How Water Retains Information: a.k.a. ‘Water Memory’

The topic of this chapter concerns a great scientific controversy of past decades: claims that liquid water has ‘memory’. Here we debunk that claim by showing that, though water retains information about its prior states; that should not be called a ‘memory’. Memory implies that information is available to be recalled, i.e. ‘remembered’. Such is definitely not the case.

Obviously, water cannot store digital information; that would require a stable substrate which water cannot provide. Water’s microscopic structure is unstable; the make-up of individual molecules changes continuously as hydrogen bonds between them rearrange themselves, constantly shifting H-atoms from one O-atom to another. Any ‘information retained’ in water must be stored differently from Shannon information; to call it a ‘memory’ would end in scientific rejection – and rightly so!

Certain eminent scientists have, however, contended that, if liquid water’s microstructure is involved, information retention might occur. This chapter shows how it becomes possible. The key is this: in contrast to other substances, liquid water can be assigned two kinds of entropy. The first is classical, i.e. macroscopic, its heat content; the second is quantum i.e. microscopic and calculated in terms of microstates of water polymolecules.

Comparing these two forms Method. Result: the first exerts restrictions on the second: numbers of polymolecule are so vast that quantum entropies tend to exceed heat entropies. But those cannot be exceeded. At any temperature, T, forms taken by polymolecules are restricted. That restriction, IR(T), constitutes an entirely novel form of information, different from the previously known four. Arising from restrictions on a variable’s range, it parallels Fisher Information. We have therefore proposed to name it, ‘Quantum Fisher Information’.