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.