The Pennsylvania State University team have been number crunching since our Intention Experiment on April 26. We finally have our results, and the answer is: we’re not sure exactly what happened.

Initial measurements did not produce a definitive positive result or indeed any profound changes, although it was possible that something had affected the water before the official time we’d sent intention.

It turned out that our water registered changes, even before we sent intention.

Our sample water had enormous variation in light scattering to begin with – a situation that became apparent when the data was graphed in a different program. So it is possible that the water itself went through changes before the official time we were supposed to send intention.

Many variables

According to our protocol, the team took measurements of the water one hour before and then during and after we’d sent intention, using Raman spectroscopy, which measures the scattering of light. Any changes in the light rays suggest changes in the structure of the water molecules themselves.

Professor Rustum Roy and his colleagues, Dr. Manju Rao and Dr. Tania Slawecki, found strange changes in the water one hour before we sent intention.

There are a number of possible reasons for this:

• Intention works out of time.
• The anticipation of the participants, who may have begun thinking about the experiment beforehand, produced changes in the water. A similar situation occurred with the second Water Intention Experiment we ran with Dr. Konstantin Korotkov in January. He discovered changes in light emissions one hour before we sent intention.
• The water was somehow already structured. Although the team bought purified water, it may have been ‘contaminated’ in some way. Professor Roy is considering having the water undergo reverse osmosis, a process that removes all other possible substances so that there will be nothing present in the sample but but hydrogen-oxygen molecules.
• We’re using the wrong protocol in studying changes in light refraction. As I shared several weeks ago, the Penn State team ran several experiments examining the effect of healers on water. In a number of instances, the healers did not have an effect on the water, but on the instrument’s infrared detector. In other words,” said Dr. Slawecki, “the healers emitted energy in the IR spectrum that is not emitted from normal human hands with or without intention.”
• The time when intention was sent was not completely controlled for. A number of intenders sent intention one hour after we’d completed the experiment (one of our emails had the wrong Pacific time), and others just sent intention at the wrong time. We completed the experiment with the intenders at 2pm Eastern Daylight Savings Time and the Penn State team continued to monitor samples for the next hour or two. As Dr. Slawecki says, “We learned that some of the meditators got the time wrong and sent intention after 2 pm, which means we were not really looking at post-experiment results.” It would have been impossible to compare the results during the time when intention was sent with the effects one hour after intention, because, in some cases, the intention was still being sent then.
• Environmental factors played a part. At 5pm, an intense thunderstorm hit the area. Says Dr. Slawecki: “Perhaps as a result of the falling barometric pressure and excess free ions, our de-ionized water samples were not as stable as they should have been, so our error bars on the data are sufficiently large as to obscure any underlying changes to the water structure.”
• Anything else could have affected this exquisitely sensitive equipment. “It is important for your readers to understand that these are very sensitive measurements we are making, and sometimes it is difficult to anticipate what factors may come into play,” she added.
• Intention doesn’t affect water. Although all of our other studies have produced a measurable effect, this hypothesis must always be considered.

The upshot is that Professor Roy and his team believe that they need to refine the protocol and use other, more sensitive equipment — and of course we need to refine our web protocol, to ensure that all of our participants get involved at the exact same moment.

We have developed a new protocol that seems to circumvent any possibilities of water or instrument instabilities,’ says Dr. Slawecki. “ The upcoming summer months will provide us with ample opportunities to test our new protocol under similar weather conditions.

“I think what we might consider doing are two experiments back to back: one in which we look for changes to the structure of water with the laser on, and one in which we simply look for the presence of energy with the laser off over some period of time. In our studies of healers, there was a great variation in the peak intensity emitted by the healers with each 20 second scan.”

The other good news is that Penn State will be getting a new piece of equipment in two months’ time — “ the most sophisticated water analysis system in the world,” says Professor Roy — which will quantify several properties of water with great precision. “It would be a great coup to use that for an Intention Experiment, as it can measure 400 different parameters of water to examine in the event that intention alters the structure of the water.”

So, we’re going to repeat the experiment in two month’s time, but with this new equipment. Stay tuned and at your computer in mid-June.

