Could water really have a memory?

[abbassido]

BBC science series reported at 09:23 GMT, on Friday, 25 July 2008, that twenty years ago, in the summer of 1988, the world of science was rocked by one of the most controversial research papers ever published in the highly-respected journal [i]Nature.[/i]
According to a charismatic French scientist named Jacques Benveniste, pure water could somehow remember what it had previously contained. He had started with a substance that caused an allergic reaction, he diluted it over and over again until there was nothing left except water, and then he observed that the pure water still managed to trigger an allergic reaction when it was added to living cells.
Unfortunately for Benveniste, investigators soon discovered that the results in his laboratory were unreliable, that If the experiment was correct, according to Simon Singh, then it would mean rewriting the laws of physics and chemistry, then discovering that water taken from the mouth of the river would start your car!" A Professor, Martin Bland, of St George's Hospital Medical School concluded that "There's absolutely no evidence at all to say that there is any difference between the solution that started off as pure water and the solution that started off with the histamine (an allergen)."
Benveniste gradually moved out of academia as a result of the [i]Nature debacle,[/i] but right up to his death in 2004, he maintained that his research was valid and that he was being ignored by a blinkered scientific establishment.
Twenty years after his research was published, perhaps now is the ideal time to asses his long-term impact on the debate surrounding ultra-dilute solutions and homeopathy.
I was one day watching a tele program, about an experiment carried out by a Japanese (Emota), who said that “Water absorbs energy, and is able of transforming it”. I then started thinking of joining Benveniste’s findings with that of Emota, but was unable to scientifically come out with anything reliable.
Before coming to the above mentioned conclussion, Emota poured equal volumes of water in three (3) graduated beakers (equal by size) and placed them a meter apart, at room temperature (to avoid evaporation of the water). Emota would every day come and talk for ten (10) minutes to each: good and praise-singing words to [i]‘Beaker № 1’[/i] ; bad words, abuses and condemnation of [i]‘Beaker № 2’[/i]; not paying attention at all to [i]‘Beaker № 3’[/i]. After 30 days, he found out that volume of water in ‘Beaker № 1’ increased, that of № 2 decreased by one-third and the volume in ‘Beaker № 3’ remained as the initial one but very cloudy.

[mith]

The water cycle would ensure that all water is "contaminated" by memory.

[aliakbar]

Water having memory has been a very conterversial topic for the last decade, however very recently a book was published by again, a Japanese scientest who researched water crystals and snow flakes. The scientest when observing the water crystals observed that the crystals reacted by changing their shape when exposed to different sounds

[Darby]

I'm not sure if this is what mith meant, but if the whole memory thing had any validity, then any water anywhere would do, since it's been exposed to all solutes sometime.