A leading figure of the Scientific Revolution, Isaac Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and president of the Royal Society. While the public celebrated his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica and Opticks, which established the laws of motion and universal gravitation, Newton privately devoted most of his time to alchemy and theological heresy. He believed the ancient philosophers had possessed a unified, lost cosmic knowledge, and saw his own investigations into physics, chemistry, and Scripture as facets of a single quest to recover this prisca sapientia — primordial wisdom. His millions of words on alchemy, written in fear of discovery, and his rejection of the Holy Trinity, were deliberately concealed by his contemporaries and successors to preserve his image as a rationalist hero. He died one of the most celebrated men in Europe, though his most intense intellectual passions stayed secretly buried for centuries.

A Serbian-American inventor and engineer, Nikola Tesla was a visionary whose radical ideas about energy and matter earned him as much admiration as marginalization. After revolutionizing electrical engineering with alternating current, he developed theories that went far beyond the scientific framework of his time. His work on free energy and wireless transmission drew the hostility of industrialists such as J.P. Morgan, who cut funding for his Wardenclyffe Tower. His notebooks were confiscated by the FBI after his death, and many of his most advanced discoveries were classified as state secrets. He died alone and ruined, his full legacy never fully recognized by official science.

An Austrian esoteric philosopher, architect, and social reformer, Rudolf Steiner founded anthroposophy, a spiritual science he presented as a rigorous, empirical extension of Goethean natural science. A prolific lecturer and writer, he sought to bridge the perceived gulf between spiritual and material worlds. His holistic worldview gave rise to practical innovations in education (Waldorf schools), agriculture (biodynamics), medicine, and the arts (eurythmy). Rejected both by conventional science for his spiritual framework and by theosophy for his independent path, Steiner’s legacy is a systematic attempt to re-spiritualize the modern understanding of nature, humanity, and the cosmos.

An Austrian forester and self-taught naturalist, Viktor Schauberger regarded nature as the supreme engineer. His central philosophy was the polarity between “implosion” (centripetal movement, vortex, cooling, energy creation) and “explosion” (centrifugal, linear movement, heating, energy consumption). He argued that modern technology, built on explosion, is destructive, while natural processes use implosion — generative and vital.

Jörg Schauberger’s book Das Wesen des Wassers, published in 2006 by AT Verlag, presents itself as an essential, previously unpublished compilation of his grandfather’s foundational writings — original texts from 1930–1945, gathered for the first time from family archives and hard-to-find publications.

A Russian-born engineer and inventor naturalized French, Georges Lakhovsky developed a theory of cellular oscillation that earned him both enthusiasm and skepticism. Though not a physician, he challenged the medical establishment by proposing that living cells function as miniature oscillating circuits. During the Occupation, his Russian origins and inventions put him in danger, forcing him to flee to the United States. Official French medicine largely rejected his theories as “scientific charlatanism,” though Parisian hospitals such as La Salpêtrière and Saint-Louis tested his devices with documented results. He died under mysterious circumstances in New York; his legacy was long marginalized before a resurgence of interest with the rise of energy medicine.

A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich was one of the few twentieth-century intellectuals whose work was systematically destroyed by the most opposed political regimes. Of Jewish origin, radical and anti-capitalist, he was forced to flee Nazi Germany, which burned his books in 1933 as “degenerate.” Rejected by the communists for his theories on sexuality, he was expelled from the Party. Exiled to the United States, he became a target of the FDA, which ordered the burning of his publications and the destruction of his orgone accumulators. Imprisoned for contempt of court, he died in prison — a trans-ideological persecution of a mind judged too subversive by every established power, from totalitarian regimes to liberal democracies.

A Hungarian biochemist and winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries on vitamin C and the metabolism of fumaric acid. After his Nobel Prize, he developed visionary theories on bioenergetics that progressively marginalized him within the scientific community. During the Second World War he actively took part in the Hungarian Resistance, narrowly escaping the Gestapo. His work on the quantum structure of biological water and semiconduction in living systems was largely ignored by colleagues who considered it too speculative. He finished his career in relative scientific isolation, developing precursor concepts of quantum biology that were only rediscovered decades later.

