water pseudoscience

This is a page from chem1.com.

http://www.chem1.com/acad/sci/aboutwater.html#BS



Water Pseudoscience

See the "AquaScams" site for much more on this subject. Here are a few highlights.

"Clustered", "Unclustered" and other structure-altered waters
The "alternative" health market is full of goofy products which purport to alter the structure of water by stabilizing groups of H2O molecules into permanent clusters of 4-8 molecules, or alternatively, to break up what they claim are the larger clusters (usually 10-15 molecules) that they say normally exist in water. The object in either case is to promote the flow of water into the body's cells ("cellular hydration"). This is of course utter nonsense; there is no credible scientific evidence for any of these claims, many of which verge on the bizarre. There are even some scientifically absurd U.S. Patents for the manufacture of so-called "Clustered Water™". At least 20 nostrums of this kind are offered to the scientifically-naïve public through hundreds of Web sites and late-night radio "infomercials". None of this misleading sales hype should be believed.

Does water have "memory"?
According to modern-day proponents of homeopathy, it must. Homeopathic remedies are made by diluting solutions of various substances so greatly that not even a single molecule of the active substance can be expected to be present in the final medication. Now that even the homeopaths have come to accept this fact, they explain that the water somehow retains the "imprint" or "memory" of the original solute.

Some references (mostly skeptical) on homeopathy

In 1985, the late Jacques Benveniste, a French biologist, conducted experiments that purported to show that a certain type of cellular immune response could be brought about by an anti-immunoglobulin agent that had been diluted to such an extent that it is highly unlikely that even one molecule of this agent remained in the aqueous solution. He interpreted this to indicate that water could somehow retain an impression, or "memory", of a solute that had been diluted out of existence. This result was immediately taken by believers in homeopathy as justification for their dogma that similarly diluted remedies could be effective as alternative medical agents. The consensus among chemists is that any temporary disruption of the water structure by a dissolved agent would disappear within a fraction of a second after its removal by dilution, owing to the vigorous thermal motions of the water molecules. Benveniste's results have never been convincingly replicated by other scientists (see here for a recent summary).

In 2010, a UK parliamentry committee report urged the government to withdraw funding and licensing of homeopathy.

Can you run your car on water?
Not really. For water to act as a fuel, there must be some combination of oxygen and hydrogen that is energetically more stable than H2O, and no such molecule is known.

This fact has failed to put to rest the venerable urban legend that some obscure inventor discovered a process to do this, but the invention was secretly bought up by the oil companies in order to preserve their monopoly.

It takes 286 kJ of energy to break up 18 g of water into its elements. Allowing the oxygen and hydrogen to recombine yields this same amount of energy back in the form of heat. But to do anything useful with this heat, it must be converted into work, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics limits the efficiency of this step to less (usually far less) than 100%. If the hydrogen and oxygen are recombined in a fuel cell, the Second Law limitation is removed, but the First Law still limits energy recovery to 100%, and this does not count inefficiencies in the initial decomposition of water. Any scheme to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen requires a net input of energy.However, adding water to the fuel-air mixture in an internal combustion engine, a process known as water injection, has been employed for many years as a method of improving the performance of both piston- and turbine engines. Water injection kits are widely available, many offered by hucksters whose marketing (sample) falsely implies that their products allow you to "run your car on water". Don't believe it! And get some solid advice before you try this on a modern computer-controlled high compression engine.

Burning water
In 2007, a widely-cited YouTube video appeared that showed a sample of salt water "burning". This occurs only in the presence of a strong radio-frequency field, which supposedly dissociates the water into H2 and O2. These two gases then recombine, producing the flame. Although there has been much uninformed hype about this being some kind of a breakthrough as a source of "energy from water", there is no reason to believe that the First Law of Thermodynamics has been repealed. If the energy supplied by the radio-frequency source is taken into account, you can be sure that there has been no net energy gain.

The actual mechanism of the process remains unclear. The fact that salt or some other ionic solute is required suggests that ions at the water's surface might be accelerated in the local field produced by the plasma discharge, helping to break up the molecules in the water vapor.
But for something really far-out, few things beat the sub-culture of the "free energy" pseudoscience enthusiasts and their religion-like obsession with "HHO", for whom some guy named Stan Meyer seems to be the guru. See this video of Stan Meyer's water-electrolysis setup that apparently flouts all the laws of thermodynamics! (See here for another scientist's opinion about this nonsense.)

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