French scientist Jacques Benveniste publishes a study in the journal Nature in which he believes that homeopathy elicits a reaction in certain blood cells. However, the study’s results prove unsuccessful in other laboratories. James Randi, a renowned illusionist and fraud debunker, then visits his Paris laboratory. Randi quickly discovers the swindle: his assistant writes down the experiment’s results in a notebook, which he then takes home and artfully alters. Randi exposes one of the most sensational and deceptive scientific frauds in the history of the 20th century: Benveniste was cheating. To uncover Randi’s trick, he videotaped the experiments. The handwritten codes on the test tubes were then replaced with randomly coded labels to make them anonymous (a blind procedure). The code key was written on a piece of paper, sandwiched between two sheets of aluminum foil, then sealed in an envelope with adhesive, revealing fingerprints. Finally, the envelope was glued to the ceiling. Before leaving the laboratory, James Randi, unbeknownst to everyone else, also marked the position of the ladder used to attach the envelope to the ceiling on the floor. The next day, upon his return, the ladder had been moved, and the envelope had been left alone to be opened, which failed. However, before the end of the year, further negative results accumulated in attempts to duplicate the experiment (J. Seagrave, S. Bonini, E. Adriani, F. Balsamo, among others). Jacques Benveniste would win two Ig Nobel Prizes, the first in 1991 in chemistry, for demonstrating that water possesses intelligence, and the second in 1998, for demonstrating that this information can be transmitted via telephone or the Internet. The Ig Nobel Prizes are a caricature of the Nobel Prizes, intended as a parody. In 2005, an article was published in Nature demonstrating that liquid water loses memory of its structural correlations in less than 50 femtoseconds (or 0.00000000000005 seconds): a truly short-lived memory…
