Microwaved Water and Plants
Below is a science fair project that my granddaughter did for 2006. In it
she took filtered water and divided it into two parts. The first part she
heated to boiling in a pan on the stove, and the second part she heated to
boiling in a microwave. Then after cooling she used the water to water two
identical plants to see if there would be any difference in the growth
between the normal boiled water and the water boiled in a microwave. She
was thinking that the structure or energy of the water may be compromised by
microwave. As it turned out, even she was amazed at the difference.
Below are the pictures that were actually submitted with the project. Some
of them were created with photoshop for the science fair presentation from
the original photos, so the display would be consistant and easy to follow.
The actual original photos are posted at the bottom with thumbnails. They
are thumbnailed because the original photos were extremely high resolution.
Marshall Dudley
Followup. We have seen a number of comments on this, such as what was the
water in the microwave boiled in. The thinking is that maybe some leaching
took place if it was in plastic. It was boiled in a plastic cup, so this
could be a possibility. Also it was not a double blind experiment, so she
knew which was which when watering them. On top of that she was wanting the
microwaved ones to do poorly, and although most scientists would dismiss the
idea, it is possible that her thoughts toward each plant had an effect as
well. Bottom line is, the results are interesting, and duplicate the results
that others have reported (try Googling '"microwaved water" plants') more
experiments need to be done with better controls and as a double blind
study. But this was a simple 6th grade science fair project, and was never
intended to be anything more than that.
The plants were genetically identical, they were produced from graphs from
the same parent plant, so that variable can be eliminated.
update 2:
Below are the original photos that were taken. The above photos were created
from them, some were simply shrunk and text added, but because of
inconsistancy in the original pictures, where some of them only showed one
plant at a time, or no picture was taken that day of the control, some of
them are splices of the original pictures. So although some of the images
may appear to be faked, that was not the intention. The actual photos each
were spliced from in in these below without modification.
