The Doomsday Water

of stuff like that. So that's who we are. We've been around a long time, and the video thing is new. So if you are here watching us, on Netflix here at the beginning of a new phase.

axions or weekly interacting massive particles. You know, these substances where there's a reasonable debate about whether they exist or there's a theoretical reason to keep looking for them and tests to see if they exist. Polywater is not like that. Today, no credible scientist thinks polywater is real, and there's really no theoretical reason to think it might be real or to keep looking for it.

and seeing where they went astray. So polywater has been used in many interesting books and articles over the years as a great example of what is called pathological science, certain types of patterns of behavior that can lead researchers into dead ends where they delude themselves into believing things that are not based in fact. And one thing I think we should really emphasize about polywater is that it was not just some obscure little rabbit hole that a

few people went down at one point in history. For a period of a few years, beginning in the nineteen sixties and stretching into the early seventies, polywater was a huge deal. A bunch of people all around the world, including many leading scientists on the cutting edge of physical chemistry, became convinced that it did exist, and some even became quite obsessed with it, because if polywater did exist, it

would be a revolutionary, potentially world changing discovery. In one of the sources I was reading, there is a quote attributed to the Irish physicist John Desmond Bernal, who was famous for pioneering the use of X ray crystallography. There's some dispute about whether he actually said this or not, but it's at least widely attributed to him secondhand that he said, this is the most important physical chemical discovery of the century.

eternal longevity. You know, we can live forever because of polywater. There's a great There was a Wall Street Journal article that I found quoted in a book that said, quote, a few years from now, living room furniture may be made out of water.

be water. It was chemically identical to regular water. It was H two oh, but it was allegedly a new liquid structure of water discovered in a lab in the Soviet Union, with a polymerized structure at the molecular level. There were different ways of imagining what this polymer structure looked like. Maybe these arrangements of squares or arrangements of hexagons. Maybe we can talk more about that later in the episode.

But this polymerized arrangement of the water molecules was said to give the water different characteristics, like a higher boiling point, lower freezing point, and at room temperature, a thick, viscous consistency, often compared to petroleum jelly. It was said to be roughly forty percent denser or up to forty percent denser than liquid water.

can take. And what's more shocking is that some researchers working on polywater, certainly not all, but some of them came to the conclusion that actually it was the most stable form of water, more stable than the regular, thin, sloshy water all around us and all throughout the environment, raising the question of whether polywater was not actually the true form of water, the water to which our form

of water wanted to return. So one interpretation take by some, again not all, but some, was that it was possible all the water around us could, given the right circumstances, be turned into polywater, and it might be extremely difficult or impossible to turn it back.

College in Pennsylvania. So here's some excerpts from note. Donaho writes, quote, after being convinced of the existence of polywater, I am not easily persuaded that it is not dangerous. The consequences of being wrong about this matter are so serious that only positive evidence that there is no danger would be acceptable. Only the existence of natural ambient mechanisms which depolymerize the

material would prove its safety. Until such mechanisms are known to exist, I regard the polymer as the most dangerous material on Earth. Every effort must be made to establish the absolute safety of the material before it is commercially produced. Once the polymer nuclei become dispersed in the soil, it will be too late to do anything. Even as I write, there are undoubtedly scores of groups preparing polywater treat it as the most deadly virus until its safety is established.

We'll get more into that later. And of course there's an added level of absurdity in that the substance they were arguing about turned out to have never existed at all, or at least not in the way that was understood. But given what was believed at the time, these researchers, I think had good arguments against Donahoe's level of alarm, But I want to be sympathetic to people who would

have been really freaked out by this. When I put myself in the place of a non expert in nineteen sixty nine who maybe reads a newspaper article about this note published in a leading scientific journal, and I don't understand, or I maybe don't even encounter the soothing counter arguments against it. It is a terrifying proposition. The feeling to me when reading this note was kind of like when Sarruman says, you know, the hour is later than you think.

