these kind of like sheets or long, long structures. And here's where you get the name polywater. It's like a polymer of water.

We also talked a bit last time about how important it might have actually been in the reception of this hypothetical substance, that it got a cool name, that it was no longer being called just like you know, anomalous anomalist behavior of water or various descriptive phrases. That it got a name, and the name sounded interesting, that it's polywater. You know, of course, poly means many, so it almost implies a kind of mini splendor water, water that can

do many things or has maybe can do anything. And in fact, lots of people in the media kind of ended up treating it like it could do anything. There was a frenzy of attention in the popular media, so people start imagining all kinds of wild ways that polywater could be applied. Maybe it's going to be the next steam engine. It'll just you know, change everything in technology. It'll do machine lubrication and nuclear power. It'll unlock the

secret of eternal youth. There is one article that was quoted in one of our sources last time that was like, Hey, your living room furniture, it's gonna be made out of water. We never got to the bottom of how that works, but I like it. But so there would be arguments

between polywater proponents and polywater skeptics. In these arguments, of course, began in the scientific community and scientific literature, but this eventually spilled out into the popular media around the year nineteen s six nine, and it became a subject of controversy that was being covered by the mainstream press, not

just in scientific literature. Also in nineteen sixty nine you get this letter published in the journal Nature by a chemist and named F. J. Donaho of Wilkes College in Pennsylvania, which sketches out this really alarming idea. He says, maybe polywater is not just a revolutionary discovery, it might be the most dangerous substance on Earth, because, according to Donnaho, it's possible that like the fictional Ice nine in the

novel Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. If a seed crystal of polywater were to escape into the natural environment and get deposited in the soil or the ocean, even if you just flush it down the toilet, it's going to end up in the in the environment, it could provide a nucleation point that would cause all of the water in the world to become polywater, which I admit is a to me, a gripping image, a truly grotesque and bizarre and amazing image, a vasaline apocalypse, or a kind

of like wax end of the world.

Of course, the whole thing is made pointless by the fact that we would later discover polywater does not exist. But while this big frenzy of excitement and enthusiasm and fear is going on in the mainstream media in popular culture, there are also lots of skeptical scientists just chipping away at the polywater project. The most common objection is, are you sure you're not just seeing the effects of impurities

in your water samples. Derriagan and the polywater proponents were always quick to say, no, that is not what's happening. Maybe your samples of water are contaminated, but ours are pure, And that's kind of hard to argue with. I mean, all you can do is test the ones you have access to. If somebody is saying the ones you don't have access to are the good ones, that's like, oh, that's a problem.

into the water and forming a kind of gel. Another big contender is human sweat biological contamination from the probably from the researchers themselves who were carrying out the experiment. And then one famous blow to the polywater project comes in the early seventies when an American researcher named Dennis L. Rousseau does analysis on a bunch of sweat and gets almost the exact same pattern that had famously appeared in

the big polywater spectroscopy paper in nineteen sixty nine. So at this point, consensus starts to turn heavily against the existence of polywater, and roughly nineteen seventy seventy one, most scientists that were initially curious or open minded about it

start saying, no, I don't think this is real. It takes the hardcore or polywater boosters a little more time to come around, but by roughly nineteen seventy three, basically everybody, including Boris de Riyagan, realizes and admits that it was probably all just various types of contamination All along. The stuff was not acting like water because it wasn't water. So that's the story we talked about in the last episode.

Like I did in the previous episode, I want to mention a couple of major sources here at the top. One is an article called case Studies in Pathological Science, published in American Scientists in the year nineteen ninety two by Dennis L. Rousseau. This article is great because it provides a historical overview of the polywater affair, a short one, but from the point of view of someone who was

actually involved in it. Rousseau was initially very interested in the possibilities of polywater, as he talks about in the article. He's like, he and a collaborator of his, we're like, oh, could it be the fountain of youth? Could it unlock you know, longevity. But he eventually becomes very skeptical about it. He becomes a polywater skeptic, and he leads some experiments showing how it is almost certainly just caused by impurities.

