It is always useful to begin a text with a quotation from a famous scientist. One may then hope that some of that person’s authority will be projected onto one’s own work by an uncritical reader. That thought came to my mind when reading the 2003 Die Zeit article “Kann Wasser denken?” (“Can Water Think?”), which opened with a quotation attributed to Newton about what we know being a drop and what we do not know an ocean.
The article reported on engineer Bernd H. Kröplin’s exhibition Welt im Tropfen (“World in a Drop”) at Berlin’s Urania. Kröplin was associated with claims that water possesses extraordinary properties: that it can store information, react to human emotions or even communicate with other liquids.
The authors acknowledged that such ideas could easily be dismissed as esotericism, but the discussion also leaned on Kröplin’s established academic status and previous scientific distinction. This is precisely where a danger lies: a person’s genuine achievements in one field do not automatically validate extraordinary claims in another. Reputation may justify attention; it does not replace evidence.
A literary quotation from D. H. Lawrence about water being more than simply H2O added atmosphere, but poetry is not experimental confirmation.
The “memory of water”
The article at least considered whether this might be a German counterpart to the Benveniste affair. In 1988, immunologist Jacques Benveniste reported results in Nature that were interpreted as evidence for a kind of “memory of water”. The extraordinary claim did not survive as established scientific evidence.
This matters because homeopathy is often defended through ideas of this kind. If water really stored highly specific information in the required way, that would appear to offer a mechanism for extreme dilutions. But the desire for such a mechanism is not evidence that the mechanism exists. See also my article on homeopathy.
From speculation to esoteric commerce
The Zeit article was attractive enough to esoteric retailers that passages circulated online, sometimes with little care for quotation marks or attribution. That is another feature of pseudoscientific ecosystems: a cautiously framed report can be detached from its qualifications and reused as apparent endorsement.
In 2004 a book titled Die Heilkraft des Wassers (“The Healing Power of Water”) appeared by Jürgen Fliege and Masaru Emoto. In such narratives, water is said to heal people, the Earth and human relationships, to store messages and feelings, and even to react to words written on bottles.
My original text responded with deliberate satire. If water could read labels such as “Christianity”, “Hinduism” or “Judaism” and form correspondingly meaningful crystals, perhaps a new teaching method would follow: because the human body contains so much water, one might simply write “medicine” on a medical student’s back and wait for the internal water to remember the curriculum. A dissertation could follow at once — perhaps not in evidence-based medicine, but after enough intellectual dilution it might qualify for homeopathy.
The critical point
The issue is not that science already knows everything about water. It does not. The issue is the leap from “there are unanswered questions” to “therefore this particular extraordinary story may be true.” Ignorance is not positive evidence for a preferred claim.
Scientific language, academic titles, beautiful microscope images and philosophical quotations can make a story appear profound. They cannot substitute for controlled experiments, independent replication and a mechanism compatible with the total body of evidence — or, when a mechanism is unknown, at least a robust reproducible effect.