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Messages from Water: The Power of Positive Thinking

I watched a movie today called What the Bleep Do We Know??? and they showed Dr. Masuru Emoto's pictures of water.

Quote:

The photographs and information in this article reflect the work of Masaru Emoto, a creative and visionary Japanese researcher Mr. Emoto has published an important book, "The Message from Water from the findings of his worldwide research If you have any doubt that your thoughts affect everything in, and around you, the information and photographs that are presented here, taken from the book of his published results, will change your mind and alter your beliefs, profoundly.

From Mr. Emoto's work we are provided with factual evidence, that human vibrational energy, thoughts, words, ideas and music, affect the molecular structure of water, the very same water that comprises over seventy percent of a mature human body and covers the same amount of our planet. Water is the very source of all life on this planet, the quality and integrity are vitally important to all forms of life. The body is very much like a sponge and is composed of trillions of chambers called cells that hold liquid. The quality of our life is directly connected to the quality of our water.

Water is a very malleable substance. Its physical shape easily adapts to whatever environment is present. But its physical appearance is not the only thing that changes, the molecular shape also changes. The energy or vibrations of the environment will change the molecular shape of water. In this sense water not only has the ability to visually reflect the environment but it also molecularly reflects the environment.

Mr. Emoto has been visually documenting these molecular changes in water by means of his photographic techniques. He freezes droplets of water and then examines them under a dark field microscope that has photographic capabilities. His work clearly demonstrates the diversity of the molecular structure of water and the effect of the environment upon the structure of the water.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1.../thank_you.jpg
Thank You

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...hetiq/love.jpg
Love & Gratitude

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...ara_before.jpg
Fujiwara Dam, before offering a prayer

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...ara_prayer.jpg
Fujiwara Dam, after offering a prayer

I'm quite impressed and will post again once I've really digested this information. On the whole, if these things are not some hoax or direct manipulation, it's an amazing paradigm shift for people if they can accept that postive labels for oneself are truly powerful.

I've heard about Emoto-san and his work. I'd love to believe it's true, but I don't know how I'd become convinced. Regardless, the photography is beautiful!

Don't mean to be a pain in the ass and rain on the parade, but this is just one of many articles about how terribly flawed "What the bleep do we know?" is:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science...cbccdrcrd.html

Quote:

Cult Science
Dressing up mysticism as quantum physics

By Gregory Mone | October 2004

Beware: A ridiculous new science movie is coming to a theater near you. What the #$*! Do We Know?, an independent film slated for national release this month, pretends to be an exploration of the grand questions of science, reality and life. It jumps between a fictional story about a divorced photographer and snippets of interviews with authoritative-looking individuals. Although several of them have big bookshelves in view behind them, it quickly becomes clear to the attentive viewer that few of these talking heads are making any sense. They speak of “infecting the quantum field” and refer to bio-body suits and antigravity magnets without explanation. Not until the credits roll, when the “experts” are finally introduced, do we learn that the two people who do most of the talking about neuroscience and physics are not actually scientists. One is a chiropractor. The other is a 35,000-year-old warrior named Ramtha, who is being “channeled” by a blonde woman from Washington. Oh, and the chiropractor is one of her devotees. As are the filmmakers. In short, what we’ve got here are the musings of a cult masquerading as a science documentary. If the movie even has a central message, it could best be summarized as, “We don’t know #$*!”

Not everyone finds this amusing. One of the few legitimate academics in the film, David Albert, a philosopher of physics at Columbia University, is outraged at the final product. He says that he spent four hours patiently explaining to the filmmakers why quantum mechanics has nothing to do with consciousness or spirituality, only to see his statements edited and cut to the point where it appears as though he and the spirit warrior are speaking with one voice. “I was taken,” Albert admits. “I was really gullible, but I learned my lesson.” Yet the real shame with this film is that it plays on people’s fascination with science while distorting and misrepresenting that science. Before its national release, the film packed theaters up and down the West Coast. Instead of stoking the curiosity of those moviegoers, What the #$*! numbed them with mindless quantum drivel.

This is all not to mention that the film was entirely produced by the cultish Ramtha School of Enlightenment

Specifically regarding the water crystals, there is a section on wikipedia:

Quote:

Masaru Emoto's work (The Hidden Messages in Water) plays a prominent role in a scene set in a subway tunnel, where the main character happens upon a presentation of displays showing images of water crystals. In the movie, "before" and "after" photographs of water are presented as evidence that specific words written on pieces of paper and affixed to different containers of water have the power to transform the water into beautiful crystalline shapes. Examples include "You make me sick", "Love and Gratitude", and "Merci". The procedure followed by Emoto can be found at this site. In the movie, it is claimed that "non-physical events" of "mental stimuli" are the cause of this transformation, but skeptics have pointed out that the "after" photographs are microscopic images of the water after being frozen (aka snowflakes) — a step not disclosed in the movie.

Additional problems arise when it becomes clear that Emoto's work is more artistic than scientific. For example, Emoto never submitted his work for peer review, and he did not utilise double blind methodology. If this had been the case, the individual providing the specimen (i.e., the person who selected the water sample, poured it into the container, labeled the container with a message, and froze it) would need to be a different person than the individual who later received the ice for analysis and photography. This second individual would also need to be unaware of what each specimen had been labelled. If the same person performed all of these tasks, this individual could easily select sections of the frozen water that matched what they wanted to see, perhaps unconsciously (a phenomenon otherwise known as confirmation bias). In other words, if the individual wanted to demonstrate that happy words produced aesthetically pleasing shapes, they only needed to find a section of the ice which was aesthetically pleasing. Conversely, if they wanted to demonstrate that angry words created aesthetically displeasing crystals, they again just needed to search until they found a section that did not look as good. Emoto also claims that polluted water does not crystallize. Depending on the properties of the pollutant, heavily polluted water will still form crystals, though the crystals may contain more crystallographic defects than pure water would. These changes in the way the crystals form can be readily explained using basic chemistry and physics.