He's got that line. Even as I write this, groups around the world are creating this stuff, that microscopic quantities of a substance that, if it escaped containment, could turn Earth into a lifeless wax world. So many things about this are so frightening if you don't if you imagine yourself without the benefit of hindsight and maybe not understanding the expert arguments against them, like the threat is microscopic. Once it escapes, it is too late. I have no

control over this. Other people are doing it that I can't stop them. They're making it right now. Also, imagine this in the context of Cold War paranoia and the nuclear arms race. You know, everybody's got a mindset of you know, races to achieve new types of weapons and

potentials on either side of the Cold War. And then finally, just the specific image of catastrophe conjured up here is so weird and grotesque, Like, imagine all of our water is now transformed into some kind of waxy substance or gel.

complete and collective annihilation. Yeah, so it's not you know, it's not like we would all say, whoa hold on, let's not do polywater. It would be like, oh, if you're doing polywater while I'm doing polywater, I'm gonna do polywater even harder, right, and then.

ending of the book. People made this comparison, I want to emphasize at the time the novel was already out. It was published in nineteen sixty three, so this is not just a retrospective comparison we're making now and people were writing about it in nineteen sixty nine.

of Kat's Cradle right here. I got it off the shelf. I was trying to find a good passage at the end here that describes it. I didn't. I don't know, maybe there is one I didn't dig up. There's one part where so at the end of the story spoiler alert for Kat's Cradle. But at the end of the story, the ice nine does get out and it transforms all of the water in the natural environment into ice nine. And so the main character talks about like peeking up out of a bunker into the world and he says.

He says, there were no smells, there was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak and blue white frost, and every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight. It was winter now and forever.

the idea to HG. Wells. He's like, hey, you should do a story about some sort of room temperature stable ice, and Wells of course never wrote anything with that concept, but people overheard this exchange. Apparently it included Kurt Vonnegut's brother, his older brother, who apparently worked at G E. Labs at the time, as did Kurt Vonnegut, I believe, And so again, Wells never used it, and after both Lagmuir and Wells had passed away, Kurt figured, hey, it's fair game.

I can take this and run with it now, and he did. How much of that is true? I don't know. That's the story anyway.

New York. But Rousseau is a great source on this because he not only has he's not only done the research to give this historical sketch and couch it in the framing of pathological science, he was also personally involved in polywater research on the skeptical side. He was the author, the lead author of one of the main experiments that really put the nail in the coffin of the polywater program. That was kind of the final embarrassment to it.

like his work. This book was first published in nineteen ninety nine, and Ball has a really good historical overview of polywater and again frames it within the context of pathological science. So research on polywater began in the Soviet Union in the early nineteen sixties, and it's worth pointing out that it was not initially called polywater. For the first few years, publications on this subject mostly referred to

it as anomalous water. And I think that difference in naming may be more important than you might assume at first. We'll maybe come back and discuss that later, but I want to start off here kind of framing this within the environment of global science in the nineteen sixties. So obviously at this time, huge advancements were being made in a bunch of fields, you know, computer science, aerospace, molecular biology,

and Philip Ball really flags this as well. Scientists were constantly making discoveries that they, in many cases correctly predicted would change the world. So it's a frothy time in the sciences. But the global advance of science at this time was made sort of awkward by the Cold War.

For the most part, Western scientists published in British and American sometimes continental European journals, the majority of which were in English, while Eastern Bloc scientists mostly published in Russian language journals, And there was transmission of scientific information back and forth, like there was translation of journals going from each side to the other, but the transmission of information between the two spheres was limited in certain ways, for

both intentional and unintentional reasons. And these reasons included everything from certain types of government restrictions on travel and communication across the Iron Curtain to simple things like the language barrier and the financial costs of acquiring Western journals in the Soviet Union. And it seems to me that motivations

and outlook throughout the scientific community were very mixed. Like some scientists on both sides had a more global view of worldwide cooperation, very you know, for the good of humankind kind of approach to scientific work. Others were more partisan or nationalistic, you know, trying to advance their side in the Cold War and kind of jealous or suspicious

of the other side. So while communication of cutting edge science between East and West did happen, it was sometimes limited or delayed, and in certain fields that were seen as more crucial for national security, it was more often tightly constrained or not shared at all, And a lot of times when new discoveries were shared between the two spheres, it happened at these international conferences, through lectures or even just individual chance meetings between scientists.

