The Strange World of Water
The unleashed power of the great wave in Hokusai’s (1760–1849) Mount Fuji Seen Below a Wave at Kanagawa is depicted as foamy paws ready to hit tiny mariners, serving as a reminder that we live in a world almost completely aquatic. The snow-capped mountain is nothing compared with the disturbing sea. Three-to-one is the proportion of water to earth on the planet: three-quarters water and one-quarter earth. The human body is also three-quarters water: our body and our planet are governed by water. Water is everywhere, not only in the sea, in the rivers, in the lakes, or in the clouds, but also in the air as vapor, in our breath, and on the surface of any physical surface, even if it may appear dry.
According to Thales, one of the first Greek physicists and philosophers, water is 
, the basic cause of things; everything is born and derived from it. Mysterious, humble, and powerful, water has played primary roles in the history of humanity. In 1781, British scientist Henry Cavendish understood that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. However, it has only been known since the beginning of the last century that water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The two hydrogen atoms are 0.95 Å (angström)*15 away from the oxygen atom, and together form an angle close to 105°, thus the molecules of water take the shape of a letter V (fig. 3.1).
Figure 3.1. Structure of a water molecule; magnet dipole
The structure of the water molecule can be likened to a magnet, with the two hydrogen atoms positively charged and the oxygen negatively charged. This allows water molecules to interact with each other, establishing an attraction known as a hydrogen bond between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms of different molecules. In one drop of water, there are billions of these bonds. Such relationships between molecules are called “interactions at a short range” and are responsible for the network-like structure of water.
Brian Josephson, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973 and professor at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, writes:
Scientists have little knowledge on the topic of water and they tend to have a naive vision: liquid composed of H2O molecules more or less isolated in movement. In reality, water as a phenomenon is a lot more complex, with single molecules grouped temporarily to form a lattice structure. It is not at all surprising that these molecules can interact, thus giving rise to a mechanism that allows water to have memory, although the existence of such a mechanism only rings true to well-informed scientists who don’t underestimate the possibility of its existence.1
The most interesting property of water is that it is able to retain information it receives. Let’s try to understand how this is possible. If the network phenomenon is true for water and ice, it is not so for water vapor, where every molecule moves on its own: evaporation dissolves the hydrogen bonds between molecules. While on the one hand water molecules are attracted to one another because of their charged status, on the other hand they move away on their own; they cannot stand still. A stretch of still water may appear to be motionless, but this is not so. Its surface is in constant turmoil due to microscopic movements, known as Brownian motion, which increase with temperature. Water moves because its molecules oscillate at certain frequencies.
If we imagine ourselves as a tiny atom and we dive into a glass of water, what would we see? Among the many molecules (huge now to our eyes), gigantic icebergs made of dense water would appear. They are called clusters, very big masses of water molecules. Thus, water can exist in two phases, one at a higher density and one at a lower one: “more solid” water and “more liquid” water.2 The clusters are linked together through “knots or nodes” (hydromagnetic junctions of a fluid crystal type), which make them similar to crystals, and indeed water can behave like a liquid crystal.*16 This helps to explain some unusual properties of water.
Water is an important solvent because the magnetic structure of the atoms dissolves the negative and positive polarity of the solute, for example a salt, which turns into ions, molecules missing some electrons. The ions are “solvated,” that is, the water molecules surround them completely, like a blanket over an infant. The two types of molecules, solute and solvent, interact and reorganize the structure of water. The water is the same from a chemical point of view—H2O—but from a chemical-physical perspective it has different properties: its molecules are arranged in a different way than before, due to received information that is retained. When you dissolve something in water, water molecules group together (with networks of hydrogen bonds), guided in a way that is imposed by the solute. When you pour sugar into a cup of tea, water molecules arrange themselves in a way to accommodate the sugar, and this arrangement is specific for sugar. Another arrangement will be made for salt (provided you like salty tea), and so on. In other words, what is dissolved is what determines the reorganized structure of the water.*17 Now, let’s tackle a question that has been debated for many years: is there only water in homeopathic remedies or something more? Do they have a physical basis, indicating that we should consider them as drugs?
