- You, my love, are the most crystal clear molecules
of hydrogen and oxygen I've ever seen.
(upbeat techno music)
Yeah, I was trying to woo my water.
That's because there's an idea out there
that our actual thoughts projected on water molecules
can affect them positively or negatively.
This is an idea from Dr. Masaru Emoto,
who had a bunch of experiments
on the cellular structure of water.
And this became widely known in the film
What The Bleep Do We Know?
In his studies, Emoto filled 100 Petri dishes with water,
and doused them with either good vibes
or really bad vibes.
Then he froze the Petri dishes
and looked at them under a microscope.
He reported that the ice crystals
that had a bunch of positive thoughts
were much more aesthetically pleasing
and symmetrical and kind of have these snowflake structures.
But the ones that had really bummer thoughts,
they were jagged, asymmetrical and dull looking.
Amazing, right, proof that mere thoughts
could transform the physical world?
Well, except that no scientist
could reproduce Emoto's results.
First off, Emoto's experiments
weren't considered very rigorous,
they lacked basic scientific controls.
Second, contaminants can easily change
the structures of ice crystals,
and third, the formation of ice crystals
can really vary widely depending on
the cooling rate of the water.
But hey, why would we exalt water to the mystical realm
in the first place?
Our ideas about water and cleanliness
have undergone quite a change over the centuries.
Not only is access to clean water a relatively new thing
in human history,
but that we should obssessively cleanse ourselves with it
is a really modern concept, too.
According to Seven Johnson in his book
How We Got to Now, Six Innovations That Changed the World,
as a child, Louis the XIII of France
was not bathed once until he was seven years old.
This is how people rolled in the 1600s.
Even if they were royalty
and they had a couple of servants to bathe them,
they were like, "Nah, I'm good."
That is until we humans began to associate
morality with hardcore cleanliness.
Oh, and we had a plumbing infrastructure
free of diseased water to plunge ourselves into,
that is key.
Fast forward to today,
and you see that the humble liquid is being bottled
and distributed with claims of magical vitamin properties.
Providence becomes a really big deal, too.
You never see water bottles
claiming that they came from some murky lake.
No, the water came up from on high,
gathered at a glacial spring,
never having to soil itself
with a descent down the mountain
to where mere mortals dwell.
But the truth is that water,
no matter where it hails from,
has at some point made contact
with trace amounts of poo.
Think of all the species that ever existed
in the entire history of the world,
and the millions of tons of dinosaur poo
produced every single day
during the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
That, as well as leaf litter,
decomposing animals and insects,
make up a good amount of the layers of soil.
And a river runs through that soil.
The water you get from your faucet,
well, it comes from two different places.
Lakes are rivers, that's surface water,
or from wells, that's ground water
collected in aquifers.
It gets treated and then put into the potable water supply.
In fact, some areas use recycled waste water.
That's right, water from the poopy tubes
of the sewer systems.
It's cleaned, it's treated,
and then it's used as tap water.
Which is great, right, especially in drought stricken areas,
except that some people cannot get over the whole
toilet to tap thing,
or what we call the yuck factor.
Regardless of whether or not
we're making mental love to our water,
or if we're screaming at it,
or if we just can't get our minds around the fact
that the next drop of water
may have once tangled with a little bit of fecal matter,
there remains an unsung hero of the water world,
and his name is John Leal.
In Steven Johnson's book
and PBS series How We Got to Now,
he points out that we owe our clean drinking water
to physician John Leal,
who surreptitiously tested his theory
that chlorine could make water safe to drink
by then adding it to Jersey City's water supply
in the early 1900s.
In doing so, he cut the infant and child mortality rate
in half over a 30 year period,
not to mention making public swimming pools a reality
and the "Everybody out of the pool,
"we have an AFR alert,"
an accidental fecal release,
which kind of brings it all full circle.
Hey, all you lifeguards and former lifeguards out there,
let us know about your AFR incidents
in the comments below,
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