Homeopathy Journal Club
Peter Fisher and Elsevier have rather kindly given me permission to reproduce the experimental papers from the special issue of Homeopathy on the memory of water, so I’m posting them in full below. As you know I’m a strong believer in free access to academic journals, especially when they’ve been press-released and discussed in popular fora.
As you also know, I’m very much against censoring the unusually well-informed brand of internet childishness which happens in the discussion on this blog, but on this occasion, since I’m posting academic papers, and since they’ve graciously given us the papers to post and discuss, it might be good to be marginally more journal clubby about it.
I don’t want you to feel inhibited, but I do have a bit of a fantasy about setting up an entertaining online journal club (although a formal one already exists), and I was hoping this could be some kind of dry run, although obviously these aren’t mass appeal clinical papers, which are the kind that I’d aim to do in the future.
So, the papers are set out below, and I’ve marked them as written in 1970 so that they don’t all clog up the front page of the site. There’s some interesting stuff in there, and some very, er, odd stuff too. Enjoy!
Overviews
“The Memory of Water: an overview”
“The history of the Memory of Water”
“Can water possibly have a memory? A sceptical view”
Experimental
“Long term structural effects in water: autothixotropy of water and its hysteresis”
“The defining role of structure (including epitaxy) in the plausibility of homeopathy”
“Can low-temperature thermoluminescence cast light on the nature of ultra-high dilutions?”
Theoretical
“The possible role of active oxygen in the Memory of Water”
“The silica hypothesis for homeopathy: physical chemistry”
“The octave potencies convention: a mathematical model of dilution and succussion”
Other Hypotheses
“The nature of the active ingredient in ultramolecular dilutions”
It all kicks off with a characteristically metered editorial from Peter Fisher.
Editorial The Memory of Water: a scientific heresy?
Peter Fisher
, Editor
Available online 31 July 2007.
Article Outline
This special issue of Homeopathy is devoted to the ‘memory of water’, a concept forever linked to the name of the late Jacques Benveniste, although not coined by him. The term first appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde, commenting on a fierce controversy which blew up in the pages of the leading scientific journal Nature in 1988. In June of that year, Nature published a paper by a large international group led by Benveniste which made the sensational claim that the antibody anti-IgE in dilutions up to 10−120 molar, far into the ‘ultramolecular’ range, triggers degranulation of human basophils in vitro.1
Nature had resisted publishing the paper, and the then editor, John Maddox, agreed to do so only on the condition that Benveniste allowed an inspection team, nominated by Maddox, to visit his laboratory after publication. The team duly visited, and, a month later, published its report denouncing Benveniste’s work as ‘pseudoscience’, but nevertheless justifying its decision to publish.2 Two subsequent attempts to reproduce Benveniste’s results failed,[3] and [4] although he remained defiant until his death in October 2004. Yolène Thomas, a long-term collaborator of Benveniste, recounts that episode and the subsequent history of the memory of water in this issue,5 and Michel Schiff has given a detailed insider’s account of the treatment Benveniste suffered for his heresy.6
A bad memory
Yet, the memory of water is a bad memory: it casts a long shadow over homeopathy and is just about all that many scientists recall about the scientific investigation of homeopathy, equating it with poor or even fraudulent science. So why revive it now? The reason of course is the claims made by homeopathy for the action of ultramolecular (also called ultra high) dilutions. Although the basic idea of homeopathy is similarity, the most controversial and, for many, implausible claim concerns the properties of the ultramolecular dilutions characteristic of it. Avogadro’s constant, the number of particles (atoms or molecules) in a gram mole of a substance, is of the order of 1023. The inescapable corollary is that dilutions of substances above this level are unlikely to contain a single molecule of the starting substance, whose name appears on the label. In homeopathic terminology, 1023 corresponds to a 23x/dH or 12c dilution. In fact, for reasons including the concentration of the starting substance(s) the ultramolecular limit is often passed well before 23x/12c. In any case, it is only a statistical probability and many homeopathic starting materials of biological origin are complex mixtures of many chemicals in varying concentrations.