Another big source I wanted to mention is an excellent chapter in a book called H two O. A Biography of Water by the British science writer Philip Ball, first published in nineteen ninety nine. And to kick things off today, I wanted to mention another article I was reading. Actually I was reading this one in between when we recorded

the two episodes. This was a piece in Distillations magazine from February twenty twenty called the Rise and Fall of Polywater by the material scientist and science communicator Anissa Ramirez. And this piece raised a few details about the story that we didn't talk much about last time, but I think would be good to dwell on for a moment because they might inform the rest of our discussion today.

So one thing that Ramirez's account brings up is how a lot of the early obsess about the weird properties of polywater were visual observations made through a microscope. So not getting a sample of this stuff, putting it in a machine and getting a numerical readout on it, it would be people looking through a microscope. So fed Yakin's original experiments. They generated only a tiny amount of the

anomalous water. It was far less than a droplet, and he had to study it through a relatively low resolution optical microscope. When he made the original observations of properties like the alleged greater density than normal water that was like an inference made based on looking at how it behaved through a microscope. And then once der Yoggan's team took over, they also used microscope observation rather than bult

measurement to note a lot of things. They used that to find that it allegedly expanded more than regular water when it was heated, that it had a different pattern of light refraction than normal water, and because of how tiny the quantities of available anomalous water were, these were visual observations of behavior through the optical microscopes in strange conditions, like in these extremely tiny glass containers. So that's something to remember for later. We'll come back to that later

in the episode. Another thing that we should dwell on for a minute. We did sort of mention this in the last episode, but it's worth revisiting is the strange fact that while all of this frenzy was going on in the late sixties, nobody had ever published a high quality chemical analysis of a polywater sample to prove that it was actually one hundred percent water. Philip Ball highlights

this in his chapter. Ramirez highlights this in the article too, that this was in part due to how little polywater could be made you're making these microscopic amounts of it at a time, and so some researchers reported that they just couldn't make enough of it that a reliable chemical analysis was possible with their instruments. You know, as we know from a lot of different domains, like you need a reasonable sample size in order to have a reliable result.

You know, we often think about this in the context of much higher levels of abstraction in the sciences, like psychology studies. You know, if you have a psychology study that's got twenty participants, that's usually not going to be a very powerful result. You don't have a lot of confidence that the same patterns would show up in the

general population. And you can say, in a way the same thing about physical sciences, though obviously you're dealing with different types of quantities there, but like extremely tiny quantities are harder to measure reliable. Ramirez writes in our article, quote chemicals, like humans, have unique fingerprints, and instruments called spectrometers can identify the elements and molecules from a chemical fingerprint or spectrum. Yet success hinges on the size of

the sample, where bigger is better. In published papers, anomalous water believers lamented that there just wasn't enough of it, certainly not enough to identify its molecular makeup. And I think in the last episode we talked about the quote from one of the guys who was working on polywater at the time, one of the students of John Desmond Bernal,

who said, if only we had a thimbleful. So, while this polywater research project was going on, because you couldn't make enough of it to really get a good answer to these core questions about it, the core questions like is this really water, scientists kept nibbling around the edges. They would measure what they could with the amounts available, including physical characteristics like boiling point and viscosity, but even these results were probably hampered in reliability by the tiny

amounts that could be tested at a time. Some skeptics of polywater were sort of brought around to believing in

it by a paper that we mentioned last time. This was the one published in the journal Science in June nineteen sixty nine, which showed the work of scientists named Robert Stromberg, Elis Lippencott, and Warren Grant, and they had produced what looked like a high quality spectrometry result that showed the absorption spectrum of polywater did not match that of normal water or they claimed of any known substance.

