Positive Energy?

My Human Diversity Professor is really awesome. Its a class about the diversity in the world and how to understand and respond to all the people and all the issues. Its a huge topic and often weighs heavily with me. She also tends to indirectly challenge me spiritually, quite frequently. She has very open ideas about the spiritual world and I am usually quite skeptical when she integrates these into our "skill development" at the end of class each week.

Example: Yesterday she told us about Dr. Masaru Emoto. Apparently, he started experimenting with water crystals. He would write positive or negative words on jars and freeze them. Then he would study the crystals with a microscope to see what happened. He found a drastic difference between the water that had been given positive words (which formed pretty crystals) and those with negative words (some didn't form crystals at all, and tended to look darker). He also went to different places around the world and found that spring water looked drastically different from some polluted water sources, and yet, he also found that with prayer, even the polluted water changed and began producing beautiful crystals. He also connects this with the human body and how our emotions might be effecting the water in us.

My first thought was, of course, complete cynicism. Water molecules don't respond to words... this is ridiculous! But I began to mull over it and decided that if anything was effecting the water, it would be the emotions felt by the person when they read the word. Hmmm... well? So, she gave us all nice water bottles with static stickers on them of positive words, so that we could drink water that was good. I grabbed "Gratitude" because I've been stressed out and figured that focusing on being grateful would help me, regardless of the state of the water.

This continued to cross my mind all day yesterday and I even thought of the ice cubes in my freezer. I filter my water, but I'm not convinced how much it really helps. And I noticed that my ice cubes here are really murky and ugly and weird compared to the perfectly clear and smooth ones I used to make with the filtered water at work. So, this morning, I decided to try it on my ice cubes. I filled an ice cube tray with my filtered water, said a little prayer over it, and then sang a couple verses of Amazing Grace. I would have spent more time on it, but I had to get ready for class.

Then I decided to look Dr. Masaru Emoto up, found a couple of his websites and then found a decent amount of dissent. Here are a couple excerpts:

Alex Boese
(Tuesday, April 05, 2005)

Masaru Emoto's book The Hidden Messages in Water is currently #66 in sales rank on Amazon. That means A LOT of people are buying it...

What do I think of this theory? Well, at the risk of giving off a lot of negative energy that's going to make a whole bunch of water crystals get all bent out of shape, I think it's complete baloney. But then, I'm not very 'open minded' about things like this. So I would think that.

Source: The Museum of Hoaxes


Some interactive comments on the topic:

Physics Monkey
10-27-2005, 12:27 AM
Nonsense. The give away is the phrase "self-published book" which you can read as "not peer reviewed." What we have here, I think, is another example of a so called scientist preying on the confusion that exists amongst non-scientists. Guys like this give the real scientists a bad name. I guess he could be right :rolleyes: , and the moon might be made of cheese (the moon landing was faked after all, so who knows what the moon is made of).

Chipper
10-27-2005, 01:51 AM
that website is a few years old but Dr. Emoto is well renowned for his findings in Japan. They have been verified and are real facts.. its really interesting thing to think about. I've been following it since "what the bleep do we know" came out on DVD.

Hans de Vries
10-27-2005, 04:25 AM
Scientifically it is complete rubbish, but that's not the criteria. The only thing what matters is that it sells. The naive question is if there is scientific merit. The real question is if it makes a living [...] It seems Dr. Masaru Emoto has a great time traveling around the world in the limelight with his hoax. Just doing his act as any traveling artist like circus artists, magicians, traveling theaters, miracle doctors.

Source: Physics Forums



Ben Goldacre
(from The Guardian on Thursday May 12, 2005):

The point of all this, in the film, is that the troubled lead character covers herself in hearts and lies in the bath, because she is made of water, and this affects her in a similar way and makes her feel better. But to me this tells a deeper story about alternative therapies: about intellectual laziness, and how self-centred we can be. After all, how indulgent do we have to be, to put humans at the centre of the universe, and say that if we bless water, then by our human aesthetics its shapes will become “more beautiful”, that water will read whatever language we write. Perhaps, that’s what still most unsettles people about science, that we are no longer at the center of the universe.

But more than that, how sad to let the field of mind-body interactions, the effect of mood on the body, and on health: to let that be monopolised by people like Emoto. There is the huge, fascinating field of psychoneuroimmunology: it presents us with an intellectually challenging, incomplete story, rather than a simplistic, complete one involving nice words on a jam jar. There’s a fascinating and reasonably coherent story about how stress hormones, such as cortisol, can affect depression, illness, and even addiction, through interaction with the amygdala and other parts of the brain. There’s nothing wrong with thinking positively, and there’s no reason to think it won’t work, but why retreat into nonsense?

Source: badscience

Good point... hmmm...

I just went back to my freezer and pulled out the two trays (I already had one in there from before). And I kid you not, I totally thought I was seeing things because the tray from this morning was noticeably lighter, clearer, and smoother. But I thought, no, the other tray is older and that's why. So I pulled out a dark plate and took one ice cube from each tray to compare them. They looked different! So I pulled out more from each tray and there were marked differences between the two trays... SOOOO WEIRD! So I tried to capture it for you:

The top row is the regular ice cubes, and the bottom is the special ones

It looks like there's something going on in the bottom row and the top row is more disorganized...

The regular ones up close


The ones I prayed and sang over


Something noticeably different is happening... do ice cubes change internal structure after they freeze? Because the regular ones were in there for at least a day or two more than the other ones... I think I need to test this again... sorry, I can't help myself.

Thoughts anyone?