The Enigma of Water
At the end of the eighteenth century the first homeopathic remedies started to appear, made by Samuel Hahnemann. He didn’t have tools or machinery of any kind; he had only dilution substances, water, and alcohol to mix in glass bottles, as was customary among German doctors in the country at that time. Like an alchemist of the past, he prepared tinctures, with plant materials, animal organisms, or minerals dissolved in alcohol, then diluted them with water in successive steps, each time shaking the mixture a hundred times. Such shaking is termed succussion or dynamization. Without it the preparation is only a diluted substance, not a homeopathic remedy. According to Hahnemann, homeopathic preparations must be dynamized against “a rigid but elastic surface, such as the leather cover of a book.”3
In homeopathy dilutions are most often used in a ratio of 1:100 or 1:10, then in centesimal or in decimal sequences. Starting from a liquid tincture diluted to 1 percent in weight or in volume, after succussion it becomes the first centesimal Hahnemannian (1 CH), adding 99 percent of water and again succussion, then it becomes the second centesimal (2 CH), and the process continues until the desired dilution is obtained. At the third centesimal, the solute concentration is a few parts per million, meaning that the solution is almost entirely water and the pharmacological effect of those few molecules of a substance is zero. After the twelfth centesimal the absence of solute is total, and there is no trace of the dissolved substance. The few molecules present in homeopathic preparations after the 3 CH are not sufficient to act pharmacologically: the introduced substance remains only a “memory.” Even though from a chemical point of view the remedies are only made of water, the therapeutic effects of the homeopathic remedies seem to relate to specific configurations of water molecules. To better understand this we need to shift our thinking and reasoning from a chemistry bias to a physics bias; this is the stumbling block for those who negate the efficacy of homeopathic dilutions.
There are two different angles from which to tackle the problematic issue of homeopathy: clinical and physical. I don’t mean clinical efficacy, which may depend on factors not fully controllable (starting with the experience of the physician). What is relevant here is the physical aspect, understanding whether after homeopathic dilution water is truly different, having gained therapeutically powerful information. Let’s examine the theories proposed so far and the chemical and physical data that support them.
Chemical Molecular Hypotheses
The Greek physicist George Anagnostatos formulated the first model in 1988 (clusters theory). In it, water molecules wrap around the dissolved substance like a cast. When the solute is progressively eliminated (through further dilutions), the water molecules eventually collapse, filling the space left empty by the solute molecule. This leaves a mold made of water, which is the copy of the lost molecule of the entirely diluted substance. This is like the process of casting a bronze statue, in which first a model is made of another material such as wax (the molecule dissolved in water), then it is wrapped in plaster, which becomes the “negative” of the statue (the mold of water molecules). The wax is then removed so that molten bronze can be poured into the mold to obtain the bronze statue (the mold collapses, becoming a copy of the substance that had been dissolved and taken away).
Water with such a changed structure attracts other molecules to form new casts, which, upon further dilution, become empty niches and then collapse again immediately. The phenomenon continues to multiply until it involves other molecules. Once the original solute molecule has been copied, the mechanism is started, and the water continues to multiply copies. According to Anagnostatos, the physical structure of water is gradually changed until it ultimately completely takes on the spatial configuration of the diluted substance.4 The altered configuration remains even when the solute is completely eliminated, and indeed it is this absence that enables the process to take place.
In 1996, Israeli doctor Dorit Arad observed complex molecules dissolved in water via radioisotope marking.*18 He discovered that the water casts around dissolved molecules were selective and specific to a substance’s most active site (which is the portion of the molecule that has the greatest pharmacological effects). This means that the water molecules are perhaps attracted by differences in potentiality in the active site. The water builds its models only on this part of the molecule, not on those that are of minor pharmacological importance.5 This seems to suggest that for a complex molecule, the water is able to select the most useful parts, from an informational point of view. The memorization within the water would then selectively happen under the guidance of a regulating system intrinsic to the water itself.
Chinese researcher S. Y. Lo proposed a different model. In his model, in very high dilutions the ions present in water generate an electrical field by their movement; this in turn produces aggregates that are stable in water. For this to happen they must occur at speeds much faster than that which destroys them.6 It is possible to increase the number and the dimensions of the aggregates by simply shaking the solution (succussion). Proof of their existence was derived by measuring the transmittance of ultraviolet light.7 S. Y. Lo had noticed in 1996 that in homeopathic dilutions the absorbance of ultraviolet light is reduced.8 He thinks that the movements of the aggregates of water molecules, which are tiny magnets, are responsible for the so-called memory of water. Further confirmations came from the electronic microscope, which showed aggregates of water molecules in the form of small sticks.