It is this problem that links Benveniste’s work to homeopathy: he claimed to have discovered that aqueous dilutions of a protein retained the essential properties of that protein many 1:100 dilution stages after it had been diluted out. The water diluent ‘remembered’ the anti-IgE long after it was gone. The underlying hypothesis can be stated as follows: ‘Under appropriate circumstances, water retains information about substances with which it has previously been in contact and may then transmit that information to presensitised biosystems’. Note that this hypothesis has two parts: retention of information and transmission of information.
It is now generally accepted that Benveniste’s original method does not yield reproducible results, so why has the idea of memory of water not faded away?
Competing hypotheses
In fact, there are competing theories for the effects of homeopathy. The most widespread is that no explanation is required: homeopathy has no specific effects, and its outcomes are attributable to purely placebo effects: psychological phenomena, including expectation of benefit in which the homeopathic medicine plays no role except to convince the patient that they are receiving a genuine medical treatment.
Among the counterarguments to this position is that homeopathic medicines and treatment regimes seem, from what is known about the factors which increase placebo effects, designed to minimise it!7 They are small and unimpressive, and often administered at low frequencies.
Of course the main counterargument is the steadily growing body of evidence from both clinical and bench science that homeopathy and homeopathic ultramolecular dilutions have effects which cannot be discounted in this way. Other hypotheses which accept that there is something to be explained have emerged, most notably a group involving ‘macroscopic quantum entanglement’. These are represented in this issue in the papers by Weingärtner8 and Milgrom.9
Yet, among those hypotheses which accept that there is something to explain about the properties of homeopathic ultramolecular dilutions, the largest group involve what can be broadly described as ‘memory of water’ effects. In fact, as our Guest Editor Prof Martin Chaplin shows in his masterly overview, there is no doubt that, at a simple level, water memory effects do exist.10 But this is far from proving that they have the features (such as the specificity to ‘remember’ individually all of the large number of substances used as the bases for homeopathic medicines), which would be required to account for the claimed effects of homeopathy.
The memory of pure water?
One interesting theme to emerge from several contributions is that the memory may not be that of water alone. As Jose Teixeira points out in his sceptical view the process of producing an homeopathic medicine produces very high dilutions, but not necessarily in very pure water.11 There is a growing view that chemical contaminants, particularly silica leached from the walls of the glassware, may play a crucial role, a hypothesis developed in this issue by Anick and Ives.12 Voeikov suggests that peroxide species created by the succussion process may be significant.13 There may be homology here to the ‘doping’ of semiconductors. On a different theme, David Anick develops a mathematical model which elegantly accounts for the series (‘octaves’) of dilutions traditionally used in homeopathic practice, independent of the underlying mechanism of information retention.14
But perhaps most significant is the growing body of experimental evidence, based widely on different physico-chemical methods represented by the papers in this issue by Elia,15 Rao et al,16 Rey,17 Vybíral and Voráček.18 None of this work is final, conclusive or above criticism and in some cases the relevance to clinical homeopathy is not immediately obvious. But here are some remarkable convergences, for instance, Elia and Vybíral and Voráček, on the basis of entirely different methods, have detected properties that are unexpected, reflect large-scale organisation in liquid water, and, perhaps, mostly remarkably, increase with time.
The work collected in this special issue reflects convergent views from widely different perspectives that water can display memory effects and that homeopathic production methods might induce them. These findings represent a fundamental challenge to the complacent view which refuses even to think seriously about homeopathy. It may develop to the point at which, after over two centuries of controversy, there is finally consensus about the key to understanding mode of action of homeopathic high dilutions.
There is much work to be done, but at this stage we can say one thing with certainty: the assertion that homeopathy is impossible because the ‘memory of water’ is impossible is wrong.
1 E. Davenas, F. Beauvais and J. Amara et al., Human basophil degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE, Nature 333 (1988), pp. 816–818. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
2 J. Maddox, J. Randi and W.W. Stewart, ‘High-dilution’ experiments a delusion, Nature 334 (1988), pp. 287–290.
3 J.H. Ovelgönne, A.W. Bol, W.C. Hop and R. van Wisk, Mechanical agitation of very dilute antiserum against IgE has no effect on basophil staining properties, Experientia 48 (1992), pp. 504–508. View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
4 S.J. Hirst, N.A. Hayes, J. Burridge, F.L. Pearce and J.C. Foreman, Human basophil degranulation is not triggered by very dilute antiserum against human IgE, Nature 366 (1993), pp. 525–527. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus
5 Y. Thomas, The history of the Memory of Water, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 151–157. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (400 K)
