Okay, I’m sure many people have carried out this mental experiment in the past, but anyway…
Given that a homeopathic medicine retains its efficacy regardless of dilutions – and some say actually becomes more effective as you dilute it
and
Given that every single noxious substance that has ever existed has come in contact with water at some point
and
Given that all the waters of planet earth are and have been mixing together, sloshing about in oceans and cycling through rain to rivers and back to the oceans, for about 4.5 billion years
Therefore, isn’t it inescapable that every drop of water on the planet (with the possible exception of water freshly created from burning hydrogen) ALREADY contains the GREATEST POSSIBLE dilution of EVERY SINGLE noxious substance on earth?
And therefore all human beings have and are undergoing continuous homeopathic treatment by the simple act of drinking water as a part of ordinary life?
In which case, what is left for a homeopathic doctor to do?
Of course your hypothesis also means that we are all drinking highly diluted “rat piss” (among other animals). Indeed, it would be fascinating if someone could calculate the number of times that the average water molecule had been “drank and released” as urine over the course of life’s multi billion year history on Earth.
Here are a few more quotes (mostly about quantum mechanics) with their authors that illustrate the point about the incredulity of scientists regarding science (at least some science):
*“I do not like it, and I am sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” *
Erwin Schrödinger, speaking of quantum mechanics
“Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it.”
Niels Bohr
“God does not play dice with the cosmos.”
Albert Einstein
“Who are you to tell God what to do?”
Niels Bohr in response to Einstein
“I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics.”
Richard Feynman
“**If that turns out to be true, I’ll quit physics.” **
Max von Laue, Nobel Laureate 1914, of de Broglie’s thesis on electrons having wave properties.
“Anyone wanting to discuss a quantum mechanical problem had better understand and learn to apply quantum mechanics to that problem.”
Willis Lamb, Nobel Laureate 1955
It could be that a study found that some herbal remedy worked, and that people were being sloppy with calling it “homeopathic”. My pharmacist refers to all the pills in a certain section of the store as “homeopathic” and says that many of them seem to work, but many of the items she points out don’t actually say “homeopathic”. I asked her about tinctures, and how dilute an active ingredient can be, and the law of similars - she had no idea about any of these. Moreover, nobody seems to be much of a gatekeeper regarding what gets to be called “homeopathic”, and there may be an incentive to label as “homeopathic” some product that doesn’t have any standing as an approved drug, because “homeopathic” refers to a somewhat accepted and longstanding branch of medicine. An example of what I mean by “somewhat accepted and longstanding” would be one of my region’s major teaching hospitals, Hahnemann University Hospital (Philadelphia), Samuel Hahnemann being the founder of homeopathy.
Certainly it’s no surprise that some studies find that some herbal remedies work.
Sure, they do! And a lot of it. It seems to me that at least half my friends buy homeopathy (on the basis of the number times of I’m advised to do the same). Not only that, but it’s also partially reimbursed by the Social Security when prescribed by a doctor.
Oh! And a lot of employers use graphology when you apply for a job, over here. So much for cartesianism.
Napier, Hahnemann University hasn’t been in the homeopathy business for a long time. The hospital moved over to allopathic medicine in the 1920s, and the last (elective) homeopathy courses were taught at the University in the 1940s. Sorry for lack of cites; my wife worked in the communications department there for a number of years, and the homeopathic past was a bit of a dirty semi-secret for the professors and doctors.
Meteorites, at one time dismissed as superstition by all educated people. The great chemist Antoinne Lavoisier (discoverer of oxygen, combustion as a process of oxidation, and air as an oxygen/nitrogen mix) stated that “a stone cannot fall from the sky - there ARE no stones in the sky.” Thomas Jefferson allegedly dismissed a witness’ statement with "I’d sooner believe that a yankee professor would lie, then that a rock fell from the sky! "
Sister Kenny’s treatment for people paralysed by Polio
What the hell does the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment have to do with non-locality? It’s about achieving a superposition of states on a macroscopic level. Are you sure you’re not trying to refer to the EPR paradox?
Also, you’re mistaken if you think that scientists being skeptical of a theory that later proves to be true means the scientists did something wrong. Scientists are supposed to be skeptical of all claims until they have been proven convincingly. The more dramatic the claims depart from what we know about the world, the higher a burden of proof they need to satisfy before they are believed. It would have been very bad science for physicists to except quantum mechanics (for example) before an overwhelming amount of experimentation had confirmed the theory. Also, if you think that scientific skepticism prevents people from testing these theories, you’re simply wrong. How do you think all the theories you list as having gone from disbelieved to believed did so? Because they were tested (often by many of the same people who doubted them) and convincing evidence was found to support them.
