The Hook. A recent science digest mentioned the Soviet "polywater" of the 1960s — a mysterious liquid that "doesn't freeze in the cold and stretches like syrup." The article covered the chemistry and debunking, but left out the juiciest part: how ordinary lab contamination became, for two years, the subject of Pentagon grants, CIA interrogations, and letters about planetary doom. Plus — an unexpected bridge for me: this same "anomalous water" appears in the Vayner brothers' Visit to the Minotaur, where a retiree grumbles in a cafeteria about "smart guys boiling water." I wanted to dig to the very bottom — from a Kostroma capillary to capitulation in Nature.
It all started not in Moscow and not in a grant-funded lab, but in Kostroma — an ancient city on the Volga, 400 km northeast of the capital, where in the late 1950s and early 1960s a modest associate professor named Nikolai Fedyakin worked. While his colleagues were launching Gagarin into space, Fedyakin was studying water — or more precisely, testing Lord Kelvin's old theory about how surface curvature affects evaporation.
With his own hands he learned to draw glass capillaries with radii down to 0.000017 mm — thinner than a human hair. Into these tubes he introduced water vapor, sealed them, and waited. Then he noticed something strange: in the narrowest capillaries, ordinary water — the very same water that expands when heated above +4 °C — suddenly stopped behaving "by the textbook." The column stretched uniformly, and after a few weeks a second column appeared in the upper part of the tube, separated like oil from vinegar — a small column of some viscous unknown liquid.
Fedyakin called it "offspring water." Then things got worse: this stuff froze not at zero but between −30 and −60 °C, and not into ice but into a glass-like state, and it contracted rather than expanding like normal water. It boiled at 150–250 °C. Viscosity — 15–20 times higher, consistency like petroleum jelly. Density — 1.1–1.4 g/cm³ instead of the familiar one.
In 1962 Fedyakin published his results in Colloid Journal — a Russian-language publication, of course, that nobody in the West noticed. Only one person in Moscow noticed.
That person was Boris Vladimirovich Deryagin — one of the Soviet Union's greatest physical chemists, founder of the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the USSR Academy of Sciences, author of the globally recognized DLVO theory of colloids. A man who by the 1960s was already an academic giant but still hungry for something Nobel-scale. And now on the horizon — an obscure chemist from Kostroma with a "new form of water."
Deryagin summoned Fedyakin to Moscow and, as Western sources honestly write, "absorbed" his research — repeated and improved the technique, cutting the time to obtain samples from weeks to hours. His group published ten papers on "water II" over four years — but all in low-circulation Russian journals. Even Deryagin's presentation at the international Faraday Society conference in Nottingham in 1966 went almost unnoticed — the title was too dry ("Effect of lyophilic surfaces on the properties of boundary liquid films"). Only one person in the audience was interested: a chemist from Unilever named Pethica. He went home, repeated the experiments, and in 1968 publicly confirmed the results — now "anomalous water" caught the attention of American scientists.
The key moment: Deryagin made a claim he would later be forced to retract. He insisted that anomalous water was the most thermodynamically stable form of water, meaning any ordinary water in contact with it would eventually become anomalous too. This confidence wasn't malicious intent but rather "will to believe" multiplied by enormous authority: the idea itself aligned with his own classical theory of surface forces. Challenging him meant challenging surface tension itself.
Then came what turned a strange Soviet note into a global sensation. In June 1969, Science published work by chemist Ellis Lippincott (University of Maryland) and Robert Stromberg of the National Bureau of Standards. They ran a tiny sample through infrared and Raman spectroscopy — and got a spectrum that "belongs to no known substance." Comparison with a database of 100,000 spectra yielded nothing. Conclusion: water molecules arranged themselves in perfectly symmetrical hexagons like a honeycomb — forming a water polymer. Stromberg himself coined the name — "polywater" (from polymerized + water).
What followed was the scientific equivalent of a gold rush. According to David Eisenberg, who later reviewed Felix Franks' book Polywater (MIT Press, 1981), between 1963 and 1974 about 500 publications appeared, over 160 in 1970 alone. Roughly 400 scientists got involved in polywater. In Washington all the desiccators in stores sold out at one point — so many people were rushing to grow polywater in drawn capillaries. Quantum chemists in twenty-five papers competed to calculate the polymer's structure, and some claimed their calculations "proved" polywater's existence.
Now — the Cold War. The term "polywater gap" bounced through American newspapers alongside "bomber gap" and "missile gap" — those mythical "shortfalls" that scared Congress in the 50s–60s. The Wall Street Journal in 1969 wrote with relief: "Good news — the U.S. appears to have closed the polywater gap, and the Pentagon is funding efforts to push American polywater technology ahead of Soviet." The Office of Naval Research held a closed symposium rumored to invite only American scientists. ARPA (future DARPA) allocated a $75,000 grant to Tycho Labs of Boston for mass production of polywater. The CIA monitored Soviet publications, and after Deryagin's visits to the U.S., agents debriefed the American hosts he stayed with. Essentially, the U.S. and USSR started a race for... a new form of water.