6 M. Schiff, The Memory of Water, Thorsons, London (1995).
7 D. Evans, Placebo: Mind over Matter in Modern Medicine, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2003).
8 O. Weingärtner, The nature of the active ingredient in ultramolecular dilutions, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 220–226. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (157 K)
9 L. Milgrom, Conspicuous by its absence: the Memory of Water, macro-entanglement, and the possibility of homeopathy, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 209–219. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (736 K)
10 M. Chaplin, The Memory of Water: an overview, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 143–150. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (224 K)
11 J. Teixeira, Can water possibly have a memory? A sceptical view, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 158–162. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (366 K)
12 D. Anick and J. Ives, The silica hypothesis for homeopathy: physical chemistry, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 189–195. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (242 K)
13 V. Voeikov, The possible role of active oxygen in the Memory of Water, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 196–201. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (136 K)
14 D. Anick, The octave potencies convention: a mathematical model of dilution and succussion, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 202–208. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (187 K)
15 V. Elia, E. Napoli and R. Germano, The Memory of Water: an almost deciphered enigma. Dissipative structures in extremely dilute aqueous solutions, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 163–169. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (338 K)
16 M.L. Rao, R. Roy, I.R. Bell and R. Hoover, The defining role of structure (including epitaxy) in the plausibility of homeopathy, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 175–182. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (775 K)
17 L. Rey, Can low temperature thermoluminescence cast light on the nature of ultra-high dilutions?, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 170–174. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (267 K)
18 B. Vybíral and P. Voráček, Long term structural effects in water: autothixotropy of water and its hysteresis, Homp 96 (2007), pp. 183–188. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (279 K)
Positive Internet are gods.
stever said,
August 14, 2007 at 5:51 pm
*joins the club*
emichan said,
August 14, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Thanks for posting these articles and thus adding to the availability of knowledge to the masses. I can’t wait to read them. Unfortunately, working for a living means I can’t do so at this time.
kleptonat said,
August 14, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Ben
Perhaps you might explain to the non-science non-med readers what a journal club actually is?
Whilst it’s a common experience for many of us for those you’re trying to convince it probably isn’t. Might be running the risk of ‘preaching’ entirely to the choir.
superburger said,
August 15, 2007 at 12:08 am
journal club is when a lab/research group gets together to discuss one or more papers. Usually one person runs the meeting by presenting a synopsis of some recent work and it *should* evolve into a free-flowing discussion, out of which new ideas flow.
it is not unique to medicine.
it can be great, or a total waste of time, depending on your point of view.
kingcnut said,
August 15, 2007 at 12:13 am
Well, I’m non-science and non-med, so I’d appreciate a run-down from someone. I’m assuming it’s a sort of unofficial peer-review thingie where everyone joins in to critique the research in question - kind of like a book club, but less artsy, more sciencey. Is that fair?
My implicit disclaimer about not really knowing what I’m talking about aside, then, it strikes me that the key part of the above article is following sentence:
“Elia and Vybíral and Voráček, on the basis of entirely different methods, have detected properties that are unexpected, reflect large-scale organisation in liquid water, and, perhaps, mostly remarkably, INCREASE WITH TIME” (my caps).
Without that property of increasing over time, the “memory of water” can’t achieve anything whether it exists or not - if you dilute the solution to 12c or whatever with pure water, then all but the molecules that were in contact with the original substance won’t remember it anyway. The “memory” needs to spread through the rest of the water if it isn’t going to run up against the same problem that the original molecules had - there just won’t be enough to have an effect. Assuming that this theory of mine makes sense (not definite by any means) then those of you with the expertise need to critique those papers by Elia and Vybíral and Voráček and tell the rest of us whether their methods are sound. If they are, then…
…whisper it…
…there might be something worth at least listening to. Or am I being credulous?
kingcnut said,
August 15, 2007 at 12:15 am
Oh. Thanks Superburger, that’s the journal club run-down I needed. Well, doesn’t sound like I was too far off.
j said,
August 15, 2007 at 3:03 am
Milgrom’s referencing sucks, for starters - referencing the whole of Kant’s First Critique when describing his account of our experience of the phenomenal world, for example. Doesn’t bother referencing Hume at all, either. Was the article peer reviewed? (the referencing here would be poor in an undergrad essay)
The start of the article is great: “Despite increasingly sterile debates over ‘whether’ homeopathy works,1 the ‘how’ and ‘why’ have yet to be seriously addressed by science.” Oddly, Milgrom doesn’t address the obvious answer: why address the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of how treatment x works, if it doesn’t work.
