On homeopathy...
In discussions of homoeopathy, most counter arguments are based on the observation that the supposed concentrations involved in homoeopathy are meaninglessly low.
For example many solutions are so weak that you would need countless solar masses of it before you could expect to include one single molecule of the "dissolved" substance. Not even bothering with handwaving about "the memory of water", there's a very serious problem with those concentrations, they aren't just scientifically meaningless, they're technically impossible!
Even is this stuff is being mixed in an eye wateringly expensive ISO-1 cleanroom environment. (And it isn't, practitioners mix this up in kitchens!) it simply isn't possible to reach that level of purity. As filtered and refined as distilled water is, there are still going to be traces of contamination, furthermore the very air that the mixing is conducted in will bare contaminants, at concentrations equivalent to billions of molecules per cubic meter. (I'm taking a few liberties with particle size, atomic radius and rules of thumb... since homoeopaths aren't even using such clean-rooms I'm still being staggeringly kind to them!) And that will be absorbed quite cheerfully by that water on contact.
Then of course there's evaporation to consider, aerosol effects of the mixing process, and so on. There are too many variables to consider, but under no circumstances is it possible to obtain anything like a genuine "C-30" concentration, and that's just based on transmission through airborne particles, by the time you consider contamination on mixing instruments the gaffe is well and truely blown. I'm not even going to bother reaching for the back of an envelope here, but it's clearly impossible to obtain even a C-10 level of likelihood of containing a molecule of antagonist per dose, contamination dominates the mixture ratios. And the actual administered concentration depends entirely on the lab, and a myriad of conditions that can't even be measured, let alone recorded.
Now by saying this, no doubt I'm enabling the homoeopathy lobby to claim that previous arguments, relating concentrations to the mass of the universe and so on, are bunk. But that overlooks my basic arguments, that the supposed dilutions are fundamentally unobtainable, and that consequently the labelled concentrations are just flat-out wrong, and all of the pseudo-science of homoeopathy and "prescription" of doses and dilutions is invalid. Put simply, there is no genuine data for what a C-30 does to someone because C-30 doesn't exist, has never existed, and has never been given to anyone, ever. And if there was a single shred of competence in the practice they'd never have even mentioned such dilutions.
For example many solutions are so weak that you would need countless solar masses of it before you could expect to include one single molecule of the "dissolved" substance. Not even bothering with handwaving about "the memory of water", there's a very serious problem with those concentrations, they aren't just scientifically meaningless, they're technically impossible!
Even is this stuff is being mixed in an eye wateringly expensive ISO-1 cleanroom environment. (And it isn't, practitioners mix this up in kitchens!) it simply isn't possible to reach that level of purity. As filtered and refined as distilled water is, there are still going to be traces of contamination, furthermore the very air that the mixing is conducted in will bare contaminants, at concentrations equivalent to billions of molecules per cubic meter. (I'm taking a few liberties with particle size, atomic radius and rules of thumb... since homoeopaths aren't even using such clean-rooms I'm still being staggeringly kind to them!) And that will be absorbed quite cheerfully by that water on contact.
Then of course there's evaporation to consider, aerosol effects of the mixing process, and so on. There are too many variables to consider, but under no circumstances is it possible to obtain anything like a genuine "C-30" concentration, and that's just based on transmission through airborne particles, by the time you consider contamination on mixing instruments the gaffe is well and truely blown. I'm not even going to bother reaching for the back of an envelope here, but it's clearly impossible to obtain even a C-10 level of likelihood of containing a molecule of antagonist per dose, contamination dominates the mixture ratios. And the actual administered concentration depends entirely on the lab, and a myriad of conditions that can't even be measured, let alone recorded.
Now by saying this, no doubt I'm enabling the homoeopathy lobby to claim that previous arguments, relating concentrations to the mass of the universe and so on, are bunk. But that overlooks my basic arguments, that the supposed dilutions are fundamentally unobtainable, and that consequently the labelled concentrations are just flat-out wrong, and all of the pseudo-science of homoeopathy and "prescription" of doses and dilutions is invalid. Put simply, there is no genuine data for what a C-30 does to someone because C-30 doesn't exist, has never existed, and has never been given to anyone, ever. And if there was a single shred of competence in the practice they'd never have even mentioned such dilutions.