The problem is people who not only propose an outlandish theory, but also insist that it’s true without adequate evidence to back them up. These people are at best very bad scientists, and at worst liars and quacks, and are worthy of nothing but disdain.
I’m not an advocate of homeopathy, but illogical arguments like this one irk me more than somewhat.
Yes, many people before you have said the same cliche. No, every drop of water on Earth is NOT a homeopathic cure for everything.
Preparation of a homeopathic medicine has to be done by a precise method. Merely having a toxin come into contact with water does not cut it. You take the original toxic substance and put it in a small quantity of water. Shake repeatedly until the water takes on opposite properties to the toxin. And this has to be done in a particular way. Any old shaking wont do. You have to repeatedly strike the vial against a leather-bound bible. Now take one drop of that water and put in a small quantity of fresh water. Again shake, hitting it against the bible, so that all the water in that vial takes on the anti-toxin properties of the original drop. Repeat several times. Merely coming into contact with water does not make a homeopathic preperation.
Also, I’d suppose that the water must be pure, a blank slate as it were. If it had already picked up the trace of toxins that had once been in contact, then at best it would overwrite them, at worst wouldn’t work at all.
As I say, I don’t think homeopathy makes much sense. I’m all for attempts to discredit it, as long as they are logical and honestly presented. I just don’t think that your argument is a good one.
Another illogical cliche. Why do they require *extraodinary *evidence? Why is *ordinary *evidence not sufficient?
Suppose a lab wants to test a new variety of antibiotic. It applies various tests to determine that it is both effective and safe. The drug passes. That is ordinary evidence.
Now, suppose the same laboratory wants to test a homeopathic preperation. Is the same level of testing not enough? Why should we require a *higher *level of evidence for this? Why is ordinary evidence not enough?
Is it actually the case that the homeopathic remedies in my local health food store have been smacked against a leather Bible? That is absolutely hilarious.
If I’m going to quibble about David Simmons’ relatively minor oversimplifications of scientific history in this thread, then I suppose it falls to me:
The initial debate was rather less one-sided than later simplistic textbook and popular accounts would make out. For a version (though an undeniably partial one) that argues that the debate was more complicated than the usual accounts, see the chapter on Pasteur in Collins and Pinch’s The Golem (Cambridge, 1993). Yes, the germ theory was scorned, but there were reasonable grounds at the time for doing so.
This is just badly confused. The Steady State theory wasn’t proposed until about 20 years after Hubble discovered the cosmic expansion.
What you presumably mean is that the idea that the universe was static was almost univerally held until the discovery of the Hubble flow. But what was unreasonable about that? It was an assumption that had originated in Newton’s day, when it seemed overwhelmingly more likely than any alternative. It then matched the observational data for two centuries. Is it so astonishing that it required Hubble’s data for it to be questioned? And the really striking thing is that, once those observations were available, everybody very quickly came around to the idea that the universe was expanding.
Penzias and Wilson’s detection of the CMBR did seriously damage the Steady State theory, but, as mentioned above, I don’t think that’s what you’re trying to refer to.
Oddly enough, I was the one who was foolish enough in the early 90s to suggest to my then girlfriend, a microbiologist, that there was a significant case against prions. I got an earfull about how silly I was and a slew of papers from Nature. The moral: relying on New Scientist, never mind newspapers, for an impression of the actual current state of debate in a scientific field isn’t wise. I suspect the debate about prions was overplayed in such media and that you’re echoing this, rather than the earlier, genuinely scientific debate.
No, the suggestion was ignored, not dismissed. There had been several people in the 60s and 70s who’d proposed that an asteroid impact could have killed the dinosaurs, but their papers sunk without trace. The point at which people started dismissing the suggestion was actually only after the Alvarez paper announcing the iridium anomaly - that’s when the bitter debate started, not before it.
My impression is that the earlier papers were ignored on sensible grounds: until 1983 there wasn’t any reason, never mind a good one, to particularly subscribe the extinctions to an impact. The suggestions were thus effectively entirely speculative and hence didn’t attract much attention. For an account of how the earlier papers were received and the post-Alvarez debate by one of the participants that foregrounds the social factors, see David Raup’s The Nemesis Affair (1986; 1999).
It was long dismissed by some geologists. There was always a significant minority that supported the idea. Any geological minority that included Arthur Holmes has to be regarded - at least in hindsight - as significant.