But this was taken to indicate not that the sample was not water, but that the water had a different molecular structure than normal water, hence the idea of polywater. Funny thing here is they also tried to do a chemical analysis of polywater and they found some contaminants. They found like sodium and silicon, but they were like, those are there in the quantities observed are too small for it to matter, so we don't have to worry about that. And this is when you get that letter from Donahoe

to Nature writing about the dangers of polywater. Ramirez mentions a detail here that I didn't encounter in any of the other sources I was reading, where she says that Robert Stromberg, you know, one of the authors of the sixty nine paper, started getting angry letters from people who said he was bringing about the end of the world. So that's the public engagement we crave, you know. And also I think this is maybe important. We didn't talk

about this enough last time. Ramirez mentions briefly how this was affected by the Cold War context. We talked about the Cold War context in the idea of the exchange of information between East and West being limited in some ways, not to say that there was no exchange of information,

because clearly the ideas were making it across. There were international conferences, journals to get translated back and forth, but there were, you know, just awkward things about how information was shared around the world at the time because of the Cold War context. Ramirez mentions that there are indications that by nineteen sixty nine, the CIA was trying to keep a close eye on polywater research in the Soviet Union, and according to reports published in the Wall Street Journal,

the Pentagon started trying to fund polywater research. So it's you know, it's like Doctor Strangelove, like, we cannot allow a polywater gap. And people made this joke at the time, you know, playing up on the idea of a missile gap from the nuclear arms race. Now it's like, well, if this is maybe going to be the most important technology in the world, whether that's for good or for ill, and the people were saying it could be for both, we better get it first.

But if you strip yourself of hindsight, and you strip yourself of access to the good arguments against the danger, if you allow yourself to inhabit the vasilyne apocalypse mindset, it creates, at least for me, a very familiar feeling, actually, the feeling that people somewhere are doing something obscure that could be very dangerous. It could even be the end of the world, and I have no power to stop it,

except like trying to write letters or you know. Yeah, And add to that the knowledge that there's pressure operating in the opposite direction that's like driving toward this result that you're now afraid of and that you don't have power to stop that pressure, Like there's some amount of international great power competition that is making people think, even if this stuff is dangerous, we've got to have it first.

They can't have it first. Feel similar to the nuclear arms race, of course, and also feel similar to if people have talked about this a lot where we might be with AI. You know, there are I'm constantly struck by the idea that there are a lot of people in the United States who used to argue that AI is potentially very dangerous. We might need to make absolutely sure it's safe before developing it, and it might not

be possible to make sure that it's absolutely safe. And now some of the same people are saying, well, you can't let China build it first. We've got to build it first. So that consciousness we have of these pressures pushing in the opposite direction against caution in these scenarios where we don't know exactly how dangerous something could be. You know, you've got these international competitive pressures, You've got

money making pressures. Money making incentives, of course, are leading people down trails that we don't know could turn out to be okay, could turn out to be disastrous and we can't really know in advance. It's a maddening feeling.

have it right? And then there's that added realization that, no matter what, containment might not be possible for these things, certainly not in the long run or in the short run. And I keep coming across examples of this, you know, the idea that you could look at a new technology and think about like the absolute realization of the thing, and how that could present some sort of existential risk and some sort of huge danger to everything that we know.

But then there are also these short term possibilities where the thing is not very advanced at all, It is just advanced enough to get out of our hands and

quickly get out of control. So we'll look at some examples of some of these, and a lot of it also just comes back to the I think it's impossible not to think of the tale of Pandora's Box in all of this that there is there's except in the sense that there's almost this certainty that these boxes will be opened, and then once they are opened, we know how it goes. Then the the the ill factors that were contained within cannot be put back in the box. The only thing that remains in the box is hope,

or at least we hope that's the case. Yeah, So, yeah, I wanted to roll through some of these. We can we can chat about these. A number of these involves some form of runaway reaction, much like the hypothetical polywater reaction or the fictional Ice nine reaction. We'll get to some examples of that that are you know, a certain

amount of concern. We have any number of hypothetical apocalypses based on science gone wrong, of science that could go wrong, or science that could just get out out of our hands.

