Those of you who are by now, quite justifiably, fed up of my banging on about homoeopathy might as well skip this post. I ran into an old friend on the train today and he said he'd been reading my blog and been amused by my recent stuff on the subject. While we were talking a thought experiment occurred to me. Actually what occurred to me was a question and while I'm sure it must have occurred to other rational thinkers and been asked of the homoeopaths, I've certainly not seen it.
So here's my little thought experiment.
For the purposes of inquiry I'm going to assume that homoeopathy works. More than that I'm going to assume that it works exactly as claimed starting with the "like cures like" law of similars, the effect of succussion on the water and the memory of water long after the original substance has gone. I'm assuming all of it works.
Nowadays even the homoeopaths recognise that thanks to basics of molecular chemistry there comes a point when the water no longer contains any of the original substance. That's why they came up with the whole memory of water idea, so that it doesn't need to. Now I'm thinking of the point where the water we have taken from our Cn solution (the n'th 100x dilution) no longer has any molecules of the solute in it. The Cn solution itself may have but there are so few that they are all left behind when we take out the couple of drops we are going to add to pure water to get our Cn+1 solution. Fair enough the water we are taking out has the memory of what was previously in it so no problem there. Let's drip it into our imaginary Cn+1 beakerfull of water. Let's succuss (which in homoeopathic terms means bang the beaker up and down a couple of times). Let's suppose that the newly added water has now transferred its memory of the solute to all of the water in the beaker.
And let's repeat to get our Cn+2, Cn+3 and so on solutions.
Still assuming that everything works according to the mechanisms supposed we have a very interesting question arising. In what way are these dilutions actually diluting anything? Is the transferred memory somehow getting weaker each time? Or is it staying the same. If it's staying the same then we might as well stop as soon as Cn+1 is reached because after that all we are producing is more of the same. If however it's somehow getting weaker then we now have a whole different level of weirdness in the mechanism. Not only does water have a memory of what was once in it, not only can it transfer that memory to new water that never had anything in it but there is a potentially infinite number of different ever paler copies of the original memory. Remarkable stuff this water. It can take an infinite series of ever fainter impressions and there is a mechanism by which these impressions in becoming fainter become more potent.
Perhaps it doesn't work like that. Maybe it's like an infinite series of photocopies but everyone knows that you get escalating copying errors that way. Your thousandth generation copy is likely to be completely unreadable compared to your first generation original so that if this is the mechanism you could end up with anything, but you could be fairly certain that it wouldn't be whatever it said on the label.
I'm rather bewildered now. Either the point of diluting it is lost because it keeps on making accurate copies indefinitely or the water is such a miraculous thing that a C100 solution has a fainter memory than a C99 solution when there has been nothing of the original left since about C14.
Surely someone must have asked the homoeopaths about exactly how this works. My guess is that they will say they don't know but it does work and anyway science can't explain everything.
Which, of course, is just another way of saying, "it's magic".
I'll try not to go on about it any more.
So here's my little thought experiment.
For the purposes of inquiry I'm going to assume that homoeopathy works. More than that I'm going to assume that it works exactly as claimed starting with the "like cures like" law of similars, the effect of succussion on the water and the memory of water long after the original substance has gone. I'm assuming all of it works.
Nowadays even the homoeopaths recognise that thanks to basics of molecular chemistry there comes a point when the water no longer contains any of the original substance. That's why they came up with the whole memory of water idea, so that it doesn't need to. Now I'm thinking of the point where the water we have taken from our Cn solution (the n'th 100x dilution) no longer has any molecules of the solute in it. The Cn solution itself may have but there are so few that they are all left behind when we take out the couple of drops we are going to add to pure water to get our Cn+1 solution. Fair enough the water we are taking out has the memory of what was previously in it so no problem there. Let's drip it into our imaginary Cn+1 beakerfull of water. Let's succuss (which in homoeopathic terms means bang the beaker up and down a couple of times). Let's suppose that the newly added water has now transferred its memory of the solute to all of the water in the beaker.
And let's repeat to get our Cn+2, Cn+3 and so on solutions.
Still assuming that everything works according to the mechanisms supposed we have a very interesting question arising. In what way are these dilutions actually diluting anything? Is the transferred memory somehow getting weaker each time? Or is it staying the same. If it's staying the same then we might as well stop as soon as Cn+1 is reached because after that all we are producing is more of the same. If however it's somehow getting weaker then we now have a whole different level of weirdness in the mechanism. Not only does water have a memory of what was once in it, not only can it transfer that memory to new water that never had anything in it but there is a potentially infinite number of different ever paler copies of the original memory. Remarkable stuff this water. It can take an infinite series of ever fainter impressions and there is a mechanism by which these impressions in becoming fainter become more potent.
Perhaps it doesn't work like that. Maybe it's like an infinite series of photocopies but everyone knows that you get escalating copying errors that way. Your thousandth generation copy is likely to be completely unreadable compared to your first generation original so that if this is the mechanism you could end up with anything, but you could be fairly certain that it wouldn't be whatever it said on the label.
I'm rather bewildered now. Either the point of diluting it is lost because it keeps on making accurate copies indefinitely or the water is such a miraculous thing that a C100 solution has a fainter memory than a C99 solution when there has been nothing of the original left since about C14.
Surely someone must have asked the homoeopaths about exactly how this works. My guess is that they will say they don't know but it does work and anyway science can't explain everything.
Which, of course, is just another way of saying, "it's magic".
I'll try not to go on about it any more.
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