A self-taught American inventor and researcher, Royal Rife developed theories on electromagnetic frequencies that earned him both admiration and controversy. Creator of an exceptionally powerful optical microscope (the Universal Microscope), he claimed to observe living microorganisms without staining. His most famous theory held that every pathogen emits a specific electromagnetic frequency that could be used to destroy it by resonance. Initially supported by some renowned physicians, he was progressively marginalized by the medical establishment; his devices were confiscated, his research destroyed, and he ended his days in obscurity. His legacy sees a resurgence of interest today in alternative-medicine circles.

A Chinese-American cell physiologist whose life’s work presents a coherent, mathematically rigorous, and thoroughly heretical alternative to the standard model of the living cell. In his Association-Induction (AI) Hypothesis, Ling argued the cell is not a “bag of solutions” stabilized by a sodium-potassium pump in the membrane. Instead he proposed a highly structured, coherent electronic entity in which the vast majority of water exists in a polarized, multilayered state at the surface of proteins, and where selective potassium accumulation and sodium exclusion is an equilibrium property of living protoplasm — not the result of energy-consuming pumping. Despite formidable experimental evidence, his life’s work was systematically ignored by a field clinging to pump-based membrane theory. He spent decades refuting critics and building a complete, evidence-based model of the cell that remains the most significant, and least known, dissident vision in biology.

A British physiologist and biochemist whose career was marked by constant, principled, and often controversial skepticism toward the established methods of his field. Born in London in 1930, he spent his professional life at the University of Surrey, where he was a lecturer in physiology and director of the Unity Laboratory of Applied Neurobiology. A committed humanist with deep concern for animal welfare and human rights, his uncompromising commitment to his principles — both scientific and personal — ultimately defined his legacy, at the cost of professional marginalization and difficulty publishing his critiques in prestigious journals.

A French virologist and Nobel laureate (2008) for his co-discovery of HIV, Luc Montagnier underwent a transformation similar to Benveniste’s, whom he later supported. After his Nobel Prize gave him a prominent platform, he began publishing research reporting that highly diluted aqueous solutions of bacterial and viral DNA could emit low-frequency electromagnetic waves — and, more controversially, that this “signature” could be transmitted to a distant tube of pure water, from which the original DNA sequence could then be reconstructed by PCR. This suggested a form of “teleportation” or quantum imprinting of genetic information via water. Framed within a theory of quantum coherence in water, the conventional response was rejection, treated as the unfortunate folly of a once-great scientist. In his final years he became a regular presenter at the Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water, where his opening talks were, by the organizers’ account, among the most anticipated of each year. His work on the electromagnetic properties of DNA remains a marginalized but persistent challenge to the central dogma of molecular biology.

A French immunologist and research director at INSERM, Jacques Benveniste’s career traces a dramatic arc from conventional recognition to profound heresy. His early work on platelet-activating factor (PAF) was highly regarded, until 1988, when a paper in Nature demonstrated that specific biological signals could be transmitted by water diluted and shaken past the point where any physical molecule of the original substance remained. This “water memory” effect, observed in basophil degranulation tests, directly challenged the pharmacological principle of dose-response. A subsequent investigation — including a magician on the team, orchestrated by Nature‘s editor — famously dismissed his results as an “illusion,” effectively exiling him from the mainstream. Undeterred, Benveniste spent his final years developing “digital biology,” proposing that a substance’s specific molecular information could be recorded electronically, sent by email, and “replayed” into water to reproduce its biological effect — a theory he pursued with rigor until his death.

A German biophysicist who discovered biophoton emission — an ultra-weak coherent light produced by all living systems. His work suggested DNA functions as a holographic laser, using cellular water as a waveguide for this luminous communication. Though his instrumental measurements were rigorous, his theory of a light-based biological information field was largely rejected by conventional biology.

An American geographer and researcher, the principal contemporary successor to Wilhelm Reich’s work on orgone energy. He systematically reproduced and extended Reich’s experiments, documenting orgone’s biological and atmospheric effects. His “cloudbuster” has been used to attempt to modify drought conditions on several continents.

A British theoretical and nuclear physicist turned alchemist, Steven A. Young holds an MSci and PhD in theoretical physics and spent nearly two decades in academic and quantum-physics research before leaving the field in 2005 to work as an electronic music producer under the name Hedflux. Between 2015 and 2018 he undertook a period of shamanic and alchemical study across Central America and Hawaii, an experience he credits with overturning his earlier scientific worldview. He now writes and lectures from Scotland as an independent “natural philosopher,” arguing that alchemy — grounded in the four classical elements of fire, air, water, and earth, plus a fifth, the Aether — offers a truer account of nature than what he calls the “scientism” of modern materialist physics.

