SKEPTICAL INQUIRER November / December 2007 49

Masaru Emoto’s Wonderful World of Water

It can read, listen to music, look at pictures, hear your thoughts, heal you, and create world peace.

HARRIET HALL

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The folks in my community have beenarguing about fluoride again. A nutri-tionist wrote in the local newspaper

that fluoride is a deadly poison and that itdoesn’t reduce tooth decay. She recommendedavoiding it entirely, even to the extent of buy-ing nonfluoride toothpaste. I responded witha calmly reasoned guest column trying to sep-arate the scientific facts from policies andopinions. The scientific facts are not open todebate: fluoride in optimum amounts reducestooth decay; too much fluoride can be harm-ful. The public policy question is open toopinion and debate: should we add fluoride tothe water or protect our children from toothdecay by other means?

I know that at least one person read my guest column,because there was a letter to the editor in the following issue ofthe paper. It was written by a very confused woman whosigned herself “Reverend.” She disregarded my argumentsabout the effectiveness of fluoride and the advisability of sep-arating facts from opinions, and she fixated on one thing: heropinion that adding anything to our water is wrong. She’s cer-tainly welcome to her opinion, but she based that opinion onpseudoscientific nonsense that she confused with scientifictruth. She wrote:

I am saddened that Harriet Hall is not aware of the latest sci-entific research by Dr. Masaru Emoto. In his two books, TheTrue Power of Water and The Hidden Power of Water hedescribes the healing capabilities of non-toxic water (chemicalfree). Our country is too toxic from pollution, food, thoughtsand water we drink. . . . I suggest people go to Dr. Emoto’s lec-ture . . . and see the slides of microscope samples of the toxic,repulsive water crystals compared to those of pure untaintedwater. Or, see the movie What the Bleep Do We Know now onDVD, which shows slides of the difference in their molecularstructure. Which would you want to drink?

I wrote back that she was wrong that I wasn’t aware of Dr.Emoto’s “research.”

His newest book, Hidden Messages in Water holds a place ofhonor on my bookshelves as the worst book I have ever read.It is about as scientific as Alice in Wonderland. Emoto took pic-tures of snowflakes and “observed” that clean water made pret-tier crystals.

A [real] scientist would have checked to see if he got thesame results if he didn’t know beforehand which water wasclean. Emoto never bothered with even this most elementarydouble-check. He didn’t consult real scientists. Had he doneso, they could have told him that these snowflake crystals, justlike raindrops, form around a core of dust, so actually thecleaner water is less likely to form them. Their beauty varieswith the temperature and conditions of formation, not withthe purity of the water. The idea that snowflakes could showanything about differences in the “molecular structure” ofwater is incompatible with basic physics.

Emoto’s popularity is a sad commentary on the scientificilliteracy of our society. His work is a morass of factual errors,misconceptions, misinterpretations, metaphors, and meaning-less assertions. He writes in the language of magical thinkingand superstition, not of science.

Most serious scientists find Emoto’s delusions too silly to evenacknowledge, but one retired chemistry professor has taken thetime to debunk water cluster pseudoscience and Emoto’s“research” on his Web site: www.chem1.com/CQ/clusqk.html.

I didn’t mention that I saw the What the Bleep movie and didn’tfind it particularly convincing as a scientific document. Itscredits list the 35,000-year-old warrior Ramtha “as channeledby J.Z. Knight.”

Remember talking to plants? Emoto talks to water. Heclaims that if you say nice things, the water makes pretty crys-tals, and if you say mean things, it just makes amorphousglobs. You don’t even have to talk out loud, because water canread. Humans have to be taught to read, but water issmarter—it already knows how. If you place labels with“Thank you” or “You idiot!” on containers of water, the waterwill respond by making pretty or ugly snowflakes.

Water can not only read, it can look at pictures: a pictureof a tree resulted in “a large crystal that seems to be teemingwith life,” while a picture of autumn leaves created a “crystalthat appears to be formed by leaves before they have fallenfrom the trees.” The one I liked best was a crystal from waterexposed to the word “war” two months before September 11,2001. He says it looks “almost as if a jet plane crashed into it.”

Emoto talks to plants too. The What the Bleep movie describesan experiment where cooked rice rotted faster if labeled with neg-ative words. Most experiments are published somewhere. Ilooked for this one in vain. I finally realized that he was onlyreporting what children had done informally in a private homeand reported to him by mail. He “verified” the findings by sug-gesting to other devotees that they try the same experiment, andsome of them reported that it worked for them, too.

