{"id":27,"date":"2008-11-25T14:34:23","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T01:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2008\/11\/25\/water_water_everywhere\/"},"modified":"2008-11-25T14:34:23","modified_gmt":"2008-11-25T01:34:23","slug":"water-water-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2008\/11\/25\/water-water-everywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Water, water everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday a very politely written letter arrived at the department, addressed to the physicists. I was curious as to what it was, and read it carefully all the way to the word ‘homeopathy’, at which time I began preparing a space for it in the ‘cranky letter’ folder of my filing cabinet. I will spare you the details of the ‘discovery’, but it concerned the physical reason why rainwater was safe to drink, and water-from-the-tap wasn’t. The letter was even kind enough to suggest some experiments that my department could carry out to validate this discovery. <\/p>\n

Many ‘discoveries’ of this nature turn up from not doing properly repeatable, controlled experiments. The orignal ‘discovery’ of Cold fusion<\/a> in 1989 springs to mind. While I am quite willing to believe that this particular person ‘recovered’ from an illness after switching to rainwater for a drinking supply, I suspect that this had little to do with it. An experiment done once, with a sample size of one, doesn’t make me down tools and rush off to investigate it, however revolutionary it might be.<\/p>\n

Finally, my correspondent would probably be horrified to read of the link between rain and autism<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday a very politely written letter arrived at the department, addressed to the physicists. I was curious as to what it was, and read it carefully all the way to the word ‘homeopathy’, at which time I began preparing a space for it in the ‘cranky letter’ folder of my filing cabinet. I will spare you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6],"yoast_head":"\nWater, water everywhere : Physics Stop<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/physicsstop\/2008\/11\/25\/water-water-everywhere\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Water, water everywhere : Physics Stop\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Yesterday a very politely written letter arrived at the department, addressed to the physicists. 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