Hmmm, I actually started to compose the post below just after PixyMisa posted his 11.40 post (quoted), in between doing some actual work. By the time I got it up, much of my musings seem to have been covered, especially by Mojo.
Perhaps they were making
the same mistake as Kumar ("Kayvee" to you, bvw12).
A day late and a dollar short, sorry. But here it is.
Introduction, first sentence:
Nope. Try it: The first phrase returns 32,300 hits; the second, 224,000.
I looked at the PowerPoint slides. They're
terrible! It's difficult to imagine how any serious academic can put anything out with presentation this bad. It looks as if Kumar's Pakistani homoeopath friends did the visual aids! Still, I found something out. In an earlier thread on this topic, it was claimed that Roy was a Nobel laureate. This I found somewhat surprising. However, I note from the initial slides that there is no mention of such an award in his credentials list. There is however a throwaway remark that three Nobel prizes have been awarded for work on metallic sols. To whom and for what discoveries, not stated. OK, that's that cleared up. Why can't homoeopathy proponents learn to read?
So then I looked at the paper itself, out of sheer disbelief that any serious academic work could possibly incorporate what we dubbed "argument by Googlefight" when Kumar started doing it. (I think Kumar right (without any inverted commas) got more returns than Kumar wrong, so that proved he was right, or something.) [OK, Mojo, ten extra points for finding the post, I see it was Kumar is intelligant and Kumar is idiot.]
But it's true! The number of returns on a Google search is actually quoted by Roy
et al. as if it had some meaning! I scarcely believe it.
Short digression. I recall
Kumar's Googlefight argument when we were trying to explain to him the function of the inverted commas. I'll skip over the question about whether the crow should drink the water in the pot, which implied that Kumar thought the Internet could magically supply the answer to whether or not the water in one particular pot was safe to drink! His other example was about whether or not grapes were sweet. He contended that since the phrase - are grapes sweat - with no inverted commas, got him a lot of returns, and "are grapes sweat" got him none, then the former was the better way to ask the question. It was pointed out to him that exactly none of the links provided by the first search actually answered the question (because he was persistently mis-spelling "sweet"), so it was in fact useless. However if he could bring himself to spell the word correctly, a search on "are grapes sweet", with the inverted commas, while producing very few returns, actually answered the question. This all fell on deaf ears as far as I remember. He continued to assert that a search without inverted commas was superior because it produced more links.
So is that what's going on here? I get 24,300,000 returns for structure of liquid water (no inverted commas) and 170,000,000 for structure of water. However I get 32,200 for "structure of liquid water" and 223,000 for "structure of water" - much the same as PixyMisa got.
Huh, neither of these really figures.
The wording of the paper is very odd.
The “structure of liquid water” receives some 8 million hits on Google and the “structure of water” over twice as many. Any contribution that can be made to this vast body of knowledge is sure to be marginal. This paper does not report any such incremental advance with ultraprecise measurements about the structure of oligomers, femtosecond spectroscopy of bond breakage or phase transitions in glassy water. Instead, it examines the literature to establish only one proposition, that pure, thermodynamically stable or metastble liquid water can have more than one 3-D condensed matter structure. While we assemble here various sets of relevant data and lines of argumentation, by a coincidence, at the same time as this paper was first presented orally (April 2004), Kawamoto et al. published their paper providing the experimental proof of this assertion [1, 2].
I'm having increasing difficulty reconciling this nonsense with the concept that any of the people responsible are or have ever been serious academics.
First, the terminology is strange to me. To "receive a hit" to me seems to be talking about a web site getting a certain number of visitors. Yet they seem to be using this form of words to describe the number of links returned in a Google search. But are they? The numbers bear no relation to the actual number of links returned when one actually does these searches, either with or without the inverted commas. I wondered if they were meaning this was the number of times such a search had been performed on Google (over what time period?), but that makes no sense either.
Second, they are equating links returned on a Google search with a "vast body of knowledge". I hardly have to point out how imbecilic that concept is. Any serious scrutineer of any scientific paper would kill that assertion stone dead. Which rather illustrates the quality of the scrutineering, if any.
Third, they seem to be saying that the paper is purely theoretical, and presents no experimental data. Fine. There's a reason I should read this?
Fourth, there is a mention of someone having published some actual experimental data. It seems to be to "Kawamoto
et al. [1, 2]. However, when we look at the reference list, references 1 and 2 are:
[FONT=TimesNewRoman,Italic]
1. Roy R (2004) A contemporary materials science view of the structure of water. Symposium on Living Systems/Materials Research, Boston, MA, Nov. 28, 2004[/FONT]
[FONT=TimesNewRoman,Italic]2. Katayama S et al. (2004) Science 306:848[/FONT]
It took a little bit of thought to realise that in fact the reference citation is simply completely screwed up. First, reference 1 is not to the experimental work, but to Roy's verbal presentation of his own theories, which happened at about the same time as the experimental work was published. Instead of printing
by a coincidence, at the same time as this paper was first presented orally (April 2004), Kawamoto et al. published their paper providing the experimental proof of this assertion [1, 2].
what should have been printed is
by a coincidence, at the same time as this paper was first presented orally (April 2004) [1], Kawamoto Katayama et al. published their paper providing the experimental proof of this assertion [2].
Oh yea, and "metastble " is obviously a mis-spelling.
This again argues for a totally amateur setup. Any competent scientific editor would have fixed the [1] having been put in the wrong place, and the name of the author of paper [2] having been completely mangled, and the mis-spelling.
I'm sorry, but when something is presented in such a cackhanded and unprofessional way, then why should I take anything in the paper seriously? These people are supposed to be serious academics, and serious academics know about the importance of presenting your work professionally, but their presentation - well, it has all the hallmarks of amateurish quackery.
By the authors' own admission, the paper is purely theoretical fantasising, apparently along the same lines as Lionel Milgrom's quantum logorrhoea. If they can't even present their work in a professional format (Milgrom at least manages to do that!), what incentive is there even to read further?
This does make me wonder. Is Professor Roy real? If there is such a person, and he did publish a good paper in 1956, is it actually the same person writing now? Or could this all just be a complicated Internet hoax? How to find out?
However, there's still Kawamoto (or is it Katayama?).
Science 306:848.
Excuse, me, it's not really my subject, but does this paper have anything at all to do with the price of fish? I was wondering why it was Roy and not
Kawamoto Katayama the homoeopaths were trumpeting, but it seems as if only Roy in the whole world believes this work has any bearing on homoeopathy - even the woos can see that citing the
Science paper is completely irrelevant.
Look, this Roy stuff is so full of implausibilities even before you get as far as finding out what he's actually saying that I really don't think I'll bother. My main question now goes straight back to, does Rustum Roy actually exist at all, and if there is indeed such a person with these qualifications who published a seminal paper over 50 years ago, is it actually he who is responsible for the present unprofessional and implausible presentation. Or could it just possibly be a complete hoax?
Rolfe.
O=2.66–2.81 Å) formed by hydrogen bonds at the periphery, i.e., the third shell. Each of the H2O molecules of the second (dodecahedral) shell connects the molecules from three different pentagons of the third shell with one molecule of the central dodecahedron.
