The Structure of Liquid Water; Novel Insights from Materials Research; Potential Relevance to Homeopathy

This paper provides an interdisciplinary base of information on the structure of liquid water. It begins with a synthesis built on the information base on the structure of noncrystalline, inorganic, covalently-bonded condensed liquid phases, such as SiO2, S, Se, P, and H2O, which exists in the materials science literature. The data for water are analyzed through the prism of well-established algorithms in materials research: the connection of properties to structure; the pressure-temperature (P-T) phase diagrams; the phenomenon of epitaxy; the phenomenon of liquid-liquid phase separation; the stability of two phase colloids; and, the recently discovered effects of weak magnetic and electric fields on the structure of simple inorganic oxides. A thorough combing of the literature of the condensed matter properties reflecting structural features of essentially pure water obtained via the normal processes of preparing homeopathic remedies, provides another rich data base.
The examination of these data through the standard materials science paradigms leads to the following conclusion: Many different structures of liquid water must exist within the range of observations and processes encountered near ambient conditions. A typical sample of water in these experimental ranges no doubt consists of a statistical-mechanical-determined assemblage of monomers and oligomers (clusters) of various sizes up to at least several hundred H2O units. The importance of the structural similarity of SiO2 and OH2 is very relevant to the structure of the latter as well as to the probability of epitaxy in controlling at least the region contiguous to the silicate glass surfaces of many common containers.
The most distinctive feature of bonding in liquid water is not only the 'well-known hydrogen bonds, but the necessary presence of a wide range' of van der Waals bonds between and among the various oligomeric (cluster) structural units. It is this range of very weak bonds that could account for the remarkable ease of changing the structure of water, which in turn could help explain the half-dozen well-known anomalies in its properties. In its subtler form, such weak bonds would also allow for the changes of structure caused by electric and magnetic fields and by radiation of all kinds, including possibly so-called 'subtle energies', which are the basis of an enormous range of claims about specially 'structured' water.
This paper does not deal in any way with, and has no bearing whatsoever on, the clinical efficacy of any homeopathic remedy. However, it does definitively demolish the objection against homeopathy, when such is based on the wholly incorrect claim that since there is no difference in composition between a remedy and the pure water used, there can be no differences at all between them. We show the untenability of this claim against the central paradigm of materials science that it is structure (not composition) that (largely) controls properties, and structures can easily be changed in inorganic phases without any change of composition. The burden of proof on critics of homeopathy is to establish that the structure of the processed remedy is not different from the original solvent.
The principal conclusions of this paper concern only the plausibility of the biological action of ultradiluted water remedies, they are based on some very old (e.g. homeopathy) and some very new (e.g. metallic and nanobubble colloids) observations which have been rejected on invalid grounds or due to ignorance of the materials research literature and its theoretical basis. This constitutes an excellent example of the common error in rejecting new scientific discoveries by using the absence of evidence as evidence for absence.