For Milgrom, Hume “pointed out that inductive reasoning is based on custom or habit, and in so far as it predicts the future will resemble the past, cannot actually ‘prove’ anything”. Not exactly - Hume argued that one could not construct an a priori proof of any foundation for inductive inferences. He didn’t believe that this was a good excuse to make shit up (e.g. magic water memory). On the contrary, Hume saw inductive thinking as very valuable. Hume’s position on miracles is especially relevent re. homeopathy: “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish”. In other words, Hume believed that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
For Milgrom, Kant “pointed out that…we cannot know anything about how the world ‘really is”. Even if Milgrom’s right (his reading of Kant isn’t terribly convincing), I don’t think Kant’s Critique is quite the source Milgrom wants to draw on here. For Kant, the world as it really is - the noumenal world - exists somehow outside of causality and time (which, for Kant, are imposed by us on our experience of the world, instead of being present in the noumenal world). For Kant, we’re not capable of directly knowing the noumenal world.
Therefore, taking a Kantian position - looking for some kind of noumenon of water memory that science can’t directly know - would not help Milgrom much. This position leaves no apparent way:
a) that water could have a noumenal ‘memory: memory as a noumenon outside of time would be rather odd.
b) that this noumenon could have any causal effects on our phenomenal world (this may be an excuse for why homeopathy has no causal effects that can be measured - but what’s the point of medicine without effects that we can experience?)
c) that we could have causal effects on this noumenon of water memory (for Kant, we can’t directly know about the noumenal world, and this is outside of causality; there’s therefore absolutely no bloody way to know that shaking water will somehow cause a reliable noumenon of water memory).
Right. That’s no doubt too many words of incoherent gibberish - the effects of sleep writing when can’t sleep. I still think my gibberish is better than Milgrom’s, though
wewillfixit said,
August 15, 2007 at 9:12 am
There’s a very good critique of the Rustrum Roy paper at Jref (especially Rolfes comments).
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=88831
And earlier discussion of some of the work that appear in this paper.
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=87421
superburger said,
August 15, 2007 at 9:33 am
“The silica hypothesis for homeopathy: physical chemistry”
“29Si-NMR provide insight into the degree of polymerization of silicates. 29Si-NMR will tell us ratios among Qx loci. ”
29Si has a natural abundance about 30%, and its NMR receptivity is 2.1% of carbons.
I am *not* an nmr expert, but…
At the concentrations of dissolved Si proposed, you’d do very well to see *dissolved* silicates, above the *background* coming from the fact that NMR tubes are mode from, er, glass.
Normally you’d just run a blank, and subtract the background signal, but at these sort of concentrations I’m not sure that’s a valid method.
Unless you use sapphire NMR tubes, which has been done before, i think.
I could well be wrong, can anyone fill me in on the nmr details.
DoctorLoctor said,
August 15, 2007 at 10:32 am
@superburger
29Si, according to the JACS paper cited, has a natural abundance of
DoctorLoctor said,
August 15, 2007 at 10:33 am
@superburger
29Si, according to the JACS paper cited, has a natural abundance of [edit:] less than 5%. As you suspect, this makes it even harder to detect. However, using glass tubes shouldn’t be a problem as NMR experts (I’m just a former user) would use fancy pulse sequences to filter out signals from static atoms, seeing only those tumbling in solution.
The main problem is the low sensitivity of the technique - if 29Si is 2% of the receptivity of 13C, well, 13C is about 1% of 1H’s. You need about 10E-5M solutions of (identical) 1H’s to get a good signal-to-noise ratio, so you need about 0.05M 29Si - 1.5 g / l If you don’t enrich the Si, you will need to condense the equivalent of 150g of SiO2 into 1 litre of liquid.
