Masaru Emoto

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Masaru Emoto
江本勝
Born(1943-07-22)July 22, 1943
Yokohama, Japan
DiedOctober 17, 2014(2014-10-17) (aged 71)
Japan
EducationYokohama Municipal University
SpouseKazuko Emoto

Masaru Emoto (江本 勝, Emoto Masaru, July 22, 1943 – October 17, 2014)[1] was a Japanese businessman, author and pseudoscientist who claimed that human consciousness could affect the molecular structure of water. His 2004 book The Hidden Messages in Water was a New York Times best seller.[2] His ideas had evolved over the years, and his early work revolved around pseudoscientific hypotheses that water could react to positive thoughts and words and that polluted water could be cleaned through prayer and positive visualization.[3][4][5]

Starting in 1999, Emoto published several volumes of a work entitled Messages from Water, containing photographs of ice crystals and accompanying experiments such as that of the "rice in water 30 day experiment."

Biography

Emoto was born in

International Relations. He worked in the Nagoya Office (Central Japan Office) of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, then founded the International Health Medical company in 1986. In 1989, he received exclusive rights to market the Magnetic Resonance Analyzer,[6] a device patented by Ronald Weinstock (Patent 5,592,086), which was alleged to be able to detect the magnetic field around a human hair, for example, and diagnose almost any disease.[7] He renamed it the "Vibration-o-Meter," became an operator himself, and started a business dealing in vibrations.[8]

He was President Emeritus of the International Water For Life Foundation, a

Oklahoma City in the United States.[9] In 1992, he became a Doctor of Alternative Medicine at the Open International University for Alternative Medicine in India,[10] a fraudulent college which targeted quacks to sell degrees[11] and was later shut down.[12][13]

Ideas

Emoto claimed that water was a "blueprint for our reality" and that emotional "energies" and "vibrations" could change its physical structure.

aesthetic properties with microscopic photography.[9] He claimed that water exposed to positive speech and thoughts created visually "pleasing" ice crystals, and that negative intentions yielded "ugly" ice formations.[9]

Emoto held that different water sources produced different ice structures. For example, he held that water from a mountain stream, when frozen, showed structures of beautifully shaped geometric designs; but that water from polluted sources created distorted, randomly formed ice structures. He held that these changes could be eliminated by exposing water to ultraviolet light or certain electromagnetic waves.[14]

In 2008, Emoto published his findings in the

Journal of Scientific Exploration, a journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration that has been criticized for catering to fringe science.[15] He co-conducted and co-authored the work with Takashige Kizu of Emoto's own IHM General Institute, and Dean Radin and Nancy Lund of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which is on Stephen Barrett's Quackwatch list of questionable organizations.[16]

Reception

Commentators have criticized Emoto for insufficient

experimental controls and for not sharing enough details of his experiments with the scientific community.[9][17] He has also been criticized for designing his experiments in ways that permit manipulation or human error.[9][18] Biochemist and Director of Microscopy at University College Cork William Reville wrote, "It is very unlikely that there is any reality behind Emoto's claims."[9] Reville noted the lack of scientific publication and pointed out that anyone who could demonstrate such phenomena would become immediately famous and probably wealthy.[9]

Writing about Emoto's ideas in the

Harriet A. Hall concluded that it was "hard to see how anyone could mistake it for science".[5] In 2003, James Randi published an invitation on his website, offering Emoto to take the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, in which Emoto could have received US$1,000,000 if he had been able to reproduce the experiment under test conditions agreed to by both parties. Randi did not receive a response.[19]

Emoto's book The Hidden Messages in Water was a New York Times best seller.[20][2] Writing in The New York Times Book Review, literary critic Dwight Garner described it as "spectacularly eccentric", and said its success was "one of those 'head-scratchers' that makes me question the sanity of the reading public."[2] Publishers Weekly described Emoto's later work, The Shape of Love, as "mostly incoherent and unsatisfying".[21]

Emoto's ideas appeared in the movies Kamen Rider: The First and What the Bleep Do We Know!?.[4][22][23]

Publications

Books

See also

References

  1. ^ "Masaru Emoto" (in German). Koha Verlag. Retrieved 20 October 2014.
  2. ^
    ProQuest 217307067
    .
  3. ^ Kenneth G. Libbrecht. "Snowflake Myths and Nonsense". California Institute of Technology. Retrieved 21 July 2012.
  4. ^ a b "The minds boggle". The Guardian. May 15, 2005. Retrieved 13 January 2024.
  5. ^ a b Harriet Hall (November 2007). "Masaru Emoto's Wonderful World of Water". Skeptical Inquirer. Retrieved 13 January 2024.
  6. ^ 江本勝『波動時代への除幕』（サンロード、1992年）5刷、, tr. "Masaru Emoto, "Unveiling the Wave Age" (Sunroad, 1992) 5th edition," P.24
  7. ^ Neurosceptic (January 31, 2015). "Does Quantum Resonance Spectrometry Work?". Discover. Retrieved August 5, 2020.
  8. ^ This is from Japanese Wikipedia.
  9. ^
    ProQuest 851900025
    .
  10. ProQuest 217433470
    .
  11. ^ "Fake university 'VC' targeted only quacks to issue degrees - Times of India". The Times of India. Retrieved 2019-03-11.
  12. ^ Dunning, Brian (September 23, 2014). "Skeptoid #433: The Water Woo of Masaru Emoto". Skeptoid. Retrieved 4 May 2018.
  13. ISSN 0971-751X
    . Retrieved 2019-03-11.
  14. ^
    ProQuest 245079696
    .
  15. Time magazine. Archived from the original
    on 2018-07-16. Retrieved 2008-06-02.
  16. ^ Barrett, Stephen. "Questionable Organizations: An Overview". Quackwatch. Retrieved 14 October 2013.
  17. ProQuest 272168250
    .
  18. ^ Matthews, Robert (April 8, 2006). "Water: The quantum elixir". New Scientist (2546). Retrieved 13 January 2024.
  19. ISBN 9781936101597
    .
  20. ProQuest 463050722
    .
  21. ^ "The Shape of Love: Discovering Who We Are, Where We Came From, and Where We're Going". Publishers Weekly (book review). Vol. 254, no. 7. February 12, 2007. p. 79.
  22. ISSN 1556-5696
    . Retrieved 2014-08-21.
  23. ^ Poppy, Carrie (March 11, 2014). "A grain of truth: Recreating Dr. Emoto's rice experiment". Poppycock (blog). Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Retrieved 2014-08-21.
  24. ISBN 9781582701288
    . Retrieved 13 January 2024 – via books.google.com.
  25. ISBN 9781582701141
    .

Further reading

External links


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