Last Saturday, April 26, as you know, we ran our historic Water Structure Intention Experiment. People around the world participated, for the first time, in attempting to turn ordinary distilled water into ‘healing’ water by changing its molecular cluster structure.

The scientists from Pennsylvania State University are still busily analyzing the results by studying the results of Raman spectroscopy, will recorded any subtle change in the vibration of the molecule.

Unusual calibrations

Although the scientists are not finished examining their data, they have told me one thing: they’ve seen results they’ve never seen before with their equipment.

One reason it is taking so long is that our water had a great deal of variation an hour before the experiment was run. This could mean that our anticipation of the event began to affect the water. Or it could mean that our hypothesis is wrong.

Or it could mean that with intention, we are emanating an energy like a Qigong master, which is being picked up by the spectroscopy before the event.

One interesting possibility comes from some work the team did with a group of healers.

Dr. Tania Slawecki, one of our Penn State research team told us, their working thesis on the healer’s experiment, as well as our Intention Experiment, is that the structure of water — that is, the arrangement of molecules — plays a more important role than its chemistry in therapeutic applications like homeopathy or ‘imprinted’ water samples from healers.

Qigong grandmaster’s effect

The scientists chose to use Raman spectroscopy because they discovered one published study showing that Qigong Grandmaster called Dr. Yan Xin significantly altered the structure of a water sample, as measured by a Raman spectrometer, when he sent his Qi from a place seven kilometers away from the water sample.

When running this kind of study, scientists will send a laser beam into the sample, while the Qigong master is sending Qi to the water. The laser light is absorbed by the water molecules, depending on how they are energetically configured or arranged, and then reradiated at a different wavelength.

This re-radiation process, as picked up by sensitive CCD cameras and the Raman equipment, says Tania, “gives them information about how the water is structured – the vibrational states of the hydrogen bonds relative to the oxygen in water, for example. These are also known as ‘hydrogen bending modes’.”

If it is significantly altered after the Qigong master sends intention, as it was with Yan Xin, the scientists will know that his intention had an effect on the water.

The Penn State team has used this to study a number of homeopathic solutions, colloidal silver and various kinds of water imprinted by so called resonance devices and also healers. In the main, they have found that changes in the structure are most important.

However, with three studies of healers, they discovered healers weren’t affecting the structure of water itself, but were emanating radiation that was being directly picked up by the instrument sensors — in some cases even before they began the study.

For instance, with Qigong Master Jixing Li, whose healing ability was well documented, the scientists did not record any change in the structure of the water but did find that the pH of the water went into strong oscillations before Master Li’s arrival. Dr. William Tiller recorded similar effects in his Black Box Experiments (see The Intention Experiment, chapter 8). This is considered evidence that a space like the lab is ‘conditioned’ with healing energy.

A healer’s light

The lab then enlisted a healer called Judith Jubb and asked her to send intention. Jubb complained about the laser light and asked that it be turned off. However, with no laser light, there would be no light to be scattered, which is what the scientists record with their equipment in order to work out what is going between the molecules of the water. Without any light, there should be nothing for the CCD camera to photograph.

Here’s a graph of what occurs when a member of their lab, who is not experienced in intention, tries to affect the water.

However, here’s what happened when Judith sent energy to the water sample once the laser was turned off:

The CCD cameras system picked up waves of faint light emissions — corresponding to a far-infrared wavelength of 8628 nm.

Judith had an excellent ability to control her emanations, says Tania. “A sudden vanishing of peaks correlated with her informing us, ‘I’m shifting frequencies now and am passing through a vacuum state.’” As soon as she left her ‘vacuum state’, the infra red signals returned.

The scientists have also re-examined Dr. Yan Xin’s data and found evidence of large energy peaks, detected by the Raman spectrometer, resulting from long-wave far-infrared light waves — just like those of Judith Jubb.

“The most interesting point about the peak in the Raman spectrum generated by Dr. Yan is that it makes no physical sense,” says Tania.

Both Jubb and Dr. Xin are noted for their healing abilities, even healing at great distances. However, infrared energy at the levels detected by the Raman spectrometer is not something that can be sent long distances, according to our understanding of transverse EM waves.