To comment on this particular paper: as seems quite common for this “field”, the authors have picked up on some really interesting proper science and come up with some wouldn’t-it-be-cool-ifs without consideration to a few all-importants.
1. it is observed that interesting silicate structures are achievable at very high concentrations of silicate, or by introducing corrosive solutions into glass vials.
2. it is also true that certain inorganic “clusters” have been shown to possess anti-viral properties, not that they mention this. (see work by Craig Hill of Emory University) These are non-silicates to my knowledge, though I believe people are working on methds for making controlled, soluble cage structures based on Si-O-Si bonds for catalytic and therapeutic applications, but not silicates for the reason below.
3. problem - silicate anions form in dynamic equilibrium. You can slow this down by freezing the solution or precipitating the anions as solids. However, they simply cannot work as a “memory” in liquid over anything more than a few seconds. Most importantly, you will fundamentally shift the equilibrium if you “infinitely dissolve” the silicate solution over a period of seconds.
This “hypothesis” suffers from the same fundamental problem as the “water memory hypothesis”, then, in that the proposed mechanism cannot survive over time - the half life of the scrambling of whatever the structural consequences might be of chemical interaction with an active solute is simply a bit longer, as we are talking about covalent bonds rather than hydrogen bonds.
DoctorLoctor said,
August 15, 2007 at 10:42 am
correction - abundance of 29Si is 5% not 2%, so you would need to dissolve about 65 g of, well, sand into a litre to get a reasonable signal, if all of the dissolved Si was identical…
superburger said,
August 15, 2007 at 11:14 am
yes, abundance of 29Si is >5%. Don’t know where I thought that up from.
point is, doubt nmr will show up anything of interest.
superburger said,
August 15, 2007 at 11:18 am
“Consider two vials of pure water (in practice doubly deionized distilled water is used) each containing 198 drops (about 4 ml). To the first, two drops of pure water (from the same source) are added, making 200 drops. To the second, two drops of Sepia 29c are added. Each vial is covered and succussed. At the end, one is Sepia 30c, and the other is succussed water. To a homeopath, Sepia 30c and shaken water are as different as night and day. From a scientist’s perspective, the only difference between these samples is the 2-drop ‘seed’ added just before succussion. Other than the seed representing 1% by volume, 99% of the two samples (before succussion) were identical.”
This is flawed too, it appears to assume that the ’seed’: 29c Sepia (cuttlefish ink?) is pure sepia, whereas in fact the ’seed’ it is almost entirely water.
Therefore v/v ration is not 99:1, it is really much closer to 100:0.
DoctorLoctor said,
August 15, 2007 at 11:25 am
I’m absolutely loving the repeated use of the word succussion and derivatives, so as to make “shaking” seem like a learned and scientific process…
wilsontown said,
August 15, 2007 at 11:29 am
Just as a general comment on the issue as a whole, it seems that the authors are not really talking about ‘water memory’ in the way most people understand the term. They are talking about various impurities and how they might affect the structure of water. This isn’t the same thing as water structurally ‘remembering’ a solute that has been diluted out of existence.
So homeopathic remedies don’t only contain water; they contain all kinds of impurities too! But then, so does tap water, or distilled water that has been exposed to air for any length of time, so I’m not sure how much further forward this observation gets us.
Charles Copeland said,
August 15, 2007 at 11:49 am
‘j’ wrote:
Milgrom doesn’t address the obvious answer: why address the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of how treatment x works, if it doesn’t work.
Precisely. Just to expand on that: Milgrom’s paper is based in its entirety on question-begging as to the efficacy of homeopathic therapy. He simply assumes that homeopathy works.
If that were the case I think all open-minded skeptics would be absolutely fascinated by the Memory of Water and ‘quantum stuff’. We would queuing up for more information, thrilled to learn that after years of living in darkness we have now been enlightened.
How come that, in a double-blind randomized control study, a brackish-brown homeopathic liquid probably containing no more than 0.0000043 molecules of valerian’s active principle ‘cured’ sleeplessness in 20% of 280 000 patients located in 50 different countries, while a brackish-brown liquid consisting only of tinctured tap water ‘cured’ only 2%?
Anyone who could answer that question deserves the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Alas! Nobody can – the experiment is one I made up as I went along.