His book, A Fool’s Wisdom: Science Conspiracies & The Secret Art of Alchemy (2024), argues that the Aether was expelled from physics following the Michelson–Morley experiment, and that mainstream science has been reintroducing it ever since under new names — dark matter, the zero-point field, the space-time continuum. He extends the same argument to other fields of established science, including nuclear physics, virology, and heliocentrism.

Gerald Pollack is professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the Pollack Laboratory. Trained in biomedical engineering and physiology, he spent his early career on muscle contraction and cellular motility before growing dissatisfied with the assumption that water acts as a passive solvent — a dissatisfaction that led him to re-examine water’s behavior near hydrophilic surfaces.

Using rigorous experimental methods, Pollack observed that suspended microspheres are repelled from hydrophilic surfaces, creating a solute-free “exclusion zone” (EZ) extending hundreds of micrometers — far beyond what classical colloid science predicts. He and his team characterized this EZ water as a distinct phase, structurally different from ordinary water, with the formula H₃O₂. It carries a negative charge, shows liquid-crystalline order, and forms preferentially under infrared radiation, creating a natural charge separation that functions like a battery. These findings suggest EZ water could be a fundamental energy source for cellular function — enabling blood flow, membrane-free intracellular organization, even the propulsion of plants and animals. The phenomenon itself has since been replicated by several independent laboratories, though its interpretation remains disputed; a 2019 critical review of the evidence treats the exclusion zone as a genuine, reproducible effect still awaiting a settled explanation.

His 2013 book, The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor, brought these findings to a wide audience. In his 2025 book, Charged: The Unexpected Role of Electricity in the Workings of Nature, Pollack extends the framework beyond water, proposing that electric charge — not mass alone — governs phenomena from gravitation and wind to cloud formation, rain, and animal locomotion. He also founded the journal WATER and the Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water, which since 2005 has become the closest thing this field has to a common meeting ground.

An American physician, Cowan graduated from Duke and joined the Peace Corps in Swaziland in the mid-1970s, where he first encountered the work of Rudolf Steiner and nutrition researcher Weston A. Price — both of whom shaped the rest of his career. He went on to practice medicine in New Hampshire and then San Francisco, served as vice president of the Physicians’ Association for Anthroposophic Medicine, and is a founding board member of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

In Human Heart, Cosmic Heart (2016), Cowan takes up Steiner’s claim that the heart is not a pump: he argues blood arrives already in motion, propelled by the structured water lining the vessel walls, with the heart’s chambers acting as a hydraulic ram that adds pressure to an existing vortex rather than generating the flow from nothing.

In Cancer and the New Biology of Water (2019), he extends the same idea to oncology, arguing that cancer originates not in DNA mutation but in the breakdown of the structured, gel-like water that organizes the cell’s cytoplasm — with Pollack’s exclusion-zone research cited throughout as the physical basis for the claim.

An Austrian physicist, Fuchs has systematically studied the “floating water bridge” — a stable filament of water forming between two beakers under high voltage. His experimental work has demonstrated that water can maintain an extended coherent structure under an electric field, revealing unusual physical properties, including a 40% density increase within the bridge, anisotropic thermal conductivity, and anomalous proton mobility shown by Raman spectroscopy. He has chaired sessions on droplets and interfacial water at the Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water.

Professor of chemistry, materials science, and quantum physics at the University of Strasbourg, Henry brings the formalism of advanced theoretical physics to explain water’s “anomalous” properties, arguing that the chemistry of life is a “quantum chemistry.” He developed a framework based on quantum electrodynamics (QED) showing how water molecules can form stable coherent domains at room temperature through interaction with the electromagnetic field of the quantum vacuum — a rigorous mathematical basis, he argues, for understanding “water memory” as transitions between stable coherent states.

A British biochemist and physiologist, Sheldrake proposed a radical theory to explain morphogenesis and instinct, moving beyond the standard mechanistic and genetic model. He postulates that the form, behavior, and organization of natural systems are governed by immaterial, species-specific morphogenetic fields — a cumulative memory accessible through “morphic resonance,” whereby repeated patterns grow progressively more probable and stable. This offers, he argues, a coherent interpretation of “water memory” phenomena, with water acting as a resonant medium especially sensitive to these informational fields. He continues to publish and lecture on morphic resonance; his ongoing research and talks are collected at sheldrake.org.

