An article in Nature demonstrates that liquid water loses memory of its structural correlations in less than 50 femtoseconds (or 0.00000000000005 seconds): a truly short memory… In 1988, also in Nature, an article by French scientist Jacques Benveniste was published in which he believed that homeopathy elicited a reaction in certain blood cells. However, the study’s results were unsuccessful in repeating in other laboratories. James Randi, a famous illusionist and fraud debunker, then visited his Paris laboratory. Randi quickly discovered the trick: his assistant wrote down the experiment’s results in a notebook, which he then took home and artfully altered. Randi brought to light one of the most sensational and mocking 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 tampered with to open, failing. 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 in chemistry for demonstrating that this information from water can be transmitted via telephone or the Internet. The Ig Nobel Prizes are a caricature of the Nobel Prizes, intended as a parody.