Volga northeast of Moscow. And what Fedyakin found was that when you put water inside a very narrow glass capillary tube, so imagine like a tiny, tiny glass straw where the tube is only about as wide as a human hair, or even narrower. When you did that, it appeared that the water would somehow separate into two different columns of liquid. So think about like you ever mix up a salad dressing.

You're mixing up oil and water. If you don't have a good to mulsifier in there, you might shake it up and it'll get all mixed up, but then over time the suspension will separate and the oil will float to the top. Fadyakin was watching something like this happen over a period of days or weeks inside these extremely tiny glass tubes, except it wasn't oil and water, it was just water. So it was like pure water was separating into water and question marks something else. What could

it be? And this anomolus secondary substance would tend to appear at the top of the column in the tube, and it seemed to grow in volume proportional to a loss of water at the bottom of the tube. It wasn't like all of the water became the stuff at the top, but it looked to Fedyakin like some of it turned into this water at the top. So it really seemed like what was happening was that the regular water was evaporating from below and then condensing above, having

been transformed into something else. But there was no physical reason it should have been evaporating and condensing somewhere else, because the temperature and the pressure in the tubes were

supposedly held constant throughout. So the only way this would really make sense was if the secondary water was somehow different from the primary water, with a lower vapor pressure meaning a higher boiling point, and Fedyakin believed this secondary liquid was still water, but it was a new form of water, chemically identical irregular water, so still h two oz, but with a different physical structure that gave it different properties at scale. For example, it seemed to be denser

than normal liquid water. And I'll come back to those properties in just a minute. But here we have the intervention of a figure who will become incredibly important in the history of polywater. After Fedyakin publishes his findings in a Russian journal, they catch the attention of an extremely

distinguished and important Soviet chemist and named Boris V. Der Yagan. Deryagan, working out of Moscow, believed this anomalous water to be of immense scientific and technological importance, so he started a collaboration with Fedyakin, and then it seems he effectively took over research on the subject. So for a while, Derriagan

would become sort of the anomalous water guy. He's the main advocate for this program, and he and his colleagues published ten papers on the anomalous water by the time he presented on this subject at a conference in nineteen sixty six. So we mentioned earlier what some of the characteristics, the alleged characteristics of this anomalous water were, but I

just want to run through them briefly again here. The numbers cited tend to be different in different sources, and I think this probably reflects a range of reported results in the primary literature, so I'm trying to kind of put them all together here. This water somehow did not boil at the regular boiling point of water, so did not boil at one hundred degrees celsius. It had a much higher boiling point. Some sources place it at about

two hundred degrees cee. Others say more like three hundred degrees.

Sources describe its consistency as similar to that of petroleum jelly like vacilline, or sometimes compare it to paraffin wax. I want to emphasize though here there was very little of it being made, So this wasn't like they were making bowls of it and sticking their hands into it and saying, oh, it's like vacoline. They were making microscopic quantities and then extract extrapolating from those microscopic quantities into what they thought the macroscopic qualities would be.

For one thing, Philip Ball explains this in his chapter, it might not even make sense to call this new water anomalous water, because really this form of water, with the lower vapor pressure would potentially be the more stable form of water. So really it would be the regular water, and the water that we know would be the weird water that would be it would be the unusual form.

It might be what can mists call meta stable. Meta stable would mean it's in a semi stable form occupying a local energy minimum, which, given the right conditions to get past that energy barrier, will hop down and transform into the more stable lower energy form. As a rough analogy, you can think of meta stability as the chemical equivalent of like a ball sitting in a bowl on the edge of a table. So the ball is stable sitting

in the bowl. It's not going to suddenly fall through the bottom of the bowl and through the table onto the floor. But if it's somehow perturbed, like if it is knocked over the lip of the bowl and off the edge of the table, gravity will act on it and pull it all the way down to the floor. So in this analogy, the bowl is the liquid water we know and the floor is the anomalous water. Here we get back to that scary image.