And yeah, like we've been saying, AI is certainly one of the big ones, clearly the one that resonates the most as we are currently living through the realization of the thread, and we're going to cover a few specific AI related scenario, but ultimately there are so many different angles to take on AI and its threat, especially as far as the democratization of AI tools goes for various nefarious purposes. Many of these pose a significant contemporary threat.

And that's in addition to all of the various highly observable ways that AI is impacting industries and ways of life and hurting people's jobs already.

being a kind of runaway reaction or containment danger. But it is also funny that if you go back, just like ten or twenty years, you can regularly find people in imagining the future of AI as AI is something that would be developed in containment and then there would be a question about is it safe to let it out? Yeah, And that's just not what we got at all. It's just like it's just it's out from the moment it exists. It's all you know, it's just set loose always it's been loose.

years back. You know. It's probably at a I want to say, this was maybe a panel at the World Science Festival in New York, and it presented this optimistic idea of like in the future, in the near future, and to a certain extent, contemporary examples you'll have certain artists using AI and working alongside it to create new forms of art or music or what have you, but in a very collaborative way and in a way that

does that wouldn't feel icky. Instead, we have, like you know, everybody out there using these tools, uh, creating a lot of material that is that is ikey, a lot of AI slop as we've come to call it, you know, which is not to say that that original vision is is isn't a possibility and there's not a lot of value in it. I mean, especially since the tools are not going away. I hope that that is what we come back to and that is something that we can return to. But but yeah, it is. It is alarming

to watch in real time all around us. Now not everything regarding machines and AI is current or near term. We also have the likes of the gray goo scenario.

This is, it's gray goo, not grey goose. That would involve some sort of catastrophic event concerning vodka obviously, but the gray goo scenario the idea here by which molecular self replicating nanotechnology ends up consuming the entire biomass of Earth and turning it into itself, so kind of like a global T one thousand mass in its most literal sense, you know, the idea that it would just turn everything into silvery goo.

to us. And so yeah, it has that in common with the Donahoe scenario or the Vonnegut scenario, except the way I understood people imagining the gray goo obviously, this was always just like a speculative, Yeah, kind of science fiction thing because we don't have nanotechnology of this type.

But the way I understood it was that because you would have these little tiny robots, nanotechnology robots that would be designed to make copies of themselves or to turn, you know, molecules into something that they're trying to produce, if that ever got out of hand, there really wouldn't be a good way to stop it. Is that the idea?

easily do an entire episode on it. It's fascinating, I think, not only in this kind of like worst case scenario and cautionary tale sort of way, but it also feels kind of metaphorically sound and intimidating because it is, again, like you said, about the transformation of the natural world into things, and we do this all the time. It's a huge an alarming aspect of human culture. We turn things into other substances that we need or we think

we need, and then those become garbage. And we take advantage, of course of a lot of the resources of our earth that are not easily replaced or are irreplaceable.

we do with the technology. So the other interesting thing when you go back to T. Drexler's original idea for the gray goose scenario is that the threat wouldn't be bound to some sort of ultimate highly evolved version of the thing, but rather, to quote early as similar based replicators, they get out and wind up of supplanting advanced organisms in the ecosystem.

treat it like life form. Like there's a lot of the ethical discussions, like at what point does it make sense to wipe it out? So you know, in science fiction, again, there are a number of takes on it that are rather fascinating. You also have these different spin offs their concepts, like green Goo, in which engineered organic matter ends up taking it ends up taking the place of the nanotech in this particular scenario.