On the other hand, it’s my impression that the doctors involved rather quickly changed their mind. Was this a case of inertia until too late or doctors accepting the hypothesis once sufficient evidence was forthcoming?
Again, it’d be better to describe Mendel as having been ignored. It’s not that anybody explicitly suggested he was wrong, it’s that nobody thought an unknown Austrian monk was worth paying attention to.
Note that none of my above points are a denial of social/external factors in the history of science - for the most part, quite the opposite.
As for quantum teleportation and homeopathy, none of the above is probably relevant at all. Research into the former is well established science that interests any physicist, but does not surprise us. It’s good research that is testing the less classical aspects of a well-tested theory.
Yoking quantum teleportation to homeopathy is merely a variant of a familar New Age tactic whereby anything “quantum” is somehow mysterious. On the contrary, quantum mechanics is nuts-and-bolts physics these days. Sure, there are some philosophical puzzles about it that engage even the experts, but that’s also true of, say, thermodynamics.
I’ve yet to meet an expert in quantum mechanics who openly believes in homeopathy. And that includes the French ones I’ve met.
The Nov/Dec 2004 issue of Skeptical Inquirer has an article that reviews this myth and shows that although the claim that a bacterium caused ulcers was contrary to conventional wisdom, it was not, as commonly represented, widely rejected by the medical establishment. The scientists who proposed the theory conducted studies to test it, and those studies were later confirmed by many other independent studies, until the theory gained wide acceptance. The time it took for all this to happen was about 10 years, while the studies were being done. It was science working as it is supposed to work.
As for the rest of your list, it seems to me (without doing a lot of research) that a couple of them happened before the modern scientific era and the rest were examples of science working as it should. Someone proposes a “revolutionary” theory (e.g. Hubble) and then provides scientifically valid evidence to back up the claim.
Because the extraordinary claim is asserting (implicitly, at least) that well established scientific principles are incorrect. To overthrow laws of physics that have been demonstrated over and over, you’re going to have to have a lot of good evidence that you’re right and thousands of professional scientists have been missing something for years.
The claims of homeopathy are so ridiculous that there is no plausible physical mechanism by which they could work. Someone claiming not just that one homeopathic preparation works, but that homeopathic principles are true, would have to provide reams of theoretical reasoning and practical evidence. Needless to say, it is highly unlikely that such evidence could be produced.
If I proclaim that the moon is made of green cheese and present as evidence a green-tinted photo of the moon I took, I shouldn’t expect the whole world to take my word for it just because I happen to have a Ph.D. from Wassamatta U. Nor is it sensible for me to complain that the scientific world isn’t taking me seriously and is trying to stifle my scientific truth. Arguing that since science has rejected lots of outlandish claims that later turned out to be true therefore my outlandish theory could be right, too, is fallacious.
Ah, okay. I guess “homeopathy” could have been a slip of the tongue. I saw her books (which had many pretty pictures of plants and descriptions of what they do) but didn’t take note of the titles.
Oh, wow. And I thought homeopathy was a crock before…
How do you tell when this has occurred? Do you test somehow? Is there a ledger where you can look up how many shakes for each given toxin? Does a tiny little ‘done’ popper open up?
Whoa. Okay, what kind of leather? Is ordinary old cowhide good enough, or should it be virgin lamb skin or something? What if the gold-embossed cross on the cover has worn away, does that affect it?
What if the practitioner isn’t a Christian? Should you substitute the Koran or a Torah or whatever to match?
Okay…but where to you get all this ‘pure’ water from? Because, as I said before, the earth is one giant water recycling project, with every molecule of it having been ‘used’ and ‘exposed’ to whatever a zillion times in the past.
(I have a sinking feeling that the answer to creating ‘pure’ water is to pray over it. In which case…why isn’t homeopathy considered just a variant of faith healing?)
Whatwhatwhat? Striking it against a leather-bound bible? Which translation? If any translation is allowed, what happens if you stich sections from different translations together? Does it need to include the Apocrypha? The book of Mormon? What if it’s only the Old Testament? Does the particular leather matter? Can it come from, say, a yak, or does only cow leather work? If you take out Deuteronomy and stitch everything back together does the technique still work? Or does it work, but less efficiently? If you bind up that section in leather and alternate hitting the Deuteronomy-less bible and the Deutoronomy text, how do the properties change?
So : if homeopathic water did get into the ocean, then the ocean would not become a mass of homeopathic water, because the ocean isn’t distilled water. And also, when water evaporates from the ocean and falls as rain, it loses any homeopathic properties it may have had.