Unexpected Coup in the Nightclub: The Physical Hypothesis
What we have discussed so far is the chemical and molecular hypothesis. The proposal of theoretical physicists Emilio Del Giudice and Giuliano Preparata at the University of Milan is instead of a quantum type. In quantum physics particles as well as all bodies constantly fluctuate, because nothingness doesn’t exist and everything is in continuous interchange. From a physical point of view, a substance that vibrates at the same frequency as another becomes a copy of it, even if it remains chemically different.
In water each molecule typically vibrates on its own, independently and in seemingly disordered fashion, just like when people are dancing in a nightclub, one here and another one there, each in his or her own way. But if a substance is dissolved in the water, it can instigate a coup, as if the music suddenly stops in the nightclub and the speakers instead broadcast classical ballet music while the youngsters get together, arm in arm, dancing the same steps at the same pace, like a ballet troupe. It is as though a DJ from out of town has taken over from his colleague and imposed his own music on the dancers. Similarly, the diluted substance imposes its own vibration—its information—on the molecules of water. Thus the information of the solute is imprinted in the water because it modifies the oscillation of the water molecules. Unlike the chemical models described above, in which molecules are copied, in this model the molecular rhythms of the solute are impressed on the water.
Before, the water molecules were each vibrating on their own, but in the presence of the solute they begin to fluctuate in phase. In phase means that the water molecules now oscillate at the same rate, acting as if they were a single molecule. In homeopathic dilutions the molecules of the solute (the substance that is dissolved in water) are able to capture the vibrations of the water and make them oscillate at their own pace due to certain phenomena of electromagnetic interference. In order to explain those phenomena, we need to begin with understanding the concept of a ground state (GS). A quantum system is stable when it reaches—which it does sooner or later—its “state of minimum energy,” its ground state. A system achieves the ground state through fluctuations that dissipate any surplus energy. The GS of a system is similar to what happens when a car reaches the speed that allows for the optimal balance between fuel consumption and stability.
The state of minimum energy is the quantum vacuum. Left alone, a quantum system tends toward the vacuum: this is how matter can interact with its field. If matter comes to interact with its own electromagnetic field, it can reach high levels of coherence, that is, it becomes “highly ordered.”*19 The system’s state of minimum energy becomes a coherent ground state (CGS) when molecules and fields oscillate in phase with each other. When matter and field oscillate in phase, they produce high levels of consistency and coherence. Areas where the molecules oscillate in a coherent way are called domains of coherence. These domains of coherence allow water to record information and “imitate” anything.
Bodies are defined both by short-range forces (molecular interactions) and long-range forces (field oscillations). Molecules that oscillate in phase can emit intense and penetrating waves. Oscillating in phase with their field, the particles vibrating at the same frequency generate waves of photons, which are rich in consistent particles.9 When they oscillate in a coherent way, systems emit more intense signals, just like a laser.
Entering a coherent ground state (CGS), water can receive and emit signals. According to Preparata’s “theory of quantum electrodynamical coherence in condensed matter,” this applies to liquids and solids, in which atoms and molecules interact via both short-range forces (chemical bonds) and long-range forces (mediated by the electromagnetic fields).10 What does this mean? The molecules generate a field, which in turn is like a conductor who, through long-range interactions, harmonizes the movements of all the molecules. The short-range chemical interactions are the dynamics of the system, but the long-range interactions retain control.11
This is the secret of the “memory of water”: the coherence of its fundamental state, which enables it to convey information. All this can be explained by the theory of superradiance, formulated by Robert H. Dicke in the 1950s and revisited by the physicists Preparata and Del Giudice. Superradiance is a class of enhanced radiation effects in which disordered energy of various kinds is converted into coherent electromagnetic energy. Particles of coherent matter can produce amazing effects when oscillating with their electromagnetic fields. The secret is the oscillation. Oscillating particles generate a field that fluctuates in a constant way, typical of systems that are self-governing and self-maintaining. In other words, water is able to receive, retain, and return information because it fluctuates between coherent and noncoherent states. This enables water to be a medium for excellent communication.