You know. It's like maybe I have some you know, I have some some hang ups about how my last headshot look and I'm totally okay with AI just creating something for me, even though it's not authentic. It's not really what I look like, and it's not created via authentic means. But you know, you say, all right, I'm gonna check that off. But then what's the next thing

to fall? And then ultimately, what does the boundary line end up looking like anyway, I want to read a quote here from betteredge, he writes, and you can read about this at ianbetterage dot com. He has a whole

post on the information gray Goo. He says, quote, this is the AI grey goose scenario and Internet choked with low quality content which never improves, where it is almost impossible to locate public, reliable sources for information because the tools we have been able to rely on in the past, Google social media can never keep up with the scale of new content being created, where the volume of content created overwhelms human or algorithmic abilities to sift through it

quickly and find high quality stuff.

make the case that we're already halfway there. We're sort of edging into this scenario, are we not?

authenticity and anything, we don't care about human creation. We're just like, it sounds good enough to me, it looks good enough to me, it feels good enough to me, and then we're just okay with all of the jobs that are lost, all of the meaning that is lost in people's lives just because a particular image was a little more pleasing to us, or a particular piece of writing was just a little more calibrated to our tastes and so forth, or something was we were able to

generate it quickly and easily through some sort of online interface. So yeah, it's alarming. It's it's frankly terrifying because I wish hope was still in the Pandora's box. I'm not sure that it is. A lot of it just comes down to like, what what are we going to put up with?

Even if it did exist, it probably wasn't dangerous in the ways that we're being imagined. I guess AI is different for a number of reasons. I mean, for one, thing, like it actually exists and is here. I guess you could debate in terms of its existence. You can have a debate about whether or not it actually constitutes intelligence or not, and people do have that philosophical debate and intelligence.

But it is not an imaginary thing like like polywater or like or you know, just a fully science fiction speculative thing like gray goo. It's here. It does some things that are undeniably useful, and it's integrated into the economy, which makes it you know, harder to I guess it makes the question of thinking about its potential danger is even more fraud.

But I want to turn to some examples of potential you know, chain reaction catastrophes tied to advancements in science that have turned out to not be the case cases much like poly water, where someone was like, this might happen and we need to be wary of it, and then for a variety of reasons, that worst case scenario

turned out to not be the case. Yeah, so we already mentioned atomic weaponry, like the advent of atomic weaponry being being something that helped inform the understanding of the potential threats of poly water and also ends up casting a long shadow over any technology to come out after the advent of nuclear weaponry, especially and the one I want to focus on here is one that I believe this I have not actually seen the Oppenheimer film, but I believe this actually comes up in the film, and

that is the idea that, Okay, when we carry out this first atmospheric detonation of a nuclear device, it might ignite the atmosphere, resulting in a global chain reaction of atmospheric fire.

human societies for ages and ages to come. A similar possibility was apparently explored for underwater detonation as well, and again, like you said, while technically possible, scientists of the day agreed that it was terribly unlikely, and our current understanding of it seems to fall in the idea that the density of Earth's atmosphere is just much too low for this to take place, as is the atmosphere of Venus.

Even jennif Flgarris did a nice write up on this in twenty twenty four for Advanced Science News, I believe in response to the Oppenheimer movie, interviewing a pair of nuclear astrophysicist on the topic, and that seemed to be where they landed on it. It's like, it's just, as far as we understand it, this is not possible in

Earth's atmosphere. And of course all of this is just in addition to the other obvious concerns over the potential for the rollout of nuclear weaponry to enable humans to destroy each other through devastating warfare, fallout, wide ranging fires, and the chilling grip of nuclear winter. This is, of course, it's just another just obvious and huge aspect of the nuclear age. You know, we knew the world would not be the same, and it has not been.

