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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with the follow-up to last week's episode called the Doomsday Water, which was about a totally non-existent, but historically very interesting hypothetical substance called Polywater. Now, if you haven't heard or watched the last episode yet, this is one where I'd really

recommend you do the series in order.

You should go back and check that one out.

Today, I think we're going to add a few more details on the history of polywater, and then

have some discussion about ideas that kind of bloom out of the ashes of

this failed scientific project.

All right, let's do it.

Yeah, so to start with the condensed refresher on the timeline of Polywater, the story begins

with some isolated chemistry research taking place in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s,

and this was carried out by a scientist named Nikolai Fedyakin.

Fedyakin discovers that by condensing samples of what he believes to be pure water,

pure H-2-0, inside extremely tiny glass capillary tubes under just the right conditions, he can somehow

cause the water to appear to separate into two different substances. You've got regular water

and then something else, this other anomalous form of water, which seems to be denser than normal water and have weird properties,

like an extremely high boiling point and a very low freezing point.

So this is kind of hard to imagine because we normally think of water as just water,

but maybe the easiest way to do it is imagine another phase of water that you've never seen before.

So you can think of liquid water, ice, and steam.

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