The peak of madness. In fall 1969, physicist Frank Donahoe (Wilkes College) wrote a letter to Nature meant to sound apocalyptic: "I regard this aqueous polymer as the most dangerous substance on Earth and propose treating it like a deadly virus until its safety is proven." The logic: if polywater is more stable than ordinary water, one drop escaping down the drain would spontaneously polymerize the oceans. The planet would become like Venus — a dried-out, scorching desert. The popular press immediately recalled Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle (1963), where the fictional crystalloid "ice-nine" converts all the planet's water into itself and kills everything living. Stromberg later recalled: people wrote him letters accusing him of "destroying the world."
Worth mentioning the pseudoscientific momentum: Vonnegut himself fueled the panic — his novel came out just six years before the sensation. Readers already "knew" such water was possible. Fiction preceded "reality" — and made it plausible.
Skeptics existed from the start, but one detail hindered them: there was physically too little polywater. All the world's labs combined could gather a volume "barely filling a vodka shot glass" (formulation from Time, 1970). Late-1960s analytical chemistry couldn't work with such quantities — even if someone wanted to check purity, the instruments didn't allow it.
The turning point came when it emerged that Deryagin himself in his original publication (in a Russian journal) mentioned sodium contamination, but rather too quietly — and behind the Iron Curtain, Western chemists didn't really see this fact. Then, when Science spoke up, came the opposite extreme: if American instruments confirm it, it must be true. In neither case did anyone go verify the phenomenon itself with the thoroughness it required. Geopolitics is always ready to lend a shoulder to a bad idea if it confirms fears.
And then came the most beautiful experiment in debunking history: Rousseau simply went to play handball. Returning to the lab sweaty, he wrung out his T-shirt, collected the sweat in a flask, evaporated it, and ran it through an infrared spectrometer. His sweat's spectrum matched polywater's spectrum exactly. The culprit — sodium lactate from human skin. Every person, like Pigpen from Peanuts, is surrounded by an invisible cloud of organic salts evaporating from skin and settling on capillary walls; these microparticles get into condensate and "polymerize" it. On March 27, 1970, the Rousseau and Porto team published a thorough chemical analysis in Science: "polywater" is just water contaminated with sodium, potassium, chlorine, and so on, but almost no silicon.
Events then unfolded like a well-directed detective story. Professor Robert Davis from Purdue dug up a note in an obscure Soviet journal that as early as 1968, analysis of Deryagin's samples showed contamination "possibly of human origin, possibly sweat." The New York Times wrote about this (September 27, 1970), and in October Time ran a photo of Davis wringing sweat from a T-shirt. Deryagin responded with accusations against the Americans — their "samples" were dirty — and for another year or so rearguard battles continued: in summer 1971 he brought "fresh" evidence to a conference at Lehigh University, presented virtually no new data, and most participants departed in mutual mistrust.
Rousseau's formula entered history: polywater consists of 1% imagination and 99% perspiration. Stromberg, father of the polywater boom, publicly admitted: "The data were correct, the interpretation was wrong." Lippincott retreated earlier: at the Lehigh conference in summer 1970 he acknowledged that his "polywater" spectrum almost certainly resulted from contamination: "Polywater is so strange that we keep wondering: where's the big screw-up we made?"
The final note came from Deryagin himself. In August 1973 he and N. V. Churaev published a letter in Nature: "these [anomalous] properties should be attributed to impurities rather than the existence of polymeric water molecules." In 1974 came a detailed composition analysis: silicon, organics, solid particles. With carefully washed lab glassware, no anomalous layer formed. Case closed.
Now for the juiciest part — what the story almost always omits. As early as 1969, it was theoretically possible to prove polywater didn't exist without doing a single new experiment. Richard Feynman formulated his famous "biological counterexample": "Polywater doesn't exist, because if it existed, there would exist an animal that doesn't need food. It would just drink water and excrete polywater" — since water's transition to a more stable state releases energy that could be used for metabolism. Over billions of years of evolution, such an organism would surely have appeared. It didn't — therefore it doesn't exist.
Even simpler: if polywater really is more stable than water under given conditions, then billions of years of surf washing silicon beaches should have already turned the world ocean into polywater. Since this didn't happen — either polywater doesn't exist or the first and second laws of thermodynamics are wrong. As Eisenberg later summarized in his review of Franks' book: "The tendency of polywater scientists to ignore established thermodynamic principles testified to a certain 'will to believe'."
