Five awesome substances that never existed

September 21st, 2008

The road to the truth is rarely straight or clearly signposted, and although the scientific method has managed to install a few streetlights along the way, there are still plenty of dead ends for the unwary to stumble into. Here I’ve collected a few examples of wonderful substances that have been bought, sold, collected, created, and had detailed theories written about them, only to have one tiny downside – they never existed.

Orgonite
Orgonite is an offshoot of the pseudoscience of Orgone, an all-encompassing life-force energy “discovered” in the 1930s by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, in an extrapolation of Sigmund Freud’s already highly questionable theories. Today, a host of websites host tutorials on how to create orgonite, a substance said to be able to accumulate this life force. Some even claim to have invented it themselves, and trademarked it. In reality, it’s just a piece of quartz embedded in some plastic, and the only thing it will accumulate is strange looks when you tell everyone how their sexual libido energy is coursing through you.

Polywater
Some time around the early 1960s, Soviet physicist Nikolai Fedyakin was carrying out experiments on tiny amounts of water that had been repeatedly forced through narrow quartz capillary tubes.  His measurements showed this water had a higher boiling point, lower freezing point, and much higher viscosity than ordinary water.  As news of his research spread, his experiments were soon replicated with varying success around the world, with only very small amounts ever beig produced.  The new substance was termed ‘polywater‘.  Excitement and speculation surrounded the discovery, with some people suggesting polywater could be responsible for the increasing resistance of the trans-atlantic phone cables.

However, when Denis Rousseau of Bell Labs measured the properties of his own sweat after a rigorous game of handball, he found it to be identical to those of polywater.  He published his findings, suggesting that polywater was nothing more than normal water contaminated with biological impurities.  When researchers attempted to create polywater under even tighter controls to eliminate contamination, they found nothing but water.  Polywater dropped off the radar almost overnight, and today remains a byword for pathological science.

N rays
Another example of pathological science, but this time over a electromagnetic wave rather than a physical substance, is the “discovery” of N-rays.  Toward the end of the 19th century, rays and waves were the exciting forefront of science.  Röntgen had discovered the medical usefulness of X rays in 1895, whilst the Curies were doing important research into the properites of radioactive substances.  France desperately wanted its own home-grown hero of this new science and a man named René-Prosper Blondlot briefly filled that gap.  He was convinced that a change in the brightness of a spark crossing a spark gap was due to a novel form of radiation he named N rays, after the University of Nancy at which he worked.  Other reasearchers however, could not replicate his experiments.

After himself failing to replicate the phenomenon, US physicist and renowned debunker Robert W. Wood travelled to France to see Blondlot’s setup.  Hidden in the requisite darkness of the experiment, Wood secretly removed an essential prism from the apparatus, and switched a large file for a piece of wood.  Nevertheless, Blondlot and his team were able to ’see’ the spark.  Wood reported his findings in the journal Nature, stating that N rays were a purely subjective phenomenon.  Although belief in N rays endured for some time in France, the rest of the world soon forgot them.

Carmot / Alkahest
As the principle element of the mythical Philosopher’s Stone, carmot was all things to all men.  The 8th-century Arab alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan had categorised each metal in terms of the four basic qualities of hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness.  Clearly one metal could be turned into another by rearranging these four basic qualities. A substance that could engineer this change came to be known as al-iksir in Arabic (from which the term elixir is derived) – or in other words, the Philosopher’s Stone.  16th-century Swiss alchemist Philippus Paracelsus posited that all classical elements were derived from one master element, which he named alkahest, which could similarly transform other metals. Despite a huge amount of effort over hundreds of years, nothing even approaching this fantastic substance was ever discovered or synthesised. However, a great many useful substances were, and the foundations for modern chemistry were laid in the process.

Red Mercury
Perhaps the strangest of all non-existent materials, Red Mercury was originally a little-known about material used by Soviet scientists in the creation of nuclear weapons. In the absence of any anchor to reality, Red Mercury became anything that a buyer wanted it to be as hoaxers began selling the mysterious substance on the black market. An article in New Scientist covering a report from the Los Alamos National Laboratory had this to say: “You want a short cut to making an atom bomb? You want the key to Soviet ballistic missile guidance systems? Or perhaps you want the Russian alternative to the anti-radar paint on the stealth bomber? What you need is red mercury.”
Even more bizarrely Dominic Martins, Roque Fernandes and Abdurahman Kanyare were arrested by UK police in a sting operation in 2004, after attempting to buy a kilo of Red Mercury for £300,000. After a lengthy trial all three were acquitted, probably under the reasoning that if Red Mercury didn’t exist, it couldn’t be illegal to buy it. This begs the question: which is stupider, trying to buy a fictitious weapons material, or arresting someone for trying to buy a fictitious weapons material?
Some people still think Red Mercury exists, but no-one seems to be able to agree on what exactly it is: an element, a code-name for nuclear fuel, a landmine additive, or simply the collected fears and suspicions of those living in a nuclear world?

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