One thing that is absolutely true is that molecules of liquid water behave weirdly and assume new structures when they come into contact with a surface or a wall. At the interface with a surface, several layers of liquid water molecules nearest the surface will often form unusual patterns and arrangements, so they'll act differently than water. Just in the center of a mass of liquid water, right up at the wall,

they start to arrange themselves in different ways. Boris Deriagan knew something about this and proposed that something about the interaction with the glass surface on the inside of the capillary tube caused the water to assume this new structure and then, even more remarkably, somehow remember or retain this new structure even after evaporating and condensing again. So Derriagan and his team they started, you know, they fired up

production and started making samples of this anomalous water. They came up with a faster system than Fidyakin had used, though the amounts they were able to produce it at a time were still very, very small, because the tubes were tiny, Like the tubes were like a tenth of a millimeter in width, and the columns of this anomalous water they were making, you know, might only be a

millimeter tall. So you're talking tiny, tiny amounts. And one thing we're thinking about is that when you've got that little of a sample to work with, with these tiny, tiny amounts, you really need to be conscious of the dangers of contamination. Philip Ball flags this and Rousseauta talk about this in his paper as well. You're making so little of it that even a tiny amount of contamination in total in the capillary tubes would be a significant

part of the final product and could change its properties significantly. So, you know, there were all these efforts made to ensure that the samples were of the highest possible purity, Like Derriogan and colleagues they used. They made sure that the silica used to make the glass capillary tubes was made was very pure. It was made from pure quartz, and this was to prevent like trace inorganic materials getting mixed in with the glass and then some leeching into the

water in the tubes. And they also worked very hard to ensure that the water used in the experiment was pure. So they're of the you know, if you suggest to them that their samples are contaminated, they're like, no, look at all these links we go to to make sure that the samples cannot be contaminated. It's very very pure. But at the same time, it was still quite laborious to produce the anomalous water and very little was available, which limited the testing that could be done on it.

in England. And another one is a figure I mentioned earlier in the episode, John Desmond Bernal, very famous and respected crystallographer, and supposedly after one of these I think it's the presentation in England, Bernal took der Yagan back to his lab at Birkbeck College in London and they had a talk where they were talking they were like talking about the procedure for making the anomalous water. And

this was at this meeting. This was when Bernal allegedly said that this is going to be, you know, one of the most important discoveries of the century. So the two scientists I just mentioned in their associates, they start cranking on trying to do polywater research. It's not called polywater yet though, it's still anomalous water. And then meanwhile

some American scientists get interested as well. You have Robert Stromberg of the National Bureau of Standards in Maryland, and then also Ellis Lippencott of the Center for Materials Research at the University of Maryland. They start cranking on polywater search as well. I think this was roughly nineteen sixty eight, and then anomalous water really started to break out into the open in sixty nine, when you had Pethica's team

publish a paper in Nature. They reported their attempts to recreate the substance via dir Yogan's methods, and they started talking about the properties of the new water. Very importantly. Their publication included photographs, so now there's something to look at. You can see these microscopic columns, something that had condensed

in the tubes. But one thing here is that Pethica's team offered some reasonable caveats For example, they said, we can't rule out that something is leeching out of the pyrex glass tubes and mixing with the water to form a gel. That's possible, but they thought that might explain our results. But it doesn't explain Deryogan's results because they're not using just like normal pyrex glass. They're using this

special pure quartz silica glass. And then also they mentioned that their attempts to figure out what this stuff was were severely limited by how little of it could be produced. Microscopic amounts are hard to study. There is a quote attributed to one of JD. Bernell's students saying, if only we could make a thimbleful, but the anomalous water would

really become a sensation. A few months later, when Stromberg and Lippincott published their own research in the journal Science, and their research was a big deal because it used the technique of infrared spectroscopy. So spectroscopy is a powerful tool of analysis that lets you study a substance by measuring how it absorbs, emits or scatters various kinds of electromagnetic radiation, like infrared or UV light or visible light.

Each molecule has its own special pattern of absorption or emission or scattering, determined by things like the atomic makeup and the chemical bonds within it. So you can make a spectrum graph of a substance and that will tell you things about its molecular makeup and structure which are too small to see with the naked eye. Spectroscopy is used all throughout various kinds of sciences. It's not just in chemical analysis, you know, it's used in like astronomy.

