Masaru Emoto's The Hidden Messages in Water posits the theory that water exposed to positive thoughts and words forms beautiful crystals, while exposure to negative thoughts forms distorted and ugly crystals. If you can hear that premise without rolling your eyes, you're more the audience for this attempt at new age inspiration than I am. Listening to this audiobook, my eyes were in danger of rolling out of my head - unpleasant at the best of times, but dangerous since I was listening while driving.
I'm baffled at how some people can be skeptical about science and the scientific method, yet not at all skeptical about the unproven and often unprovable theories of pseudoscientific research such as Emoto's. He is careful to outline his experiments in scientific terms — even bringing a hazy understanding of quantum physics into it — while skirting any description that would allow for duplication of his findings or any confidence that other variables contributed to them.
The basic method of his experiments was to direct words, either written or spoken, to a sample of water, freeze it, then take high-speed photographs of the resulting crystals. He finds that "love" and "gratitude" form perfect crystals, while defective crystals are formed on exposure to phrases such as "you fool" and "just do it". (Nike might be surprised to have that classified as a negative). Ignoring crystals altogether was also bad. From this, he takes the fairly admirable view that we should use these same principles to guide how we treat people, although I don't think it's necessary to consider that people are made up largely of water for us to want to treat others with love and gratitude more than insults.
He also played various types of music for the water, finding that classical music resulted in beautiful crystals, and heavy metal created ugly ones. Guess what kind of music Emoto prefers?
The Hidden Messages in Water is one of a few such books by Masaru Emoto which were initially self-published in his native Japan, never peer-reviewed in academic journals, and gained some popularity from exposure in the movie What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?. He ignores double-blind procedures, which might reduce the skepticism that the photographer could simply choose a crystal that best demonstrates the result he expects to find. His claims are the subject of one of the James Randi Educational Foundation's million-dollar challenges — that skeptics' organization has an as-yet-unaccepted standing offer to pay him $1 million if he can demonstrate his findings using scientific methods.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
2 - Rick Henderson
I would like to believe that his research is verifiable, but alas its probably not going to be so. Your site is the first in a Google list that critically reviews the book, as the first 2 pages of hits for the phrase "messages in water" mostly result in telling people how great the book is. Congrats on a well written, non-confrontational review.
3 - Anthony Lewis
You say "I'm baffled at how some people can be skeptical about science and the scientific method, yet not at all skeptical about the unproven and often unprovable theories of pseudoscientific research such as Emoto's."
I would say that when someone says something nice to you and you feel good about what was said and you put an image to it I bet it would be beautiful. On the other hand if someone said something hateful and mean to you and you put an image to it I bet it would look ugly.
Honestly, I just believe it.