A real scientist would ask questions such as: How manypeople tried the experiment, failed, and didn’t report to him?Were the rice samples kept under exactly the same conditions?Did the experimenters treat the samples with “good” wordsany differently, for instance by picking them up more often tocheck them, or breathing on them? Did anyone try it withdouble blinding so the observers wouldn’t be aware of whichsamples had which labels? Was an endpoint predetermined, ordid the observers just subjectively decide which rotted faster?Was any statistical analysis done to rule out “noise” and theeffects of chance? Emoto doesn’t ask such questions; he justmarvels about the reports.

Harriet Hall, also known as the SkepDoc, is a retired physicianwho lives in Puyallup, Washington, and writes about alternativemedicine and pseudoscience. This is her sixth article for theSKEPTICAL INQUIRER. Her e-mail is harriet.hall@comcast.net.

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In another example, he unquestioningly accepted theresults of an experiment with a sample size of only two. A girlgrew two sunflower plants, one labeled “fool,” whose growthwas stunted, and one not labeled. Emoto would like us tobelieve that obviously the stunted plant was reading the label,because otherwise there’s no conceivable reason why one plantmight grow better than another.

Water likes to listen to music, too: when one sample lis-tened to “a mournful melody,” it supposedly formed differentcrystals than water exposed to a song by the musician Enya.The Enya water produced a crystal that was “pure, innocent,and white, just like her voice.” All snowflakes are white, andvoices aren’t white—unless you suffer from synesthesia. Andhow could you possibly determine the “innocence” of a crys-tal? He sees things in crystals like “a brilliant healing effect”and “overflowing love.” He has a great imagination, but anindependent observer would have a hard time matching thephotos to his descriptions.

He has what he calls a “hado” machine. According toEmoto, everything emits hado. He tests patients with his hadomachine, and if they are too ill to leave their bed, he prints outthe person’s name and tests the printed slip or their photo-graph. Then he infuses water with hado to counteract their ill-ness. He brilliantly rehashes the unfounded claims of “energymedicine” and employs a new version of the quack electrodi-agnostic machines that have been fooling patients for decades.

He explains how everything in the universe vibrates, and hismachine detects those vibrations. He knows a doctor who col-lected blood samples from patients, kept them for years, and wasable to diagnose the patients’ current illnesses because the vibra-tions in the old blood samples changed as the condition of theirbodies changed. He knows of people who can sense from thevibrations of a photograph whether the person is alive or dead.He fails to explain, however, why these talented people have notapplied for (and won) James Randi’s million dollar challenge.

Apparently Emoto has been challenged for not being scien-tific, so in one of his latest books, The Secret Life of Water, headmits, “Photographing crystals is a subjective science.” Didyou know there was such a thing as a subjective science? Hesays, “The methods employed to photograph water crystalsmight not pass everyone’s definition of being scientific, andthere is a degree of uncertainty involved. In fact, there is muchabout the world of hado that is murky and that cannot beexplained by the black-and-white standards of statistical analy-sis. But when you think about it, all any scientist can do any-way is lift up one small corner of the veil that covers the truthof this world and then try to express it with words that thegeneral population can stretch their minds around.” He com-pares the uncertainty of subjectively choosing when to snapthe pictures of snowflakes to that of Heisenberg’s uncertaintyprinciple in quantum mechanics. He thinks that “water changesits form completely depending on the person doing theobserving” and whether the observer’s heart is filled with ap-preciation or anger.

He classifies the crystals into eight ill-defined categoriesthat he apparently made up. In his analysis of crystals from

water from the Honmyo River, he found this distribution:

Beautiful: 2Rather beautiful: 4Hexagonal pattern: 0Radial pattern: 8Lattice pattern: 8Indefinite pattern: 29Collapsed pattern: 3No crystal formation: 0

In this case, he chose a beautiful crystal to represent the sam-ple, because although there were only two beautiful crystalsout of fifty, there were others that were in the process or hadthe potential to make beautiful crystals. Eminently rational,don’t you think? By this kind of reasoning, if an antibiotic onlycured two cases of pneumonia out of fifty, we could give itcredit for being in the process or having the potential to cureother cases. The drug companies would love that.

He says tap water with chlorine doesn’t usually form crys-tals, but when Emoto had five hundred people pray for a jar oftap water on his desk, he claims it formed beautiful crystals.He would have us believe that prayer and feelings of love workinstantaneously at any distance, that water has ESP and cantell which feelings are directed to it, and that prayer changesthe appearance of the crystals. Of course, he admits that the crystals are constantly changing anyway, and he has toarbitrarily choose a point to photograph them. With his

Masaru Emoto. (Notimex/foto/Guillermo Granados/GGV/POL/) [Photo viaNewscom]

MASARU EMOTO’S WONDERFUL WORLD OF WATERContinued on page 69

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