The human body consists mostly of liquid, which is subject to the alternation of coherent states of water. If most of the molecules of this liquid lose their pace and their state of coherence, the consequence is a disorder in the information content being carried, which in turn can cause states of disease. Imagine the immense amount of fluid surrounding the cells (called mesenchyme) and within the cells themselves: like gigantic moving seas whose state changes continuously, just like water freezing, then becoming liquid, and then dispersing in the form of vapor. When dissipated, the bodily fluids collapse into a state of emptiness, losing coherence. Some system information is then deleted. Of course, the body’s control systems work to ensure that this does not happen—like the antivirus systems of a computer. But if something escapes the control mechanism and manifests itself as a symptom, the introduction of water carrying the appropriate information can act on the body’s fluids in order to help return them to a coherent state. This might be a homeopathic remedy or any other “informed” water.
Some Like It Hot
The first scientific proofs that homeopathic dilution is different from plain water have recently been obtained through nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). NMR is a property demonstrated by magnetic nuclei in a magnetic field when an electromagnetic (EM) pulse is applied, causing the nuclei to absorb energy from the EM pulse and radiate this energy back out. The energy radiated back out is at a specific resonance frequency, which depends on the strength of the magnetic field and other factors. Recent analysis of nuclear magnetic resonance has confirmed that the water in homeopathic dilutions is organized differently than that in the controls.12 In fact, the NMR techniques show that double-distilled water is quite another thing than the highly diluted homeopathic solutions, which show the organized presence of information.13 Every time the chemical and physical parameters confirm reorganization, it means that water has acquired information via the solute or via the field.
The chemist and physicist Vittorio Elia of the Federico II University of Naples has discovered important variations in the thermodynamic profile of homeopathic dilutions using a technique known as microcalorimetry. Imagine a hollow sphere in which two tubes are placed: two different solutions pass through those little tubes and mix together. In their mixing, millions of molecules collide, generating a very weak heat. In microcalorimetry this heat is measured precisely. (The cells are thermostatically controlled so that the environmental temperature does not influence them.) If the heat measured is typical of water, it confirms that only molecules of water are present. If, however, the water contains different molecules (such as, for example, those of a medicine), the heat readings will be different, generally increased.
If homeopathic remedies were only constituted of water, their profile would be calorimetrically that of water (and those who consider homeopathic remedies nothing but water would be right). Instead, thousands of samples of homeopathic remedies analyzed by Elia over the years had heat signatures higher than that of pure water, demonstrating that there were other molecules present besides water.14 This was true despite the fact that chemical analysis revealed only the presence of water. It is plausible that the excess heat is due to the water molecules organizing in a different way from before. This is what we call information. Thus, homeopathic remedies are not just fresh water; on the contrary, they are warmer. The homeopathic dilutions are also different in the sense of temporal evolution: the excess heat doesn’t peter out in a short space of time, as it does for medicines, but instead increases with time.15 In periodic measurements of the dilutions, the heat recorded is increasingly higher.
As difficult as it is to explain how water-based solutions can contain molecules that supposedly aren’t there, this progressive calorimetric increase is even more surprising. Even undiluted water (nothing dissolved in it) but dynamized (through a process of violent succussions, as in the homeopathic procedure) increases in heat, which confirms that this mechanical action is necessary in the homeopathic preparation. This is not explainable via traditional chemistry, which says that this action itself is not sufficient to reorganize the molecular disposition of water. On the other hand, diluted solutions that are not succussed are completely different from homeopathic remedies. Succussion is therefore essential to modify the structure of water and plays a key role in the mechanisms by which information is stored.
It has also been shown that homeopathic remedies have a higher conductivity than undiluted water, that is, an increased ability to transmit electricity. Chemically, water is always H2O, but physically it can differ. This is an undeniable phenomenon. There is now evidence from NMR, calorimetry, and measurements of chemical and physical conductivity showing that water that has received information is different from before.
More Breakthroughs: Electromagnetic Signals from Water
In 2009 the Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier*20 published a paper in which he officially demonstrated the existence of homeopathy, confirming that water, in homeopathic dilutions, not only keeps memory of the solute but also emits specific low-frequency electromagnetic signals that are both recordable and reproducible.16 Let us see how.
Montagnier prepared homeopathic dilutions from water solutions of different bacterial DNA sequences. These samples were serially diluted 1:10 (0.1 + 0.9) in sterile water in tubes and then tightly stoppered and strongly agitated on a Vortex apparatus for 15 seconds. This step (succussion) was found to be critical for the generation of signals.