I mean, the atomic weapons they were designing were used in the immediate circumstance, and then you know, it's hard to imagine that going through into the future, that we could have nuclear weapons on Earth and they would never ever be used ever again for you know, however many you know, thousands or hopefully millions of years, humans continue to exist.

like what does that look like statistically? So yeah, continues to be a matter of great concern obviously exactly.

to the negative twenty seventh power seconds. They would decay into standard model or super symmetric particles, creating events containing an exceptional number of tracks in our detectors which we would easily spot. Finding more on any of these subjects would open the door to yet unknown possibilities. In other words, it wasn't happening, and it's not a real concern. Now there's another related concern that also popped up. I think it may be resonated in headline level a little less

strongly because not as evocative as black holes. But there was also this idea that hypothetical clumps of strange matter called strangelets could be generated in a particle accelerator, either the LHC or or the relativistic heavy ion collideer. The rhic and the extreme version of the scenario is that it would set off a chain reaction that converts the

entire planet into a condensed lump of strange goop. However, no strangelets have ever been observed at the RHIC or the LHC, and the scientists contend that they're even less likely at the LHC facility, the planet has not been gooped, so we seem to be pretty good on this case as well.

any reasons, good or not. So, like if people are raising concerns, just the fact that somebody is raising concerns about something doesn't necessarily mean those concerns are things that are well founded or that we should take seriously. And part of the problem is like in the realm of cutting edge science, like most people if they hear about a concern with something, oh, you know, they're doing an experiment at the particle collider. You know, it could do

something that destroys the world. Ninety nine point whatever percent of people have no idea whether they should take that concern seriously or not. But the fact that somebody is saying it makes you feel like, well, maybe I should be concerned because you don't know, you know, you don't have the background knowledge to evaluate these claims and understand whether they're they're based on reasonable concerns or not.

the thing that we're hypothetically creating. Is it something that is that is just occurring elsewhere in the world or in the universe, And then we have to sort of weigh those two things, you know, like, Okay, if this is a possibility in a lab, then it is surely a reality elsewhere in the universe. And what does that mean for our fears?

But the conference in question was centered around biohazards and regulatory concerns regarding developing and as well as just near future biotechnological advancements in general, especially recombinant DNA genetic material created from two different sources to create all new sequences. It was an advancement that at the time was highly promising, and it has proven to be very beneficial in biotechnology

and medicine multiple research areas. But at the same time, at the time, researchers also recognized the huge potential for the creation of organisms with dangerous properties, not so much like space were wolves, or anything, but more so like the accidental creation of deadly pathogens that could conceivably wash over the globe, like any number of real and imagined plagues and doomsday scenarios. There was a lot of concern

regarding cancer viruses cancer causing viruses in particular. I read a quote from French biologist Philippe Kouilsky about the conference, in which he underlined the excitement surrounding it, but also the confusion quote because some of the basic questions could only be dealt with in great disorder or not confronted at all. On the frontiers of the unknown, the analysis of benefits and hazards were locked up in concentric circles

of ignorance. How could one determine the reality without experimenting, without taking a minimum of risk. I read this quote in a silomar in recombinant DNA the end of the Beginning by medical researcher Donald S. Fredrickson. This came out in nineteen ninety one, but I think that succinctly summarizes some of the issues regarding a number of these scenarios. Science advances, like I said in previous episode, kind of

like a swine mold navigating a maze of understanding. And when do we decide to not let it explore a particular corridor or to try and slow its pace down in a particular corridor.

relaxed in seventy eight. By seventy eight, but at the time of his writing, none of the more dire biotechnology outcomes discussed had come to pass, while many great advancements had been made. But he stressed that we shouldn't let either factor wayh too heavily on our judgment of the

precaution exercised at the conference. And I think that is something to keep in mind with all these scenarios, Like we know that either you know, there were a lot of benefits to be gained or there ended up not being a threat, But we have to really put ourselves in the shoes of the people in the trenches dealing with the prospect of some sort of an advancement in their given time.

research dead end. And fortunately, you know, we did eventually figure it out. Like there was a clarification process that went on in the scientific community and eventually it was figured out that like, oh, polywater is not real. This was mistaken all along in a way that is science working the way it's supposed to. I mean, it is inevitable in science that some incorrect ideas are going to end up are going to be floated and in some

cases might attract a lot of attention and enthusiasm. But the great thing about science is that it is this vast collaborative process of gradual clarification where that stuff will get sorted out over time. So it's not quite fair to, you know, to flog people for having been mistaken for some time. It might be fair to flog people if they're like really stubborn, you know, and once the evidence comes out they refuse to acknowledge it.

