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Description of the different roles of the agents who participate in the experiments. Alice is the experimenter (1) and two other observers participate (if necessary) in the blind experiments. Bob is inside the laboratory, and for him who observes Alice in her environment, Alice and the experimental system (S with two possible states ↓ or ↑) are in a defined state. To control Alice's experiments, Bob can locally assess the results in blind experiments (2). This means that he replaces the initial label of each experimental sample by a code number before giving it to Alice for blind testing. Eve is outside the laboratory (3). Therefore, for Eve, Alice and the experimental system are in an undefined state until all samples have been tested and results are transmitted to Eve. When Eve participates in a blind experiment, she keeps secret the list of sample labels to be tested by Alice. After the completion of the experiments, she receives the list of outcomes of the experimental device and she compares the two lists to calculate the rate of success.
Source publication
The case of the “memory of water” was an outstanding scientific controversy of the end of the twentieth century which has not been satisfactorily resolved. Although an experimenter effect has been proposed to explain Benveniste’s experiments, no evidence or convincing explanation supporting this assumption have been reported. One of the unexplained...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... one replaces the parrot by the emergence of a "biological signal" from background noise, this is exactly what happened in Benveniste's experiments: In some experimental conditions such as blind "public demonstrations", the biological parameter did change, but not at the expected places. Figure 1 is a graphical representation of the different experimental conditions encountered during Benveniste's experiments. Alice is the experimenter and Bob observes Alice doing the experiment; Bob can also be a supervisor in in-house blind experiments. ...
Context 2
... Eve's assessment, ProbA (success) = 0.92 (Alice's assessment) and ProbB (success) = 0.88 (Bob's assessment). Then Eve tried to confirm these results by supervising blind experiments with the participation of Alice (Figure 1). After receiving the results corresponding to each label, she assessed the "success" rates for the inactive and active labels and she calculated the overall rate of "success": ProbE (success) = 0.57. ...