We use spectroscopy to try to figure out what elements are in the atmosphere of another planet we're looking at, or something like that. Stromberg and Lippincott publish their paper in the journal Science in nineteen sixty nine, and they were building on some previous research that had also used spectroscopy, but they were trying to show that the anomalous water, because it produced this different spectrum, had a different structure from familiar water, and they proposed that it was something

like a stable polymer. And this paper is where we get the term polywater. It was the paper's title. And I think we should pause here to think of this, because I think it's wise not to overlook the power of giving something an intriguing name. Naming is persuasive. Naming is rhetorical. I think in a lot of cases, giving a concept an evocative name really affects how it is

received in multiple ways. For one thing, if there's a name for something, instead of just talking about something in descriptive terms, like anomalous water, if there's a specific new name for it feels like it's something that really exists, doesn't it. You know, why would it have a name if it didn't exist? And then the qualities of the name affect how we think about the thing. To me, when I hear polywater sounds new, sounds exciting, sounds like

a product almost. In fact, that may be one reason why it could have been appealing to adopt as the name of a product line actually, which you were talking about earlier.

doom water or and it's also not super goofy. They didn't call it like, I don't know, ranch water or something, but polywater. It just it begins to raise questions in the mind. And it does kind of feel like the sort of thing like like it's like it's it's hiding, you know, like it's it could be secretly bad, but we just don't know how to feel about it. Just based on that that that term.

water molecules. This was, again without having actually established firmly that it was water, but they were you know, they were moving on quickly to the theoretical stage and trying to say like what can how does it work before firmly establishing that it actually is something.

of work back from that to communicate the chemistry that's right.

on it. You know, they're like, no, this is real. You know, this is going to change the world. There was this proliferation of theoretical work on the structure of poly water, but as you alluded to by it was by the summer of nineteen sixty nine really that the mainstream press caught wind of it and started going going bananas.

So Philip Ball mentions that once the subject move from professional and scientific journals into the mainstream press, the mainstream press kind of became the preferred venue for even the scientists themselves to communicate on the subject. Maybe not all of them, but some of them, the most you know, the most eager to argue, wanted to go straight to the mainstream press. And you know what, you still see

versions of this phenomenon today, don't you. Like, somebody has a revolutionary new idea, it's not really getting traction with their professional colleagues. So you can just bypass your expert colleagues and take your claims straight to the daily mail, or you know, you go straight to some kind of blog or popular press, or now even easier, you go to social media or the podcast circuit.

that we go through this process. So so, yeah, you can see where the problems emerge here.

on Earth and its containment was of absolute necessity. Now we already explained early on what Donahoe's reasoning was there that okay, so a bit of a bit of this polywater acts as a seed crystal. It transforms all of the water in the environment into the more stable form of water, which is polywater, and then if there is no ambient mechanism to turn it back, then we're really

in a bad situation. There However, in the next issue of Nature, Donahoe's note was rebuked by responses from multiple esteemed scientists, including Bernal who I mentioned earlier, who is a very very dogged proponent of polywater, very much a believer, also by a British chemist named Douglas Everett, and their point was like, well, you are getting way ahead of yourself, and there are good reasons for thinking that this is not going to happen. So they've pointed out, for example,

we've seen polywater in contact with regular water already. We've seen that in the laboratory, and we have not observed it transforming the normal water through touch alone. So it's not like water comes into contact with polywater and then is all transformed. That's not what we observe. And then second they say, you know, if polywater exists, it must occur sometimes in nature because there are natural quartz surfaces, some must have pores and capillaries like the tubes in

our experiments. And it is not already the case that all of Earth's water has been transformed into polywater. So if that were going to happen through exposure to poly water, it would have already happened in the past four and a half billion years. If it hasn't already happened, it's not going to happen.

more tests? Like how how does science proceed? Because we've talked about before, like science, you know, we think of it as kind of like a slime mold and a maze, and it's branching out and it's going through the different corridors of the maze. But then if you say no slime mold, you don't go down this corridor, like that's that's you know, that kind of runs against the whole scenario.

