Messages From Water

"Water represents the interface between the 4th dimension in which we live and the 5th dimensional sphere of our soul." (Give me a moment to recover from finding that quote...)

I generally don't like the fact that water freezes and becomes ice. It has the nasty habit of doing so on roads that I have to drive on. I don't believe that ice would be any less dangerous to drive on if I had projected loving thoughts at the water while it was freezing. And that about sums up my interest to date in the water crystal formation studies of Dr. Masaru Emoto.

So I wasn't thinking too much about this recent replication of Emoto's work until I read this. And then I got to wondering about the exact nature of the differences in the water crystals after they had been treated... Where there physical differences in the structure of the crystals? Were those differences quantified/quantifiable? Do the treated water crystals exhibit a more highly-ordered state when compared to the untreated crystals?

To begin to get some answers, I had to go to this earlier replication of the same study. The results of the study deal primarily with subjective ratings of the aesthetic appeal of the crystals. "To assess the aesthetic appeal of these 40 crystals, a group of 100 volunteers were recruited over the Internet to blindly and independently rate each crystal, one at a time, on a scale from zero to six, where zero meant “not beautiful” and six meant “very beautiful.”... Beautiful crystals were defined as symmetric, aesthetically pleasing shapes." No objective measure of crystal structure was reported, however the presence of symmetry is a known contributor to judgments of beauty in other situations.

Now my question is... How does symmetry in the structure of a crystal relate to the energy needed to create the varying levels of crystal structure? (Is it easier or harder - in terms of energy - to create a symmetrical crystal? Is a more-symmetrical state more or less likely to occur naturally? Is there more or less information contained in a symmetrical crystal?) As I am still not a physicist, I resort to google searching for a quick and dirty explanation. "Factually, the correlation of entropy and symmetry in a qualitative manner was already hinted at by Schrödinger many years ago that negative entropy corresponds to asymmetry, broken symmetry, or less symmetry. However, it remains generally a tacit assumption that higher symmetry of a system implies less entropy." My source article goes on to explain "the symmetry increase leading to a macroscopically equilibrium state is obvious. [Obviously.] However, as will be pointed out, the corresponding effect of information loss (or entropy increase) is also obvious, such as the consequence in the formation of a perfect crystal. Here, information content and symmetry of different static structures are compared and their differences are considered." Sounds confusing but promising, yet a bit beyond the scope of this post...

The major questions that arise from the water crystal formation studies have to do with reconciling the differences in symmetry and entropy in the crystals with the processes were 'applied' to the crystals. I think we're all beyond the classic model of a physical force of some kind that is directed at the water, so I can safely ask this question... Are the observers who are directing intentions at the water and/or the observers of the crystals able to collectively select a more symmetrical state of the ice crystals? (While the 2006 replication briefly mentioned observer effects, it did so without mention of a mechanism for those effects.) I then also want to know if the more-symmetrical state has a higher or lower probability of occurring, relative to the 'not attractive' (and therefore, presumably, less symmetrical) crystal states? Can the relative probabilities be correlated somehow to the efforts of the relative observers?

An intentional selection of a specific state (whether it be ice crystals or any other system) is not possible without information about the system. I couldn't help but notice that information (photographs) about the target bottles of water was given to a much larger number of observers than the number who had information about the control bottles. I began to wonder about the total amount of information (and with it, the ability to influence the process of state selection) that existed with regards to those 'treated' bottles of water... While lost in earlier musings about the concept of relative entropy, I was quickly prompted to think about the related concepts of cumulative entropy (the sum of the information that exists about a system/state across multiple observers, moments in time, and degrees of knowledge) and distributed entropy (information about a system that is distributed among different observers). And I began to wonder... If the amount of information that is available about a system is related in some way to the amount of order in a system, then can varying the cumulative entropy of a system have an independent effect on the amount of observable order or disorder present? Can varying the nature of the information that is available about a system have an independent effect on the amount of observable order or disorder present?

I'm not suggesting that more information about the system means that more energy is locally available to physically affect the crystal formation. Rather, I suggest examining the process of state selection as a function of the amount and nature of the information that exists about the system.