A third healer also recorded these light waves while sending healing to Rick, a member of the scientific team. The scientists then discovered that Rick’s energy emanations were beginning to entrain with the healer’s.

So we’ll await new results to see if our effects, like those of healers, are more akin to a giant rush of light energy mediated over a long distance.

Our Water Structure Intention Experiment will be run in one of the labs in Pennsylvania State University’s Materials Science department in the dark. Right before the experiment, the scientists will test the sample with a Raman Spectrometer.

Here’s what one looks like.

As you can see, the probe will be inserted into our water sample, like this, and measurements taken periodically for several hours before the experiment begins. We’ll show you this equipment with the actual water (this isn’t it).

A long cable will connect the probe to a highly sensitive CCD camera on the instrument which will sense any the weak Raman scattering from the water molecules as they vibrate in response to a red laser light on the water sample. This is will be recording the very vibrations of the oxygen-hydrogen bonds in the water. (For more on what we’re actually measuring, see below.)

The scientists won’t know how and when we are sending intention, and will continue to take measurements for some hours afterward. We are controlling the experiment in some way, but the scientists have asked me to keep the details of this information from you until after the experiment.

What on earth are we measuring?

In 1928, an Indian physicist named Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman discovered that when light is transmitted through matter, part of the light scatters randomly. A small portion of this light has different (usually lower) frequencies to that of the light source.

This discovery earned Raman a Nobel Prize in 1930. Then, in 1998, the Raman Effect, as it grew to be called, was named as an ACS National Historical Chemical Landmark in recognition of its usefulness as a tool for analyzing the composition of liquids, gases and solids. The Raman Effect is usually caused by a subtle change in the vibration of a molecule, caused by a number of factors. Scientists like Dr. Rustum Roy, who is an expert on water, at the University of Pennsylvania, have recorded the structuring of water with electromagnetic radiation. So our scientists are now examining whether the energy of our collective thoughts can cause these changes.

Why is this so important?

The importance of the Raman effect and the Raman spectroscopy, in terms of Intention Experiment, is that we will be employing a system of measurement that is universally recognized by the scientific community to record any sort of subtle change.
If our experiment is successful, it places us one step closer to showing the orthodox community that the power of collective thought has the ability to change the world.

What if it doesn’t work?

That doesn’t necessarily mean intention doesn’t work. The greatest challenge of the scientific method is determining why something works or why it fails. A failure can suggest myriad possibilities. It may mean we can’t structure water with our thoughts, but it may also mean that our experiment was designed in wrong way – in other words, we asked the wrong questions.

Remember: when you conduct a scientific study, you roam across new terrain a little aimlessly without a compass. Once you find your destination, it usually isn’t the one you were looking for. Flexibility is the greatest prerequisite of a good scientist.

Each time, we take one more baby step forward. With every answer — no matter what that is — we will keep learning, and so will you.

have some exciting news. I have been in discussion with Deepak Chopra, the Alliance for New Humanity, and the Association for Global New Thought, an umbrella organization of New Thought churches, about having their members band together to run a giant Peace experiment in the autumn 2008 . The New Thought churches are planning their own consciousness initiatives, but as one giant supergroup with enormous publicity, we would have the largest experiment of all time.Of course an experiment of this magnitude may have many challenges, most of them technical — chiefly, how to create server power large enough to support thousands of people from all around the world joining forces on the same web page at the same time.

The biggest challenge with these experiences is not in demonstrating the power of intention (that seems to be the easy bit).

The difficulty is in finding an internet system sophisticated enough to allow thousands of people around the world to stare at the same image on a single web page at the same time. Allowing in such sizeable simultaneous traffic requires a vast amount of extra web capacity. The ability of a website to handle simultaneous web traffic is completely reliant upon the size of a web system’s server power.

As many of you remember, we learned this the hard way with our very first Intention Experiment, when the website crashed after an estimated 10,000 people attempted to participate in the experiment.

Three web teams so far

We have had three teams handling these experiments. Our second team attempted to avert a homepage overload by holding the experiments on a special page, away from the main website. That web team also controlled the flipping over of pages, rather than having readers click to other pages themselves, so there would be no possibility of the site freezing when everyone clicked the same button at the same time.

