One might think that after suffering a setback like the N rays, the scientific community would have learned to be careful. However, that was not the case. At the end of the 1960s, a group of scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Moscow announced the discovery of a new form of water, which they called Polywater, or water plastic. It was not mere theoretical speculation: the Soviets had the necessary evidence to certify their finding, and even distributed small samples in thin quartz tubes. However...
Sometimes even the most renowned scientists make mistakes. The combination of predetermined ideas and errors (of observation or interpretation) often helps discover things that do not even exist. One of the biggest embarrassments of this kind, and one of the best known, is the “discovery” of the N rays by René Blondlot, a prominent French physicist from the University of Nancy, about 100 years ago. After the ugly affair of the N rays, it was thought that such a mistake would never be made again. The scientific community had learned its lesson. Or so it seemed.
A New Form of Water
For more than half a century, in the first half of the 20th century, science continued to advance by leaps and bounds. Everyone marveled at the Theory of Relativity enunciated by Einstein, and scientists discovered some new secret of nature almost every day. In this context, the discovery of a new form of water by the Russian physicist Nikolai Fedyakin did not attract particular attention. The water molecule is one of the simplest, most abundant, and best known by science. In fact, the composition of the liquid that covers 71% of the Earth's surface is very simple, consisting of only three atoms: two hydrogen atoms, the most abundant element in the universe, and one oxygen atom, the most abundant element in the Earth's crust. Water also has some surprising properties. For example, it is one of the few liquids that are denser than the corresponding solid, which is why ice floats on water.
Boris V. Deryagin, one of the greatest experts in surface chemistry of the former Soviet Union, was responsible for communicating to the West the extraordinary discovery made by his compatriot Nikolai Fedyakin. In one of the classic “Discussions of the Faraday Society”, in 1966, he brought the capitalist scientists up to date on the wonderful properties of a strange form of water discovered by the Russians. Named Polywater, or water plastic, its boiling point was extraordinarily high, and it could be heated to 500°C while remaining liquid; or cooled to -40°C before becoming a glassy solid.
The Russians had discovered the existence of polymerized water. Unlike “normal water”, the so-called “Polywater” presented a type of bonding between individual molecules that were anything but conventional. The experiments included the analysis of the behavior of liquid water in very fine capillary tubes, finding that sometimes it possessed extremely strange properties. Despite the evidence presented by the Russian scientists, the matter aroused great distrust. The world was engaged in the Cold War, and there was almost systematic skepticism toward any discovery originating outside the circle of the United Nations.
The Debunking
But when American scientists repeated Deryagin's experiments, they surprisingly obtained the same results, and even managed to see drops of this anomalous form of water, although so small that they could only be distinguished under a microscope. It took several months, many efforts, and frequent notes of an unusual tenor in scientific literature—with veiled and not-so-veiled insults included—to conclude that in reality that finding was nothing more than the result of careless work. Perhaps motivated by the desire to be the first to verify the existence of a completely strange “state” of water, many laboratories confirmed the Russian finding. By repeating the experiment step by step, Western scientists had contaminated their samples with quartz in the same way as they had, so the results coincided.
The final blow against Polywater was delivered by Denis Rousseau, from Bell Laboratories, who demonstrated that his own sweat, obtained from a shirt after playing a handball game in the laboratory, possessed properties identical to the product cited by Deryagin. Subsequently, Rousseau published a document in which he made it clear that polywater was nothing more than water with small amounts of biological impurities.
In a few months, the topic of water polymer ceased to occupy space in scientific publications, and today no chemist or physicist insists on its existence. However, many pseudoscientists—and not a few professional tricksters—continue to “prepare” almost magical solutions from polywater and, of course, defend its existence tooth and nail.
