This article explores the power of positive language through Masaru Emoto’s “Water Knows the Answer” experiment and Young Don PD’s x-Files experiment, and discusses the controversy in the scientific community surrounding them and the boundaries between pseudoscience and science. He explains the definition of science and paradigm shifts through the perspective of philosophers of science, emphasizing that pseudoscience should be approached with an open mind and not rejected outright.
In Korea, PD Lee Young-don’s x-files recently aired a program about the power of words, including the bread experiment and the bean sprout experiment. The experiment showed the difference between the effect of positive and negative words on the subject, but it was the book “Water Knows the Answer (Masaru Emoto)” that first started me thinking about the effect of positive words and writing. Masaru Emoto wrote various positive and negative words on beakers of water and then took pictures of water crystals, and the results showed that the positive words resulted in more beautiful water crystals. However, as soon as the book arrived in Korea, it was criticized as a “beautiful and touching essay” on one side and a “pseudoscience book full of crappy photos and logical leaps” on the other. In 2010, a student journalist at a university newspaper asked, “Why are scientists silent when such pseudoscience books are popular among readers?” and KAIST brain science professor Jung Jae-seung wrote a column in the Hankyoreh newspaper entitled “The Ecstatic Fraud of the Scientific World. Currently, Wikipedia and Naver Encyclopedia introduce the book as the first example of pseudoscience.
In addition, “Water Knows the Answer” provided an opportunity to reflect on the impact of positive language on our lives. This is not just a scientific experiment, but also an important lesson for the way we talk and relate to each other in society. In the modern world, people are exposed to a lot of stress and negative emotions, which can have a significant impact on our mental and physical health. Therefore, it is important to practice positive language and thinking in our lives.
To start with, I would like to comment on the scientific community’s lukewarm view of the experiments conducted in Water Has the Answer and similar experiments (such as the rice experiment, the bean sprout experiment, etc.). I believe that experimental results should not be discredited, even if they are pseudoscience. I would like to ask you about the article titled “Water Doesn’t Know the Answer” that has been circulating on the internet criticizing Water Has the Answer. Does water really not know the answer?
The first thing I would like to point out is the results of many people’s experiments. Masaru Emoto’s main experiment, which involved photographing water crystals, is difficult to reproduce by ordinary people due to equipment limitations. However, the “rice experiment,” which involves writing positive and negative words about rice instead of water and observing the changes in the rice, is an experiment that anyone can easily perform. Although there is no professional academic data yet, many people have obtained the results of the experiment, which showed that when positive words were written, yeast molds that are beneficial to us bloomed, and when negative words were written, penicillium that can cause allergic reactions to the respiratory tract and eyes were found. In addition to the aforementioned experiment aired on Lee Young-don’s Food X-Files, if you search for ‘rice experiment’ on Naver, you can see the results of many people’s home experiments, including elementary school students and housewives. The problem with pseudoscience is that it is used plausibly for its own purposes. Should even the results of elementary school students’ experiments, which do not have any purpose, be considered pseudoscience?
The second is that different philosophers of science have different definitions of science. If we want to know the definition of ‘science’ that we are referring to when we say ‘pseudoscience’ or ‘unscientific’, we should look at the history of philosophy of science in the 20th century. We will focus on the views of four representative 20th-century philosophers of science, introduced in a column titled “Should Creationism be Taught in Science Class?” by Professor Daeik Jang on Naver Cast. The four philosophers of science are Karl R. Popper, Thomas S. Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Fryerabend. Popper saw constant criticism as the heart of science and the source of its objectivity and rationality. Kuhn, however, in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), presents a very different view of the nature of science. By analyzing the actual history of science and the actual activities of scientists, he concluded that science is both a critical and a conformist activity. Kuhn, on the other hand, unlike Popper, saw science as a theory-based activity rather than a theory-testing activity. This dogma-like role in science is what he called a “paradigm. Lacatoche calls science only those theories that have the potential to predict new facts as the surrounding hypotheses are revised in response to counterexamples. These different definitions of science mean that astrology, which is currently listed as a second example of a pseudoscience on Wikipedia, can be either a pseudoscience or a science, depending on the philosopher of science’s perspective. For example, for Karl Popper, astrology is a pseudoscience because it is not disprovable, but for Paul Fireavant, astrology is also a science. When we talk about pseudoscience, the criteria are ambiguous.
The third is paradigm. In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argued that paradigms change as the means of solving the scientific problems of a society in a given time and space evolve. He suggests that pseudoscience can be defined as “the inability of a dominant paradigm to provide the explanations within the dominant science that the paradigm demands.” By the very nature of paradigms, they change over time, meaning that pseudoscience becomes science and science becomes pseudoscience depending on the time, space, and social climate in which the public is receptive to the theory. Sometimes what is now accepted as pseudoscience was once science, and sometimes what was once pseudoscience is now accepted as science. No one can be sure which theories will become science in the future. For example, Copernicus’ theories could have been categorized as pseudoscience if the scientific method had existed in medieval Europe. There was no way to directly confirm that the Earth revolved around the sun. However, it wasn’t long before evidence was found, and Copernicus’ theory was accepted. What we now call pseudoscience is also a candidate to become science in the future.
These discussions provide insight into how science is not just a set of facts, but how their interpretation and acceptance changes. We should always recognize that the scientific facts we believe are not absolute truths and are subject to change based on social and cultural contexts, so the distinction between pseudoscience and science is important because there is a risk that scientific facts can be misused to serve a particular purpose, such as religiously. However, when we consider that pseudoscience is something that many people have come to the same conclusions about, and that the distinction between pseudoscience and science is fuzzy and can change over time, we should be more wise to embrace pseudoscience. It would be a disservice to the scientific community to label and bury experiments with sufficient data as pseudoscience just because one person misused them for personal gain. We shouldn’t bury experimental results that “water knows the answer” either.
Finally, it is important to keep an open mind when we distinguish between science and pseudoscience. Science is not static, it is constantly evolving and changing based on new discoveries and experimental results. Therefore, rather than completely rejecting something based on current standards, we need to be open to new possibilities and approach it critically. This will promote the development of scientific thinking and allow for better understanding.