We also rented server space from a company that supplies the servers for Pop Idol, the British equivalent of American Idol, and was well versed in preventing a massive cyber traffic jam. Nearly 7000 people from thirty countries participated in the experiment, and only a handful had problems logging on. Nine linked servers were on hand to distribute the load. For the first few moments of our experiment, they were almost full.

Unique use of a social network

The technology of the second experiment had worked, but afterward we’d been presented with an extraordinarily large bill. The server power alone had cost us $6,000 for a half hour and the special web pages many thousands more – far too much for me to donate on a regular basis.

So we turned to a third web designer, Nick Haenen, who came up with an ingenious solution to our need for vast server power. Instead of renting our own servers, Nick said, why not make use of the giant capacity already created by a social network portal, like MySpace or Facebook? He’d constructed some sites using the Ning social network portal. Ning offers individual organizations instant facilities for a community based website.

The main advantage of Ning, for our purposes, was its server capacity — some 500 linked servers — to cope with the organization’s 20,000 social networks.

When Nick contacted the Ning creators they were enthusiastic about using their equipment to run intention experiments (Ning, by the way means ‘love’ in Chinese), and began working with Nick to modify the system slightly to cope with our special needs. By the time they were through, they said, our system would be able to cope with a hundred thousand simultaneous users.

However, we will still have the problem of having thousands of people registering all at once and participants that exceed even Ning’s enormous capacity.

So we will be meeting with some technical people from the Alliance for New Humanity to resolve some of these unique issues presented by attempting to run such a unique and uniquely large experiment. Watch this space for new developments.

I have just heard back from Russian physicist Dr Konstantin Korotkov about our latest Intention Experiment last Friday, January 18, and the results were overwhelmingly powerful. This time, it appears we had an even stronger effect.

Extended time

This experiment was set up roughly similar to our last Water Experiment on November 30, with two differences. This time, we used a stronger intention and also set up an identical beaker of water with distilled water from the same source, which would not be sent intention and was to act as our control.

Inside each beaker Dr. Korotkov placed an electrode, attached to his Galvanic Discharge Visualization (GDV) machines.

Remember, his GDV machines, which make use of state-of-the-art optics, digitized television matrices and a powerful computer, work first by stirring up the photonic signals from a substance like water so that they will shine millions of times more intensely than normal. The GDV machine then records this faint pulse via photography, measurements of light intensity and computerized pattern recognition.

As with our November experiment, Dr. Korotkov took measurements before we sent intention, during the time we sent intention and afterward.

However, this time, we extended the time when our initial recording was made, so that we took readings several times in the 90-minute period before intention was sent. We also took readings continuously during the 10 minutes of our intention and then for a half hour after our intention.

Here’s how he divided it:

0 – 20 min – Stabilization of the process

20 – 90 min – “Before” data

91 – 101 min – “Intention” data

101 – 133 min – “After” data

Our control beaker of water sat in the same room as the ‘intention’ beaker, two metres away and also underwent identical readings.

Making the water ‘glow’

This experiment was different from our first because we’d decided to focus our intention on a specific outcome. In our first experiment, we simply asked our participants to send ‘love’ to the water. This time, we decided to focus on change in the light signal from the water, by asking our participants to send an intention to make the water ‘glow’ and ‘glow’. I also asked our participants to visualize the water beaker glowing to aid the process.

In our data, we found a highly significant statistical difference between data in the intention period and the period after the intention, compared with our previous measurements. This difference was highly significant, and Dr. Korotkov demonstrated it via several parameters, after examining the area (spread) of light, it’s ‘intensity’ For those of you of a scientific bent who have asked , I’ll show you a number of graphs.

The actual statistics of differences are showing in the graph as follows.

These numbers represent the statistical change between two periods, as noted in the first column. Any figure printed in red represents a significant change. As you can see, these figures show that our effect was highly significant, in scientific terms.

In the control sample, there was no difference in area, but there were some differences in intensity, when comparing the overall before and after, and the 10 minutes before and after.

Interestingly enough, there was no difference in the intensity of light before intention or afterward, only during the time intention was sent. Our water was glowing when we told it to, and no more.

Here’s a graph showing the change in the area and intensity of light combined in the experimental sample. The blue is before intention; the red afterward.

