Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation’s largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony.
He has also received scores of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University’s top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.
He has received seven national and international film awards. Ray’s books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Four of Ray’s books have been national best sellers and The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science.
Question: I have read on the Internet that it is not possible to create alkaline or acid water
from pure water and that water that is pure enough to drink can’t be split into alkaline and
acid components. Is this true?
Answer: As responsible scientists, we had the same skepticism when we first heard about
alkaline water. Therefore, the first thing we did was to purchase a water alkalinizer as well as an
accurate electronic pH meter. We ran tap water with pH 7.1 from our home faucet into the
device and found that the water coming out of the alkaline outlet had a pH of 9.5 (indicating very
alkaline), while the water from the acid outlet measured pH 4.5 (indicating very acidic).
We repeated this experiment with a variety of tap waters obtaining alkaline outputs with a pH
ranging from 9.5 to 9.9. It is true that “pure” or distilled water can not be ionized. If you were to
try to “split” distilled water, it would not work. Tap or spring water, however, has dissolved
minerals in it. It’s the minerals in the water; primarily calcium, potassium and magnesium that
allow water to be “split” by an electric current into alkaline, “electron-rich” (i.e., containing
negatively charged ions that can engage in chemical reactions to provide electrons to positively
charged free radicals) and acid, “electron-deficient” components. Individuals who say it is not
possible to split tap or spring water are misinformed.
One site on the Internet states “Ionized water is nothing more than sales fiction; the term
is meaningless to chemists. Most water that is fit for drinking is too unconductive to
undergo significant electrolysis.”
The above statement is easily shown to be incorrect with a simple pH meter and an electrolysis
machine. Most tap waters run through the machine produce highly alkaline water as measured
by a pH meter.
Question: Since you advocate drinking alkaline water, why not simply mix something like
sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) with water and drink that? There are, in fact, alkaline
waters sold that are made by mixing water with bicarbonate. Wouldn’t that work as well
and be much less expensive than a water alkalinizer?
Answer: There are more benefits to “alkaline water” than simply the alkalinity or pH. The most
important feature of alkaline water produced by a water alkalinizer is its oxidation reduction
potential (ORP). Water with a high negative ORP is of particular value in its ability to neutralize
oxygen free radicals.
ORP can also be directly tested using an ORP sensor and meter. We have conducted these
experiments as well. We found that water coming directly from the tap had an ORP of +290mV,
while the water coming out of the water alkalinizer had a negative ORP. The more negative the
ORP .