But on the other hand, like there are definite there are definite times and places where you where we as a culture have to say no, we can't, we can't test like this, We can't, we can't or shouldn't go after this. But it becomes a very nuanced conversation regarding some of those corridors.

nobody has actually shown definitively that it is water. There's been no experiment that has demonstrated this, and again it's difficult because of how little of it there is. So let's check in with the polywater skeptics at the time, mentions one named Arthur Cherkin of the Veterans Administration Hospital

in Sepulvada, California. Churkin is out there suggesting, are we sure this is not just contamination from the glass tubes, Like what if particles of silica from the glass or getting into the water turning into a kind of gel or being dispersed in the water, and that is affecting the properties of the water. Of course, again, the polywater advocates were as they often said. They were like, well,

maybe your samples are contaminated, but ours are pure. So you know, the fact that you might find a contaminated sample doesn't show that there's anything wrong with ours. Also want to mention a polywater skeptical researcher named Robert Davis of Purdue University. He had his own theory about the origins of polywater. He said, I think it's sweat, and

he actually this wasn't original to him. He highlighted a previously little notice finding that had been public in a Russian language journal years earlier in nineteen sixty eight, which tried to create the anomalous water and had determined that it was almost entirely made of organic contaminants, which Davis interpreted as mostly sweat. Oh wow, And here's where the author of the case Studies in Pathological Science paper comes in.

The author Dennis Rousseau. He talks in the paper about how he started studying polywater when he was an associate of the professor Sergio Porto at the University of Southern California around nineteen sixty nine. They initially they got very excited about polywater. They thought, actually, I'm going to read a quote from his paper, he said, quote could polywater alter biological processes? We wondered if polywater could extend longevity, possibly being the long awaited fountain of youth. So they

got excited, but they started their own experiments. They tried to do a Raman scattering measurement. This is another type of spectroscopy experiment where you're going to try to measure vibrational modes of the molecule. So you shoot the sample with a laser and then you examine the spectrum of the scattered light. However, they hit a snag here. I'm going to read from Rousseau. Quote as soon as we directed our laser on polywater, it turned into a black char. Doesn't seem right?

other stuff. So it wasn't just that it was contaminated, it was like almost all contamination. So Rousseau goes on to explain that his experience did not end after the laser incident. He moved on in his career and became a researcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the summer of nineteen sixty nine, where he there found his colleagues and

managers in a state of excitement about polywater. They were trying to figure out what all this meant, and he recounts being invited to one meeting to discuss whether polywater could be to blame for dielectric losses in transatlantic telephone cables, Like, was polywater somehow is it seeping into the cables? And changing the properties of the cable or the insulating material.

So he was put in charge of investigating polywater at Bell Labs or I don't know if he was the head guy in charge, but he was given he was tasked with investigating it, and he kept he was By this point he was pursuing the idea, I think we've got a serious impurities and contamination problem, and that may

be to explain what's going on with polywater. Again, he got the response we've mentioned earlier, these these kind of handwaving responses from the polywater proponents that are like, well, maybe the sample you tested was contaminated, but our samples are not contaminated. So Rousseau attacked to this in several directions. One experiment he did was that he he tried to

make polywater using not regular water but heavy water. We've done episodes on heavy water in the past, but heavy water is made with the hydrogen replaced with a heavier isotope of hydrogen known as deuterium. And when he made polywater following the standard method with heavy water, and then he did infrared spectroscopy on it, he got the same line that they had showed in the original polywater spectroscopy experiment.

So that shouldn't be right, you know, it shouldn't be looking the same with heavy water, So it kind of makes it look like the stuff we're calling polywater isn't water. And then he writes quote, Determined to understand polywater's infrared spectrum, I turned to my athletic passion handball. After a lively game, I returned to the laboratory with my sweaty t shirt and wrung the perspiration into a flask. When I placed the sweat in an infrared spectrometer, the spectrum looked strikingly

similar to that of polywater. And then he shows the graph side by side and they look almost exactly the same. So what did this mean? This was some pretty strong evidence that polywater was not water. It was probably in different experiments, different things, but at least in the experiment that had produced this famous spectrum graph that everybody was using as proof that this is really different than the

structure of regular water. In that case, it was probably a result of organic contamination of the capillary tubes where it was being condensed, and that contamination may well have been sweat. And he says, you know, after he published this result, research on polywater really pretty quickly started to

grind to a halt. There was still some stuff going through the peer review process that would continue to kind of trickle out over the next couple of years, but new research stopped pretty quick and eventually even borister Yagan and the pro polywater Associates they admitted that the entire phenomenon was probably just a mistake. Is probably a result of biological contaminants like sweat being mistaken for a type of water.

like cold old fusion and infinite dilution. He says, in all cases, these were research programs where proponents could have performed definitive experiments that would have immediately answered the question once and for all, that would have shown whether the discovery was real or an illusion, but that these definitive experiments were always kind of avoided somehow, with proponents preferring to expand on and nibble around the edges of whatever

initial result inspired the craze. And he takes that as kind of a a fear of confronting, you know, the final Like there is some indication that there's a fear of what if I'm wrong about this, and so you don't want to just like find out once and for all.

