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by pkghost 29 days ago
Folks still sleeping on structured water.

While admittedly contested and only reproduced by a few labs outside Gerald Pollack's at University of Washington, there is a solid case that it could play a role in transporting water and sap to the tops of trees. At least, it's involved in the motion induced in hydrophilic tubes when there is sufficient ambient radiant energy (uv/infrared).

Relevant papers:

"Exclusion-zone water inside and outside of plant xylem vessels." 2024 Scientific Reports. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62983-3

"Surface-induced flow: a natural microscopic engine using infrared energy as fuel." 202 Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aba0941

"Long-range forces extending from polymer-gel surfaces." 2003 Phys. Rev. E. https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.68.031408

Pollack's site: https://www.pollacklab.org/

Some critiques of Pollack's theory:

Schurr, J.M. (2013). Phenomena associated with gel–water interfaces: analyses and alternatives to the long-range ordered water hypothesis. J. Phys. Chem. B, 117(25), 7653–7674. https://doi.org/10.1021/jp302589y Elton, D.C., Spencer, P.D., Riches, J.D. & Williams, E.D. (2020). Exclusion zone phenomena in water — a critical review of experimental findings and theories. Int. J. Mol. Sci., 21(14), 5041. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21145041 (open access; the most thorough critical review) Elton, D.C. & Spencer, P.D. (2021). Pathological water science — four examples and what they have in common. In Water in Biomechanical and Related Systems (Biologically-Inspired Systems, vol. 17), pp. 155–170. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67227-0_8 (preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.07287)

1 comments

I regretably didnt save it but there was a truly hilarious topic on usenet sci.physics long long ago. If we've gathered enough evidence against something or if the thing goes against accepted consensus you are forbidden from doing further research and new evidence is no longer allowed. The topic then invited others to list such topics. The list grew to hundreds of entries and people couldnt resist getting angry reading their personal trigger words despite there being many more silly things on it.

Yours shall be filed under homeopathy :)

Be careful with that dismissal. The concept of an exclusion zone itself appears to be legitimate. More generally, there's lots of strange and surprising effects that crop up on the molecular level at interfaces in solution. However not all mechanistic explanations for such behavior are shall we say "widely accepted".

And then there's homeopathy which is a largely unrelated and entirely nonsensical thing.

> And then there's homeopathy which is a largely unrelated and entirely nonsensical thing.

And be careful with that dismissal! Not that I'm helping my case, here, but Pollack doesn't think it's baloney (see related chapter in his book "The Fourth Phase of Water").

While there is plenty of evidence of strange molecular phenomena occurring at interfaces in solution, there is to the best of my knowledge absolutely no evidence to support the claims made by homeopathy. Moreover the latter appear patently unreasonable at a glance (and only become increasingly so when examined with a critical eye) while the former fall well within the bounds of established chemistry and physics.
I didnt believe any of it but when conventional methods failed the homeopathy worked incredibly well. So, i dont get to mock it. The same guy also gave me other alternative medication. I had to pull it out of him as he innitally refused for legal reasons.

So, i make of it that alternative medicine and homeopathy doesnt work because you may not talk about it(!?)

Or as Brian Josephson put it, The idea that water can have a memory can be readily disproved by any one of a number of easily understood, invalid arguments