and it was offered in an unrefrigerated capsule. But then a couple of years later, form two was discovered with significantly lower bioavailability, so less useful as a medication, but it also was more stable in this form, and the problem quickly became clear that if form two came in contact with form one, it would convert Form one into form two, and even trace amounts could do this, you know, trace amounts in production, and so the pharmaceutical company behind

it ended up apparently losing millions due to its impact on production lines. Eventually, new formulations allowed them to avoid the problem.

But my best understanding of the idea is that our universe, what if it actually has a vacuum state that you could describe as a metastable false vacuum, and that suddenly if a bubble of lower energy true vacuum were to manifest in our university, a quantum tunneling, it would rapidly expand, correcting our vacuum to a lower energy true vacuum, and rewrite the fundamental laws of physics and alter the masses of elementary particles in the process.

created by Robert Popper and Peter Sarah Finowitch. And this is the Helvetica scenario.

been discussing here. I guess we could loosely imagine some sort of scenario by which cascading calcium collapse would have dire consequences for us in our world, especially since it plays a number of crucial roles in our bodies. So I guess we might imagine that we would sort of melt into blobs of some sort. I'm not sure if we would turn into faceless scientists dudes beating on the wall, but it wouldn't be good if it could happen. Luckily,

it cannot happen. But I can't help but imagine that polywater and or ice nine partially inspire the Helvetica scenario presented in this program.

difference in how they're usually used. So the distinction I would make is this pseudoscience is fake science, and it's fake science from the beginning. It might be esthetically disguised as science. Maybe it is supposed to look and feel like science to people who can't tell the difference, but it is fundamentally not guided by an earnest search for the truth. It is fundamentally not scientific in its methods, and so it is sort of doomed from the start.

There's nothing really scientific about pseudoscience in how it works, maybe only in how it looks, whereas pathological science, I think, is usually referred to science that begins as real science and does attempt to follow the scientific method, but it refers to these projects or cases where genuine researchers are led into error by things like unconscious bias and failure

to confront central questions or contradictions. A big thing in how people talk about pathological science, at least as it seems to me, is a failure to ask the right questions. So maybe people are following the scientific method, but they are forming their conclusions based on focusing on the wrong questions, and so polywater seems to be a great example of that.

In this paper by Dennis Rousseau, he also uses the examples of cold fusion, another pathological science project, and infinite dilution properties in water principle behind like homeopathy and stuff. What Russeau does in his paper is he tries to identify three overriding characteristics of pathological science. Because of course, you know, it's not entirely useless when people go astray in searching for the truth. You can actually learn a lot from looking how smart people get things wrong, it's

a very useful thing to study. So Rousseau first calls to the attention he did not invent the concept of pathological science. The term seems to come from, or at least was made very popular by the Nobel Prize winning chemist Irving Langmuir. Langmuir identified six symptoms of pathological science in a famous talk that he gave in the nineteen fifties. I think, but Russeau tries to condense them into three characteristics, or he condenses langmuir six into two characteristics, and then

he adds one of his own. So the first one I want to quote from Russeau here quote the effect being studied is often at the limits of detectability or has a very low statistical significance. So if what he's getting at here is if the claimed effect is very weak or hard to detect, errors of bias can creep into the observation or interpretation process. He identifies especially effects that are not measured by objective numerical readings on instruments,

but effects that require visual observation by the experimenter. So if you have to rely on looking with your eyes to see the effect, and the effect is very weak. This is the danger zone for unconscious bias to take over in observation. Also, when effects are very weak or of low statistical significance, you might not be able to establish a clear connection between the size of the effect you see and the size of the very variable that

is supposedly causing it. So I don't know, you know, I coat my body in three times as much tiger repellent, and I see the exact same number of tigers, which is zero.

