Masaru Emoto was a Japanese author and pseudo-scientist who claimed that human consciousness can effect the molecular structure of water. Emoto's book The Hidden Messages in Water published in 2004 was a New York Times best seller. Emoto's conjecture evolved over the years, and his early work revolved around pseudo-scientific hypotheses that water could react to positive thoughts and words and that polluted water could be cleaned through prayer and positive visualization. From 1999, Emoto published several volumes of a work entitled Messages from Water, which contain photographs of ice crystals and accompanying experiments.
Emoto said that water was a "blueprint for our reality" and that emotional "energies" and "vibrations" could change the physical structure of water. Emoto's water crystal experiments consisted of exposing water in glasses to different words, pictures, or music and then freezing and examining the aesthetic properties of the resulting crystals with microscopic photography. He claimed that water exposed to positive speech and thoughts would result in visually "pleasing" crystals being formed when that water was frozen and that negative intention would yield "ugly" frozen crystal formations. Emoto held that different water sources would produce different crystalline structures when frozen. For example, he held that a water sample from a mountain stream when frozen would show structures of beautifully shaped geometric design, but those structures would be distorted and randomly formed if the sample were taken from a polluted water source. Emoto held that these changes could be eliminated by exposing water to ultraviolet light or certain electromagnetic waves. In 2008, Emoto published his findings in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, a scientific journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration that has been criticized for catering to fringe science. The work was conducted and authored by Masaru Emoto and Takashige Kizu of Emoto's own IHM General Institute, along with Dean Radin and Nancy Lund of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which is on Stephen Barrett'sQuackwatchlist of questionable organizations.
Scientific criticism
Commentators have criticized Emoto for insufficient experimental controls and for not sharing enough details of his approach with the scientific community. In addition, Emoto has been criticized for designing his experiments in ways that leave them prone to manipulation or human error influencing the findings. Biochemist and Director of Microscopy at University College Cork William Reville wrote, "It is very unlikely that there is any reality behind Emoto's claims." Reville noted the lack of scientific publication and pointed out that anyone who could demonstrate such a phenomenon would become immediately famous and probably wealthy. Writing about Emoto's ideas in the Skeptical Inquirer, physician Harriet A. Hall concluded that it was "hard to see how anyone could mistake it for science". Emoto was personally invited to take the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge by James Randi in 2003 and would have received US$1,000,000 if he had been able to reproduce the experiment under test conditions agreed to by both parties. He did not participate.
Reception
Emoto's book The Hidden Messages in Water was a New York Timesbest seller. Commenting on the book making the list, literary criticDwight Garner wrote in The New York Times Book Review that it was one of those "head-scratchers" that made him question the sanity of the reading public, describing the book as "spectacularly eccentric." Publishers Weekly described Emoto's later work, The Shape of Love, as "mostly incoherent and unsatisfying". Emoto's ideas appeared in the movies and What the Bleep Do We Know!?.
