Failed Experiments · Chemistry

Polywater: The New Form of Water That Almost Ate the World

For a few years around 1970, some very serious scientists worried that a single drop of a strange new liquid could turn every ocean on Earth into syrup. The liquid was called polywater — water that supposedly refused to freeze until −40 °C, boiled past 150 °C, and oozed like jelly. It was real enough to spark a Cold War panic, real enough to make headlines, and, in the end, real enough to teach chemistry an unforgettable lesson. Because polywater did not exist. It never had.

· 5 min read · Filed under Chemistry

Polywater: The New Form of Water That Almost Ate the World

What happened?

In 1961, a Soviet chemist named Nikolai Fedyakin, working at the Technological Institute in Kostroma, Russia, was doing something tedious: squeezing water into hair-thin quartz tubes and watching what it did. Inside those capillaries, the water started behaving wrongly. It was thicker, more reluctant to freeze, and slower to boil than any water should be.

The work caught the eye of Boris Derjaguin, a heavyweight of Soviet surface chemistry who ran a laboratory at the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Moscow. Derjaguin refined Fedyakin’s method and produced the odd liquid faster — though still only in tiny, precious amounts. His measurements were startling: a freezing point of −40 °C or lower, a boiling point above 150 °C, a density around 1.1 to 1.2 grams per cubic centimeter, and a viscosity closer to syrup than to water. He called it “anomalous water.”

For years, almost nobody in the West noticed. The results sat in Soviet journals and brief English abstracts. Then, in 1966, Derjaguin presented his findings in person at a Faraday Society discussion meeting in Nottingham, England. This time, Western scientists listened. British labs began chasing the effect, and by 1968 American researchers had joined in. Someone coined a catchier name for the stuff: polywater, short for polymerized water — the idea being that water molecules had linked into long chains, like a plastic.

By 1969 the story leapt from journals into newspapers and magazines, and into geopolitics. With memories of the “missile gap” and “bomber gap” still fresh, the press began warning of a “polywater gap” with the Soviet Union, and the Pentagon reportedly took an interest. In June 1969 the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on U.S. efforts to catch up. Laboratories around the world poured resources into making and explaining a substance that, all told, existed in quantities you could barely see.

Why was it strange?

The strangeness ran deeper than the syrupy liquid itself. Some scientists proposed that polywater was a more stable arrangement of water molecules than ordinary water. That sounds harmless until you follow the logic: if polywater were truly more stable, then ordinary water should want to become polywater. A few researchers speculated that polywater, on contact with normal water, might convert it — a chain reaction that could, in principle, creep through the world’s water supply. It was the real-life echo of “ice-nine,” the doomsday substance in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, which freezes all the water it touches.

This is what makes polywater a textbook case of what physicist Irving Langmuir had earlier called “pathological science” — science where smart, honest people fool themselves. The effect was faint and barely reproducible. Some labs saw it, some didn’t. The believers kept explaining away the failures and refining their theories rather than questioning whether there was anything to explain at all.

What did scientists learn?

The unraveling came from people who took contamination seriously. At Bell Labs, Denis Rousseau and Sergio Porto ran infrared spectrum analysis on polywater samples and found they weren’t a new molecule at all — the spectra matched ordinary water laced with sodium and chlorine and other gunk. They published their verdict in Science in 1970 under a pointed title: “Polywater: Polymer or Artifact?”

Rousseau then delivered the most human disproof in the history of physical chemistry. After a handball game, he analyzed his own sweat and found it had nearly the same “anomalous” properties attributed to polywater. The lesson was blunt: the magic liquid was just water with biological impurities in it. Tiny tubes are tremendously good at concentrating whatever dirt, salts, silica, or grease they contain, and those impurities shift water’s freezing and boiling points and thicken it up — exactly the effects everyone had been marveling at.

When the original experiments were repeated with scrupulously cleaned glassware, the anomalies simply vanished. There was nothing left to study. To their great credit, even the substance’s champions conceded. In August 1973, Derjaguin and his colleague N. V. Churaev published a letter in Nature stating plainly that the anomalous properties “should be attributed to impurities rather than to the existence of polymeric water molecules.” Polywater was dead.

How does it affect us today?

Polywater never gave us a product, but it gave science something arguably more valuable: a clean, almost perfect cautionary tale. It is now taught alongside cold fusion and N-rays as a model of how a research community can chase an illusion — not through fraud, but through wishful interpretation, weak controls, and the pull of an exciting result. The episode hardened standards around contamination control and independent replication, and it remains a favorite teaching example for why extraordinary claims demand extraordinary cleanliness in the lab. Every time a researcher pauses to ask “could this just be dirt?” before announcing a breakthrough, polywater is quietly doing its job.

Fun fact

Richard Feynman skewered the whole affair with a thought experiment: if polywater really were a more stable, lower-energy form of water, then somewhere out in nature there ought to be an animal that drinks ordinary water, excretes polywater, and lives off the energy released in between. No such creature exists — which was a tidy hint that polywater didn’t either.

Sources

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