#polywater

[ogeecircleman]

The Rise and Fall of Polywater: The Liquid That Fooled Science

1. An Old Obsession: Water and Its SecretsWater is everywhere. Simple, transparent, seemingly ordina

1. An Old Obsession: Water and Its SecretsWater is everywhere. Simple, transparent, seemingly ordinary. And yet, for centuries, it has baffled even th...

[ianmiller42]

The Role of Consensus in Scientific Debate

In my last post, it was stated that Peter Vickers asserted that there had never been 95% consensus before and been found to be wrong.  We have to be a wee bit careful in refuting that. For example Newtonian mechanics and Galilean relativity was held to be correct for a very long time, but the fact was that those who believed it only operated in regions where it was effectively true, so we cannot…

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[ianmiller42]

Polymerised Water

In my opinion, probably the least distinguished moment in science in the last sixty years occurred in the late 1960s, and not for the seemingly obvious reason. It all started when Nikolai Fedyakin condensed steam in quartz capillaries and found it had unusual properties, including a viscosity approaching that of a syrup. Boris Deryagin improved production techniques (although he never produced…

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[thingsidrawgohere]

A Learnt Rerun from 2018: Polywater

Learnt will be taking a break for the rest of the month! In the meantime, I’ll be posting ‘reruns’ of older comics. Any favorites you’d like to see again?

Check out the rest of Learnt on my website, Cheap Paper Art, and consider supporting my Patreon in the source link.

[aardwolfpack]

Amazing Fact #10

The results of experiments conducted in 1966 led many prominent chemists to believe water could be easily transformed into a polymer.  It took 15 years of research to determine that the water was just getting dirty from glass and hands and things.

Follow for more amazing facts.

[fritfilter]

It’s hard to imagine a better example of this than polywater. “The data was right, but our interpretation was wrong,” my great-uncle told me. Technically, he’s correct: His team produced an accurate infrared spectrum reading of the tiny amounts of the sample they tested, and it didn’t match any other substance in their database. But if they had maintained a more skeptical approach, they might have considered other possibilities—such as sweat—before drawing up a novel chemical structure and giving their material a catchy new name. “The critical thing, whenever you find something that’s really strange, is to try to disprove it, rather than trying to prove it’s there,” Rousseau reminded me. In other words, in their excitement, my great-uncle’s team forgot the maxim popularized by Carl Sagan: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[nique-blog1]

The critical thing, whenever you find something that’s really strange, is to try to disprove it, rather than trying to prove it’s there.

Dr. Denis Rousseau, on the subject of polywater, a supposed new type of water discovered in the late 1960s.

[gmolate]