Emoto essentially appears to have arbitrarily decided what constitutes a "brilliant crystal" and an "incomplete crystal", but in a movie claiming a scientific base grounded in quantum mechanics, a quantification of what defines such crystals is required.

James Randi, founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation, has publicly offered [link] Emoto one-million dollars if his results can be reproduced in a double-blind study.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SecretMethod70

Don't mean to be a pain in the ass and rain on the parade, but this is just one of many articles about how terribly flawed "What the bleep do we know?" is:

This is all not to mention that the film was entirely produced by the cultish Ramtha School of Enlightenment

Specifically regarding the water crystals, there is a section on wikipedia:

I had lots of doubt just for the fact that they didn't Chyron the speakers at the begining of the film, not to mention I have lots of scepticism when the same people write, direct, produce have something more invested (especially "passionate works") to say about the topic.

I found the Scientific American article

Quote:

December 20, 2004

Quantum Quackery

A surprise-hit film has renewed interest in applying quantum mechanics to consciousness, spirituality and human potential

By Michael Shermer

In spring 2004 I appeared on KATU TV's AM Northwest in Portland, Ore., with the producers of an improbably named film, What the #$*! Do We Know?! Artfully edited and featuring actress Marlee Matlin as a dreamy-eyed photographer trying to make sense of an apparently senseless universe, the film's central tenet is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum mechanics. I never imagined that such a film would succeed, but it has grossed millions.
The film's avatars are New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as "quantum flapdoodle." University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says in the film: "The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies." Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground's tendencies.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What the #$*! is going on here?
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The work of Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto, author of The Hidden Messages in Water, is featured to show how thoughts change the structure of ice crystals--beautiful crystals form in a glass of water with the word "love" taped to it, whereas playing Elvis's "Heartbreak Hotel" causes other crystals to split in two. Would his "Burnin' Love" boil water?

The film's nadir is an interview with "Ramtha," a 35,000-year-old spirit channeled by a woman named JZ Knight. I wondered where humans spoke English with an Indian accent 35,000 years ago. Many of the films' participants are members of Ramtha's "School of Enlightenment," where New Age pabulum is dispensed in costly weekend retreats.

The attempt to link the weirdness of the quantum world to mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness) is not new. The best candidate to connect the two comes from University of Oxford physicist Roger Penrose and physician Stuart Hameroff of the Arizona Health Sciences Center, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light. Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. Their conjecture (and that's all it is) is that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that results in the quantum coherence of atoms. The quantum coherence causes neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons, thus triggering them to fire in a uniform pattern that creates thought and consciousness. Because a wave-function collapse can come about only when an atom is "observed" (that is, affected in any way by something else), the late neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another proponent of the idea, even suggested that "mind" may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms....

In reality, the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems is too large to bridge. In his book The Unconscious Quantum (Prometheus Books, 1995), University of Colorado physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described quantum-mechanically, its typical mass (m), speed (v) and distance (d) must be on the order of Planck's constant (h). "If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can be treated classically." Stenger computes that the mass of neural transmitter molecules and their speed across the distance of the synapse are about two orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential. There is no micro-macro connection. Then what the #$*! is going on here?

Physics envy. The lure of reducing complex problems to basic physical principles has dominated the philosophy of science since Descartes's failed attempt some four centuries ago to explain cognition by the actions of swirling vortices of atoms dancing their way to consciousness. Such Cartesian dreams provide a sense of certainty, but they quickly fade in the face of the complexities of biology. We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization. Biology envy.

Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic (www.skeptic.com) and author of The Science of Good and Evil.

I think that Emoto-san's work and the film are fascinating. I don't need them to be scientifically provable. Most of the things that have made a real difference in my life aren't scientifically provable.

I actually think it's a mistake to try to tie notions like the personal choice of experience to physical, scientific concepts like quantum physics. The idea that my expectations and preconceptions and choices give me what I experience of the world around me isn't something to prove or disprove; it's a place to look and think from that gives access to new things. Science, on the other hand, has this thing called skepticism, which is very appropriate in science, but which destroys ideas that are only meant to be useful places to look and think from.

I don't NEED my philosophy to be "true" in the sense of "provable in a double-blind placebo-controlled study, peer reviewed in all the leading journals". It's PHILOSOPHY. It's chosen and proven by personal experience, nothing more or less.

This story reminded me of the old Star Trek episode where the new crystalline life forms they found referred to the evil humans as "mostly bags of water". :)

I couldn't sit throught the whole movie. As someone who has made hundreds of scientific presentations throughout my scholastic career, I was waiting, and waiting, and waiting for them to bridge the gap between the science they were talking about, and the new age mystisism. They never made that connection. The pictures of ice are really quite simple. Some are of snow flakes (the positive emotions), and some are not of snow flakes (the not so positive emotions). I find that there is more information to support new age science like group subconscious than this type of thing.

Sorry.

i guess i was really duped. a friend of mine bought the movie, and i trust his judgement to a certain extent, so i borrowed it and watched it. i did get the impression that the parts where "scientists" were interviewed were cut for content, and some of the different people had completely different views from the other people featured, but i kinda thought it was fascinating. now that i've read this article, i kinda understand it more. i went to that ramtha site and i'm definitely not spending my time on the sequel. blech!