In the USSR the polywater story also left traces — not just scientific. The term "Deryagin water" made it into the Chemist's Handbook (1976) and even children's popular science literature. The episode from the Vayner brothers' novel Visit to the Minotaur (1971–1972), where investigator Tikhonov listens in a cafeteria to a retiree grumbling about "smart guys who boiled water" — a direct reflection of polywater being discussed in Soviet newspapers at the everyday conversation level in 1970–1971. The novel was written right at the peak of the sensation — a year before Deryagin's penitent letter to Nature.
In Science and Life (No. 8, 1971) Deryagin — still before capitulation — published an extensive article "Anomalous Water: Hypotheses and Facts" describing the chamber by V. Karasev and Yu. Luzhkov for obtaining "maximally pure" polywater (and, incidentally, with the hypothesis that Venus's clouds consist of anomalous water droplets on silicate nuclei — an idea Deryagin shared with American astronomer Donahue). Yes, that same Yuri Luzhkov — future mayor of Moscow, then a young researcher whose name stood alongside Deryagin's team in attempts to save the "discovery" with a more perfect chamber. This alone makes the story politically colorful: polywater was not a marginal quirk but a topic attracting people of widely varying scale — from academicians to future city mayors.
For Deryagin himself, the story cost a significant part of his reputation. In fairness: his legacy in colloid chemistry — the DLVO theory named after the initials Deryagin–Landau–Verwey–Overbeek, the Deryagin approximation, the DMT model in contact mechanics — lives in every modern textbook. In 1990 he received the USSR State Prize. He died in 1994, at 91, having acknowledged polywater as an error back in 1973.
Polywater today ranks alongside Blondlot's "N-rays" and Fleischmann–Pons's "cold fusion" as a classic example of pathological science — a term Irving Langmuir introduced. But with an important caveat: this was not fraudulent but an insanely human error. Three factors converged like planets in conjunction:
Technical: in the 1960s no analytical instruments existed capable of analyzing micrograms of substance. The spectrometer gave a signal but couldn't distinguish "new structure" from "salt traces." What looked like proof was simply the limit of technical resolution.
Psychological: the very idea of a "new form of water" perfectly aligned with Deryagin's correct fundamental theory of liquid surface layers. The most tenacious scientific heresy always grows from a true idea, using it as a shield: doubting polywater meant doubting surface tension. Add careers, grants, a Nobel on the horizon, and Cold War fervor — and you get "will to believe."
Geopolitical: in post-Sputnik America nobody wanted to "give the Soviets" another field. The term "polywater gap" itself was modeled on military "shortfalls." The Pentagon, CIA, ARPA — all looked not at chemistry but at the world map.
And yet science worked. Nobody lied. Nobody organized a "anomalous water witnesses" cult. From the first loud "confirmation" in Science to Deryagin's public capitulation took four years — a pittance by historical standards. The system self-corrected, though burning money, time, and nerves of hundreds of scientists along the way. Felix Franks in his 1981 book directly called what happened a "scientific gold rush" — by analogy with the Klondike, where a crowd of prospectors chases glitter and finds quartz with impurities.
Three thoughts that stayed with me after this deep dive.
First. Polywater is a perfect case of how the "Iron Curtain" works both ways. Russian-language publications were ignored by the West for seven years — not because they were bad, but because nobody read Russian. When Deryagin came to Nottingham, the first reaction was mistrust ("Soviet propaganda or something"). Then, when Science spoke up — the opposite extreme: if American instruments confirm it, it must be true. In neither case did anyone go check the phenomenon itself with the thoroughness it required. Geopolitics is always ready to prop up a bad idea if it confirms fears.
Second. A beautiful lesson about "the false trail that's prettier than truth." In the Rousseau story everyone remembers "sweat from the T-shirt" — but few mention that even after this result, some polywater supporters kept believing. They said: "our samples are clean, Rousseau's are dirty." This is the same mechanism as in Benveniste's "water memory" story or cold fusion: once an idea hooks into careers, grants, and national pride, factology becomes secondary. Deryagin, to his credit, managed to exit this loop — and therefore remains in history not as a charlatan but as a scientist who erred and admitted it.
Third. About Feynman and thermodynamics. I think this line is the most underrated in retrospectives. Everyone loves the story about sweat and handball. But the real elegant resolution is different: the right answer lay at the beginning of 1969, on paper, in a thermodynamics textbook. It required no grants, no spectrometers, no visits to Kostroma. It required one thing — to stop and ask an uncomfortable question. A question that brings no grants and doesn't fit in a press release: "If this is true — why hasn't it already happened on its own?" Nearly the entire expensive polywater race could have been prevented by one question from freshman year. And this isn't about chemistry, it's about any field where money and headlines have already been issued for an "interesting hypothesis."