the variables yet. In some cases that could be true, but that can also be an excuse that allows you to keep believing in a false theoretical model. But I think this is really important when you compare it to the detail that we talked about earlier. Today where a lot of these initial observations about the properties of polywater, you know, the easing ways that stuff was different than

regular water. They're observed on tiny, tiny quantities of it, and they're not measured with normal you know, bulk measurement instruments. They're being inferred from visual observation through microscopes, So researchers are relying on things they see through microscopes, acting you know, properties of tiny amounts of something that they're looking at through these lenses. That does seem to be like a real danger zone where you might kind of see what you want to see.

building on that and that was the problem. Yeah, so we got led into this false belief that Mars had these canals.

It is, of course true across the history of science that older theories are superseded by newer, more accurate theories. You know, you can talk about ways that Newton's model of gravity was superseded by Einstein, though it also doesn't really mean Newton was wrong, Like, at certain scales, Newton is still incredibly useful. You know, you can still do Newtonian calculations and make good predictions. But it turns out that you can't use Newton to understand all gravitational phenomena

in the world, in the universe. And so you know, Einstein provides an update and a refinement that gets more accuracy in certain ways, and you know, you get that all throughout science. So you have to remain open minded that there might be better theories of reality than the ones we're using now. At the same time, we have the theories we have now because they're really good and

they consistently make good, accurate predictions. And most of the time, when somebody thinks they've come up with a new model that changes everything, they're probably wrong. Yeah.

by one team. It is a diverse, global, professional and social culture that strengthens itself by acting as a community to process new ideas and information and sort truth from error. And one of the tools in its arsenal, of course, is replication or experiment. New ideas need to be tested through critical experiments, and if somebody claims revolutionary experimental results that don't fit with our best theories of the world, other scientists try to repeat that experiment themselves and see

if they get the same results. And here we get to Rousseau's third characteristic of pathological science. He says, essentially, the investigator avoids decisive experiments that could potentially rule out their revolutionary theory.

sure we know what it is? Are we sure this is just water?

You know, this is not usually regarded as good behavior retrospectively, but people can get really caught up, you know, in trying to pursue their programs.

to be on the right track. You might get little moments of doubt, like you could ask the question like, why isn't more of an effort made to pursue that one really decisive central experiment. But you know that kind of our motivations can be unconsciously affected by biases as well. You know, like what seems like the most important thing to spend your time on can also be affected by

unconscious biases. You may get the occasional conscious fraud, but I think it's like most people who have the will and intent to do that sort of thing do not end up working in scientific research. It's not a very natural fit. And yeah, so Rousseau argues that argues that in his experience, deliberate fraud in science is extremely rare.

It's the more dangerous cocktail is these kind of sketchy areas where you're relying on these weak results and maybe visual obs or it's this cocktail of self delusion and sloppiness that can sustain a project like this. And again it's important to note that, like, you know, unlike pseudoscience, which tends to never go away, you know, the pseudoscience comes up and it just keeps on going forever. One distinction does seem to be that with these things identified

as pathological science, they are transient phenomena. They pop up for a few years and people get excited about and eventually everybody's like, oh, yeah, that's that's not that was all wrong, and they move on.

the pseudoscience, does it make something easier for me? Does it like, does it give me some sense of hope? Does it sort of distills some anxiety or fear that I have about the world or my place in it? You know, if it becomes useful in that regard to the individual or to corporations or to nation states, then yeah, that just feeds into it more.

of find the whole Polywater store a bit inspiring. You know, it's weird to think of a story of a you know, several years long enterprise of error as inspiring, but I do think of it as kind of inspiring because it shows that, you know, you can have a lot of sunk costs, you can have a lot of error and people fooling themselves into following something that isn't real, but you also get to see how the process eventually corrects itself and see what that involves, Like, how is it

that we soort fact from fiction? And we can learn a lot from this kind of thing.

hypothetical scenarios. All right, well, shall we go ahead and close it out there?

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