Polywater was a hypothesized polymerized form of water that was the subject of much scientific controversy during the late 1960s, first described by Soviet scientist Nikolai Fedyakin. By 1969 the popular press had taken notice of Western attempts to recreate the substance and sparked fears of a "polywater gap" between the United States and Soviet Union. Increased press attention also brought with it increased scientific attention, and as early as 1970 doubts about its authenticity were being circulated. By 1973 it was found to be illusory, being just water with any number of common compounds c
Polywater was a hypothesized polymerized form of water that was the subject of much scientific controversy during the late 1960s, first described by Soviet scientist Nikolai Fedyakin. By 1969 the popular press had taken notice of Western attempts to recreate the substance and sparked fears of a "polywater gap" between the United States and Soviet Union. Increased press attention also brought with it increased scientific attention, and as early as 1970 doubts about its authenticity were being circulated. By 1973 it was found to be illusory, being just water with any number of common compounds contaminating it. Today, polywater is best known as an example of pathological science.
==Background== In 1961, the Soviet physicist Nikolai Fedyakin, working at the Technological Institute of Kostroma, Russia, performed measurements on the properties of water which had been condensed in, or repeatedly forced through, narrow quartz capillary tubes. Some of these experiments resulted in what was seemingly a new form of water with a higher boiling point, lower freezing point, and much higher viscosity than ordinary water – about that of a syrup.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).