From: MarkI-ZeroPoint
Polywater may come back to embarrass the so called 'competent' scientific community... Enter capitalism, where "embarrassment" means "laughing all the way to the bank": http://www.polywater.com/ OK- one can argue that the successful products of this company are not really "polywater" in the original sense of polymerized water, which is true to one extent, but only semantically... since instead of a water with a few percent silicates picked up from glass tubing to form a polymer, this commercial product is using a mix a few percent water-soluble polymers dissolved in mostly water. Did you catch the slight distinction there? ... didn't think so, and semantics is a bitch when you want it to be... especially where the visible similarities outweigh the hidden differences; ergo it is not entirely the case that polywater was a total bust, or even pathological. It would have been another case of Goodyear's fortunate accident, had it happened under a capitalist regime. It is closer to missed opportunity than pathological science. And since this modern commercial form of the eponymous liquid is about 90% similar to the original Russian formula - even if those backward commies did not understand what it was at first, since it was not written into the Five Year Plan - shouldn't they be given some credit? After all, a product which is mostly water having picked up silicates to form long chains -that could have been commercialize earlier - to the extent it could be made inexpensively. Their culture did not care about finding anything that could be produced inexpensively, since it was all about more jobs, over there - not higher productivity. IOW - had this episode in history not been politicized as "commies vs. capitalists", the story could be reading a bit differently today. History is written by the victors, which is the West today - but this unfinished story could be written differently tomorrow. Given that we are in a Democracy, it may not be long before the 47% becomes the 51% - and it cannot be guaranteed that a 180 degree reversal will not happen in the USA in the next chapter of this story? Yikes. Anyway, today silicone plastic and rubber is an important polymer based on silicates - more precisely called polymerized siloxanes. However, Dow-Corning had this product on the market before the Russian fiasco - but their process was extremely cumbersome and very expensive. Silicone rubber, now commonplace, did not become a multi-billion industry until a far cheaper way to make it came along - to some extent buoyed up by implants, so to speak. Speaking of busts, one can argue that had the Ruskies been a little more "capitalistic" and PR oriented, in the way this new "breakthrough" was presented to the world - they could have patented it and taken over the low end of the silicone rubber market by being able to make a version of it cheaply by passing water through glass tubing. That is probably a good subplot for an "alternate universe" story... as is the good old USA going commie, sometime in the near future. The only thing pathological in this polywater story is its interpretation, "after the fact" and that chapter is not yet complete. Jones
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