Polywater history and science mistakes: The U.S. and USSR raced to create a new form of water.

That was probably one of the most interesting articles I've ever read!

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Anybody else remember how every prestigious chemistry program was replicating "Cold Fusion" results in 1989?

Yeah, they don't, either.

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Have never got round to reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat's Cradle, but now I know the ending.

Really interesting article though.

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I remember polywater. It was an example of too many physicists and not enough chemists. It turned out to be a gel of the silica or borates leached from the soft glass capillary walls, I think.

I also remember, at the national lab where I was working, people running around collecting all the palladium they could find. I actually sat on a committee to approve whether a cold fusion experiment would be safe to do, given the likelihood of neutron emissions...

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While fascinating, there's some lazy and downright misleading reporting going on here. I point you to this passage:

Similarly, in 2011, a group of European researchers claimed that they’d observed subatomic particles called neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light, violating our current model of physics. Subsequent analysis showed that their experimental setup included a fiber-optic cable that was incorrectly installed and a clock that ticked at the wrong speed, causing them to time the speed of their neutrinos just a hair too fast.

Rousseau thinks of these episodes as “pathological science”: cases where tiny sample sizes (or effects that are otherwise difficult to measure) and a potentially revolutionary (and career-making) finding lead scientists astray. These aren’t instances of outright fraud, but of unconscious bias. A scientist misinterprets a small amount of data as a paradigm-shifting discovery, and once in that mindset, he or she sees all subsequent information through the same lens.

This is a case of trying to force facts to fit a pre-conceived narrative. If he'd stuck with the 1989 cold fusion findings, great. From what I understand, it's a great example. But the scientists involved in the neutrino experiment went to great pains to emphasise that they distrusted the result. From wikipedia:

Physicists affiliated with the experiment had refrained from interpreting the result, stating in their paper:

Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly. We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results.[49]

I don't think it ruins the article by any stretch, it's still a fascinating look into something I certainly had no idea about. But he's kinda gliding the lily, which leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

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I heard about polywater. I took a class called (rough translation) 'scientific methods' and to pass it we had to write a short paper about some scientific fallacy that resulted in some kind of new insight upon it's debunking.

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Wow that was a really good read! Thanks!

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Wonder if the polywater thing could have been planted by Soviet intelligence, think about it, they make an announcement that they discovered something big, get the U.S to research it and find out its basically sweaty water. You can't possibly argue that it was malicious in intent nobody made people research it. If I wanted to waste everyones time thats how I would do it.

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So for me I guess I had a hard time maintaining interest in the article after this proposed structure :http://imgur.com/eHHes5e .

Did anyone else think of this smbc comic afterwards?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=807

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bookmarked the article for when it isn't 9 in the morning with me not having slept yet.