Is Masaru Emoto's Water Experiment Science or Pseudoscience?

[PIT2]

I haven't seen anything that would imply Radin is a crackpot. What makes u say so?

 

[Evo]

I haven't seen anything that would imply Radin is a crackpot. What makes u say so?

Because it's well known that he's a sandwich short of a picnic.

"The new material includes interviews with a crackpot parapsychologist (Dean Radin, from the “Institute of Noetic Sciences”), and a crackpot journalist (Lynne McTaggart). It also includes some new animations featuring a cartoon character (Captain Quantum or some such). The first of these starts off with a not-bad depiction of the two-slit experiment before getting silly. The second is tacked on near the end and brings in a new exciting idea that wasn’t in the first film: Extra Dimensions! Captain Quantum liberates some poor fellow cartoon character who is trapped in 2d due to her fearfulness, bringing her to enlightenment by showing her that there is a third dimension. There’s mercifully little about string theory, mostly John Hagelin going on about how the superstring field is the field of consciousness."

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?m=200602&paged=2

The "Institute of Noetic Sciences" is on the Quackwatch list of questionable organizations.

http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/nonrecorg.html

 

[PIT2]

Someone on some blog writes he is a crackpot. It doesn't mean much. Obviously in the controversial field Radin does his work, people will respond in such a manner, especially those who hold different worldviews. But in the end, such accusations are meaningless.

Has he been exposed as a fraud, or anything like that?

 

[setAI]

there is a fine line between fringe science and crackpottery- Dean Radin is one of those that rides right on the edge of that boundary to crankville- but he does manage to maintain scientific integrity-

 

[Highwaister]

debunking emoto

So if we are agreed (sort of...) that he's not a crackpot, where does that leave the validity of this study. Does anyone know of any independent replications?

 

[Evo]

So if we are agreed (sort of...) that he's not a crackpot, where does that leave the validity of this study. Does anyone know of any independent replications?

No, he's a bit of a cracked pot, there are articles everywhere saying what a crackpot he is, I'm not going to post links to all of them. You're free to believe what you want but based on what I've read of him, his beliefs and his methods, I can't see any credibility here. Not saying he's intentionally trying to be one, it's just that his methods are questionable. I mean just look at that test, it's ridiculous! It's people that let their wishes affect their work that continue to cause doubt to be shed on studies that could actually help the field of parasychology.

http://www.skepticreport.com/pseudoscience/radinbook.htm

http://skepdic.com/refuge/sheldrake.html

In a November 2005 article that critiqued the New Age movement's detachment from the mainstream scientific community, Thomas W. Clark, founder of the Center for Naturalism, criticized members of the institute. Clark wrote: "parapsychologist Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences [willingly applies]... what humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz calls the 'transcendental temptation' [that] drives the flight from standard, peer-reviewed empiricism into the arms of a dualism that privileges the mental over the physical, the teleological over the non-purposive."[6] The skeptical organization Quackwatch includes the IONS on its list of websites it does not trust.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Noetic_Sciences

I mean come on, the Noetic Institute believes in Uri Geller.

 

[Highwaister]

Read the links and OK, point taken re Dean Radin et al. So... back to searching for some good science wrt Emoto. Independent replications anyone?