----- Original Message -----
From: Jed Rothwell
That is not my impression from the Franks book. (Franks, F.,
Polywater. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1981) As far as I know,
in the end the researchers themselves concluded that their
initial findings were incorrect, and they retracted. Science was
more forgiving back then.
Yes. They did "retract" so to speak, but... and the Franks' book
was a decent, err 'felicitous' account of it all, but let's not
forget that this was the cold war, and a huge embarassment to
USSR-Science, so we can never be sure whether any of the recanting
on the Russian-end was voluntary - or ... whether it related
solely to the fact that the "effect" went away, when ultraclean
caplillaries were used (nor whether the next lab-venue for some of
them was Ice-9 research in Siberia... <g>)
Apologies for the 'Inquisition' reference - hyperbole - of course.
Siberia is preferable, one imagines, to burning at the stake...
And certainly, the whole scenario may be totally unrelated to the
context in which I was trying to shoehorn it - which was
Waterfuel. Time will tell.
Yet, it is still fascinating that nobody denies that there was
some initial anomaly which did disappear in pristine conditions
YET ... it did reappear when the apparatus was not contaminated.
That means only that water was not solely responsible, but NOT
that water was not somehow unchanged itself, in an unusual way.
And the technology was not available then to determine precisely
what was happening in its fullest extent - i.e. in addition to
mineralization... if there was an additional factor, which there
may - or may not have been.
Like Michelson-Morley, the full truth may still be "out-there" and
it is not necessarily "case closed" ... if you add-in things
learned since.
The polywater incident spawned a number of tongue-in-cheek episode
of Star Trek, where it was 'real' which will keep it going as a
meme for sometime to come (along with di-lithium).
Jones
- Re: Polywater & WaterFuel Jones Beene
-