But there are a couple of peripheral pathological science related ideas I want to visit here right before we wrap up today. One thing I want to say is, I think the wrong takeaway from the Polywater episode is that, you know, we should look at these people and think, oh, what a bunch of idiots, you know, that we should feel superior to them because they fell for an erroneous enterprise. I think it's a lot more useful to acknowledge that

these are smart people. They knew what they were doing in various ways, but they they got tricked, they fell for something that wasn't true, and so it's much more useful to look for ways that we can all learn from this episode because we're all fallible in this way.

We can all get wrapped up in an idea that we're stuck on for some reason, for maybe emotional ego reasons, or we just found ourselves really convinced of it, you know, at a certain time and place in which you know, we wanted to hear something like this, and for whatever reason, we're stuck on it and we can't see the good reasons for doubting it, and so like, are there patterns to be aware of, to watch out for so we

don't find ourselves falling for the next polywater. That's a big part of what the pathological science idea is about. And again we can come back to that next time. But another thing I want to talk about is something

that Philip Ball mentions in his chapter. He highlights some comments by a scientist and named Felix Franks, who wrote a book about the polywater controversy in nineteen eighty one, and Franks argues that part of what made the polywater illusions so powerful and so irresistible was the role of the mass media. It was because it wasn't just happening in the scientific journals and with you know, written correspondence going back and forth there, that it's spilled over into

the mainstream press and the popular media. And there were multiple problems with this, Like, of course people in the media without expertise or understanding of the subject would engage in their own wild speculation, but they would also encourage scientists to do the same sort of encouraging the worst tendencies of certain scientists involved in this controversy. It also

provided an outlet with a less discerning audience. You know, that's not to insult people like us, you know, the regular readers, non scientists, but we don't have the expertise always to understand whether what a supposed authority says is reasonable or not. So instead of talking to knowledgeable, skeptical peers, you're now talking to people who have no idea if

they should take what you're saying seriously. And then one thing that I think is especially probably toxic about this and is very relevant I think to the world today

is the increasing velocity of public comment. How Like, if things are going back and forth in scientific journals, there is a delay, and that can have some downsides, like it can slow down scientific progress obviously, but it also has a lot of upsides, like you are more considered in your responses if you have to wait, you know, there's a waiting period before you can get your comment

in response out in public. And if you speed up the ability to respond back and forth between you know, between people who are criticizing each other or arguing about something. I think a lot of times that degrades the quality of the argument. It increases the likelihood of people making responses and arguments that really, if they had time to think about it, they would know or not great or not the best way to reply.

I mean, like, I just think of various cases where there'll be some sort of amazing headline grabbing the finding, and you know, there's going to be kind of a balancing that occurs in the aftermath of something like that usually, but if it just hits the headlines, then it kind of solidifies out there for so many different people, people who may not tune in for the follow up studies and so forth.

And so in the next episode we'll get into some of that as well. Now, as for how you respond a listener, you can certainly email us. We would love to hear from you. We're going to throw out that email address in just a minute here, but yeah, if you're new to the show, people write in all the time, and we love it if you have additional insight based on your profession or your passions, your travels, or just your day to day reality. Yeah, right in, tell us,

tell us what's up. We also take episode suggestions and just you know, just right in to say hi if you like. As well, just to remind you here that the stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast. Again, we've been around for years. You can find all of our episodes wherever you get your podcasts.

Just look for Stuff to Blow your Mind. We have our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays usually, and on Wednesdays we do a short form episode and on Fridays that's when we set aside most serious concerns and we just talk about a weird movie on episodes that we call Weird House Cinema.