Water - the Great Mystery and Homeopathics uncovered

As I recently stayed a couple of weeks in India, I was approached by a friend who learned that I was a Neuroscientist and so was very keen to share his view on Memory and tried to squeeze as much information out of me as possible. First of all, it is always great to see people interested in that kind of thing, unfortunately you don't see that too often. On the other hand, he introduced me to the "documentary" "Water - the Great Mystery", which had a lasting impression on him. Well, what can I say, after he introduced me to it, and showed me the one and a half our long video, I was also impressed, but to say the least, not that positively.  So, as I dedicate this blog post to him and will thus break with the tradition of German-only blog posts (I might write a translation later on).

As there is a lot to discuss, I will break that topic into a small series of blog posts (Part I, Part II, Part III). In the first part I will introduce the roots of the main theme (The memory of water), which is an astonishing story and could fill books by itself, and I will cover homeopathics in general. The second part, will deal with the people presented and the third one will discuss the main claims and experiments of the documentary. But first of all, here is the link for the Video - have a look and decide yourself.

There is already a very good blog entry on that issue by the skepticdetective which I invite people to read, but my aim is to dig a bit deeper and cover a bit more if possible.

Just some background on the documentary itself before we start: The documentary is produced by VOICE entertainment which is founded by Jim Law and David Sereda. The latter is a self-proclaimed expert on, as it seems everything, who has been on US media for quite a while. Lately, he asked his followers to sign a petition that NASA sends him into space. Well that is certainly one cheap way getting into space. On the plus side he is actively supporting a greener planet. The documentary is quite impressively crafted and I can easily see why it would have a lasting impression on people following Ayurveda or similar beliefs. The documentarys delivery system, to convince the viewer, works mainly via two well known aspects:

• selling personal opinions as scientific facts (as many media formats)
• presenting "pseudo-scientists" as a scientific authority 

Of course there are several more e.g. several times non-scientific experiments are presented as the real deal, old fairytale stories and myths are used to support unfounded claims and even the clericy is summoned to support their notions. ..continue to see part I