In the control sample of water there was no difference in the area of light, but there was a difference between the intensity before the Intention and then afterward, particularly 10 minutes before and afterward. On the other hand, there was no difference in intensity before and after for the experimental sample.

This is a huge confounding of expectations. Dr. Korotkov assumed that since the samples were in such close physical proximity, there would have been a certain amount of intention ‘contamination’. The fact that there wasn’t also represents a highly significant result.

From this evidence, says Korotkov, we can conclude that ‘after the Intention time, readings for the experimental sample changed significantly compared with previous data. This may be considered as an effect of intentional remote influence. The absence of such changes in the control sample proves that it was not related to variations in environmental or experimental conditions.’

In our experimental sample, waves of variation in the readings for the area and intensity of light occurred practically from the very beginning of the stable period (the first 20 minutes). In the control sample, these variations were much smaller. A similar phenomenon was witnessed for the statistics measuring the intensity of light. The graphs below show the differences in the experimental water before and after intention. The arrow shows the time when intention was sent:

You can also see that the spread of the light and its intensity was far lower in the controls, when you compare graphs showing all the area and intensity across the entire time of the experiment:

As with our previous experiment, the strongest effects were recorded 10 minutes after the Intention time, as though there was a delay of 10 minutes before the target recorded our effect.

In the graph denoting the measurements of the area of light of experimental sample, there is a group of high peaks after 110 min. This amplitude was not noted in the previous recordings during the first 20 minutes. It appears that it took the water some time to accept our influence, but afterward it became more stable than before.

Future shock to water?

The most interesting effect is shown if you look at a time-line graph measuring the area of light emissions over the entire experiment. It appears to have two parts: the initial stable part and then a part showing clear variations. Those variations appeared to start 90 minutes before we began our experiment. This could be that our participants were thinking about the upcoming experiment in the hour and half before we began.

Or it could be a precognitive effect, so that people already registered their future shock on the water in some manner. It might even be due to a more prosaic cause. The countdown clock on our site was resetting itself to coincide with the time of our participants’ computers, so that some people were sending intention earlier than others (we’ll fix this next time). We can only speculate about the reason for this effect.

Nevertheless, this variation from clear cause-effect prevents us from stating unequivocably that intention was the cause. We can only make the assumption, from the data, that it was our thoughts that had an effect.

What does this all mean? We now have demonstrated twice that sending an intention to water changes its light signal, and that asking water to ‘glow’ increases that light, compared with controls.

This suggests that we have the ability to change the very structure and signaling of water. So it’s good preparation for our next stage of these experiments, which is to see if we can make bacteria in polluted water mutate, in order to clean up the sample.

This also represents our first baby step in demonstrating that intention can clean up our polluted waters. This is also an interesting demonstration of how our intentions affect other things made of water – namely us.

Dr. Korotkov has made the extraordinary decision to publish his raw data on our site, so that anyone is free to examine it. For all the scientists among you who would like to view this, the files are available here.

Spreadsheet 1
Spreadsheet 2

Powerful effects for small numbers

Interestingly, although our effect was stronger, we had less than half the number of participants (709). Three quarters were regular meditators, and nearly two-thirds had read The Intention Experiment. Almost a third were participating for the first time.

Although half were from America and the UK, and other English speaking countries, we also had a good showing from my Dutch contingency in The Netherlands (58), many from Germany, Belgium and most European countries. In total, participants hailed from 48 countries. The most farflung were from Malaysia, Japan, Hong Kong, Latvia, India and Latin American countries such as Peru and Uruguay.

This showing wasn’t bad, considering that this is a replication experiment. Nevertheless, we heard from a number of you, who wrote to say that you did not receive instructions, even though you’d signed up. We’re investigating what happened, but our customer service people have been alerted to instruct readers in what to do if you don’t receive our instructions via email. We’ll also examine other ways to make sure you get through next time.

We did have a special Intention Experiment portal an hour before the experiment to allow you to sign up right then and there. That enabled participants to click straight through to the experiment if they are registering at the last minute. So let’s both work to boost the numbers on the next experiment. We’ll ask all of you to help replicate this in future months.