The tubes were read one by one using a device designed by Jacques Benveniste that which detected signals through an electromagnetic coil. This device was connected to a Sound Blaster Card that was subsequently connected to a laptop computer (preferentially powered by its 12-volt battery). Each emission was recorded twice for 6 seconds, amplified 500 times, and processed with different software to visualize the signals on the computer’s screen. The main harmonics of the complex signals were analyzed by several types of Fourier transformation software.
In the dilutions from 10-7 (D7) to 10-12 (D12), he visualized positive signals in the range of 1 to 3 KHz. These signals signify new harmonics, but they were found only in the diluted and succussed solutions. Montagnier thinks that the emission of such waves likely represents a resonance phenomenon, depending on excitation by the ambient electromagnetic noise, and it is associated with the presence of polymeric nanostructures of definite size in the aqueous dilutions. The supernatant of uninfected eukaryotic cells used as controls did not exhibit this property.17
Montagnier thus confirms that homeopathic dilutions emit frequencies that are nonexistent in the initial undiluted solutions or in low dilutions (10-3). Therefore, from the physical viewpoint, this water is different from what it was before. It was stated by a Nobel Laureate; Ipse dixit.
This emission of electromagnetic signals is not suppressed by enzyme (RNAseA, proteinase K), formamide, formaldehyde, or chloroform. The cations are able to reduce the intensity of the signals, while the range of the positive dilutions remained unchanged. However, heating at 70°C for 30 minutes irreversibily suppressed the activity, as well as did freezing for 1 hour at -20° or -60°C. The nanostructures emitting electromagnetic signals seem to have the same range of sizes as those originating from intact bacteria.18
The physical nature of the nanostructures that support the electromagnetic signal resonances remains to be determined, but it can certainly be ascribed to the above-mentioned clusters. The latter are indeed inactivated by sensible temperature variations, as observed by us, by Benveniste, and by others. Montagnier has discovered a novel property of DNA; that is, the capacity of some sequences to emit electromagnetic waves in resonance after excitation by the ambient electromagnetic background (and this can be related to the theory of biophotons emitted by the DNA observed by Fritz Albert Popp, which will be discussed later).
It seems possible to transfer the information between two different dilutions of DNA (one emit and another is silent: for example, 10-9 and 10-3) when the tubes are placed side by side in a mu-metal box for 24 hours at room temperature. This crosstalk can be suppressed by interposing a sheet of mu-metal between the two tubes during the 24-hour contact period, pointing to a role of low frequency waves in the phenomenon.19 The crosstalk is in accordance with what was observed by Schimmel, Endler, Popp, Elia, Citro, and others (see the foreword).
In 2010, Montagnier received a delegation from my Research Institute at the UNESCO Foundation in Paris.20 In his office, located on the fifteenth floor and overlooking the Eiffel Tower, we exchanged information about our respective and very similar research studies. Starting in the fall, we began Montagnier’s experiment and worked at it through the winter, until we were able to reproduce it.
Montagnier was a friend of the late Benveniste; moreover, his current assistant, Jamal Aissa, worked with Benveniste and had taken part in our first TFF lab experiment in 1992 in Paris (see chapter 6). Both researchers came from a medical background, but they also shared another, more compelling commonality: that they dared trespass the boundaries of chemistry to explore the physical side of things—the realm of electromagnetic waves, and a lot more. With his research, Montagnier closed the water memory circle that had been opened twenty years before by Benveniste and—because of the influence coherent states of water has on the health of the human body—paved the way to new and interesting future prospects for the early diagnosis of many important chronic diseases.
If we consider all the publications by serious researchers who are investigating the water phenomenon in the true spirit of research and not governed by other interests, the sterile and useless debate on homeopathy can come to an end, for they make it clear that homeopathic remedies are water with different physical characteristics, remedies with a distinctive preparation. They are based on the ability of water to reorganize according to the informational imprint of a solute. As we shall see in later chapters, the same principle applies even when we transmit information to water electronically.
Water behaves as a natural recorder and transmitter of frequencies. During our trip you will see that it is not alone and that all matter is capable of receiving and sending signals. This provides us with some important clues to the organization of the universe as we continue our journey into the other side of things.