Pending demonstration of the efficacy of homeopathic therapy, explanations as to the supposedly causal mechanisms are at best moot, at worst a waste of intellectual effort.
ayupmeduck said,
August 15, 2007 at 1:10 pm
The Homunculus blog was interesting, but as “j” already points out, what sense is there in discussing *HOW* this process (Homeopathy) works, when it has in fact been proven that it does *NOT* work beyond what we already know (Placebo).
If I tell you I have built a fully functioning time machine, but I don’t know how it works, would you not want to be 100% sure that my time machine really did allow time travel before you start speculating *HOW* it works?
Having said that, I did read the Yolène Thomas article and I ended up digging into the DARPA funded study that Thomas references, “Can specific biological signals be digitized?” just because I was interested in why DARPA would get involved in this:
“http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/full/20/1/23
Thomas leads into his reference to the study thus:
“More surprising and mysterious was the fact that in some cases certain individuals (not claiming special talents) consistently get digital effects and other individuals get no effects or perhaps block those effects … We dealt with this problem in some of our own studies and also in the course of one independent replication.”
So Thomas thinks it’s “surprising and mysterious” that certain individuals can apparently replicate the “digital effects”? Others “block these effects”? It becomes far less surprising and mysterious when you read the study and see that the specific “certain individuals” that could show the “digital effects” were 1 member of Jacques Benveniste’s own team and nobody else. Just like the famous Benveniste paper in Nature it shows that Benveniste and his team came up with things that nobody else can replicate. I wouldn’t call this “mysterious”, there are far more down to earth reasons that would explain this.
Furthermore, Thomas calls the DRAPA study “independent replication”. Lord knows how he can make this claim since the study clearly states in “We found no effects from digital signals…”
So I’ve followed a trail from the main subject of a process that is proven not to work (Homeopathy), to a paper in a vested interest magazine, to a citied article that is supposed to support the “memory of water”, to a theory about “biological digitised signals” that it is claimed could possibly be linked the to the unsupported “memory of water”, which finally ends in a reference paper that in fact, and contrary to what the Homeopaths would lead you to believe, concludes that there is no evidence of “digitised signals”.
j said,
August 15, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Charles wrote:
Pending demonstration of the efficacy of homeopathic therapy, explanations as to the supposedly causal mechanisms are at best moot, at worst a waste of intellectual effort.
Actually, is Milgrom trying to say that the ‘efficacy’ of homeopathy is outside of causal mechanisms? I.e. maybe Milgrom acknowledges homeopathy doesn’t ‘work’ (doesn’t do anything; doesn’t cause any useful effects beyond placebo) - but he still feels that there’s space for (mis)quoting philosophers and quantum physicists re. metaphysics etc.
Not entirely sure what the point of that is - I can picture a Dr saying to a patient ‘well, I won’t give you any useful medicine, but here’s a copy of Kant’s First Critique that might distract you from the pain’ - but maybe it’s enough to keep homeopaths happy. I’m also not sure how this relates to evidence or medicine (complementary or otherwise), but anyway…
apgaylard said,
August 15, 2007 at 1:17 pm
“Conspicuous by its absence: the Memory of Water, macro-entanglement, and the possibility of homeopathy”
L.R. Milgrom
There are lots of problems with this paper from the perspective of a physicist. I’ll focus on the philosophical points raised. Perhaps there are other contributors better suited to an examination of the WQT concepts advanced here?
The philosophical discussion takes aim at a “straw man” rather than real science. It criticises what it calls “science’s primarily inductive logical structure”. The example provided is actually a common text-book example of “naive (or classical)inductivism”, a philosophical approach that had its limitations exposed some time ago, not science’s primary logical structure. The dominant philosopy of science is rather that of falsification, originally formulated by Karl Popper. Simply put, whilst the naive inductivist would have to observe all swans through all time to prove that they were all white (this, of course, cannot be done) the observation of a single black swan would falsify the hypothesis. This was laid out in Popper’s “The Logic of Scientific Discovery” (English edition published in 1959). This work is actually referenced in the paper [14], but as an implied example of the Post-Modernist attack on logical positivism (of course Popper was a critical rationalist, not a Post-Modernist).
This makes it very peculiar that the author continues to attack the “straw man” of naive inductivism, rather than engaging with the more relevant (and stronger) falsificationist position generally a