A German professor of aerospace engineering and statics at the University of Stuttgart, Kröplin founded the World Institute for the Exploration of Water. Applying engineering methodology to water, he developed the “Bild Tropfen Methode” (droplet image method) — depositing water droplets onto glass plates and analyzing the residual patterns after evaporation. His team’s research found that water from different sources, or exposed to different environmental and informational influences, produced reproducible, distinct crystallization patterns. Since his death in 2019, the research continues under his former team, documented at weltimtropfen.de.

A Japanese doctor of alternative medicine, Emoto developed a simple but controversial method for demonstrating water’s sensitivity to conscious influence. He exposed identical water samples to written words, music, and spoken words before rapidly freezing them at −20°C. His microscopic photographs showed striking differences: water exposed to “love” or “gratitude” formed symmetrical hexagonal crystals, while water exposed to “hatred” produced disorganized structures. Criticized for its lack of scientific rigor and blind protocols, his work nonetheless inspired worldwide interest in the relationship between consciousness and matter, and carried his research to the wide audience reached by the 2006 Russian documentary Water: The Great Mystery, which also featured Korotkov’s work below.

A New Zealand artist and researcher, Austin carried Emoto’s method into new territory by freezing water in motion. Her “ice glyphs” — complex patterns appearing in the ice — seem to symbolize the substances or energies to which the water was exposed. She interprets these formations as evidence of an intrinsic intelligence in water, expressing information symbolically. She continues this work at vedaaustin.com.

A British acoustician and physicist, Reid invented the CymaScope, an instrument that converts sound into visible geometric patterns through water. Using a vibrating, water-covered membrane, the CymaScope reveals the intrinsic geometry of sounds; Reid showed that every frequency produces unique, reproducible patterns — offering, he suggests, a plausible physical mechanism for “water memory.” Demonstrations and ongoing work are gathered at cymascope.com.

A professor of physics at Saint Petersburg State University, Korotkov developed Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV), a modern version of Kirlian photography applied to the study of energy fields. Applied to water, GDV produced different corona-discharge patterns for different types of water, and his experiments suggested that exposure to human intention could alter these images. He remains a regular presenter at the Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water.

A forestry engineer and doctor of natural sciences, Zürcher combines rigorous measurement with a holistic vision of the plant world. He demonstrated that wood’s physical properties — density, mechanical characteristics — show oscillations synchronized with lunisolar cycles. Using ultra-precise methods, including laser diffractometry, his research argues that trees function as bio-sensitive antennas, with circulating sap acting as a medium for receiving and transmitting cosmic influences, mediated by structured water in the xylem. He discusses this research in a recent conversation, “And What If Life Came from the Stars?”

An American research organization studying interactions between heart, brain, emotion, and environment. Under research director Rollin McCraty, the institute developed “psychophysiological coherence” — a state of optimal alignment between cardiac, neurological, and emotional systems. Their research reports that positive emotional states generate an ordered rhythmic pattern in heart-rate variability, accompanied by a measurable cardiac electromagnetic field extending several meters from the body; their water-structuring experiments claim that water exposed to states of heart coherence shows measurable changes in its UV-Vis spectral properties. The institute remains active at heartmath.org.

Professor of bio-organic chemistry at Moscow State University, Voeikov has devoted his career to the energetic and informational properties of aqueous biological systems, focusing on redox processes and their role in organizing living matter. He argues water is an active participant in biochemical processes, particularly those involving reactive oxygen species (ROS) — which, at low concentration in structured biological contexts, he sees as crucial messengers and organizers rather than purely harmful byproducts. He has documented oscillatory processes in aqueous biological systems, including rhythmic biophoton emissions and redox-potential oscillations, which he considers signatures of the living state, and has presented this work regularly at the Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water.

A doctor of biology and mathematical physics, Gariaev was a Russian geneticist who developed the theory of “Wave Genetics” — the genome as a quantum biocomputer exploiting linguistic and holographic principles, far beyond the conventional biochemical model of DNA. He proposed that DNA emits a coherent laser field of photons and phonons, forming a holographic network that carries genetic information as wave form. His “phantom regeneration” experiments on frog embryos suggested corrective genetic information could be transferred by electromagnetic waves, with cellular water serving as the holographic storage medium and waveguide for this communication. His institute continues this work at wavegenetics.org.