4 ms·
You can't run faster than the speed of light, i.e. it isn't just for lack of trying. Explaining things in those terms to the layman helps them to understand the
by avar 16y ago
You can't run faster than the speed of light, i.e. it isn't just for lack of trying. Explaining things in those terms to the layman helps them to understand the issues. There's a large chasm between things that might potentially work, and things that couldn't even work in theory.
Homeopathy is squarely in the latter category. The whole concept of water memory is pseudoscientific nonesense.
Note that they're not just claiming that water has some special effect on the human immune system. They're claiming that molecules are capable of transmitting and retaining information in a manner that violates our understanding of chemistry and physics.
- celoyd 16y agoI think we mostly agree and are arguing mainly over interpretation. There's a large chasm between things that might potentially work, and things that couldn't even work in theory. Can you characterize this chasm? I think that there’s a fairly continuous range of possibility. When we say that “theory” precludes something, we might mean any of a variety of kinds and strengths of theories. It is a very strong theory that you cannot accelerate at the speed of light. Is there something as strong saying that water categorically cannot preserve information of that kind? I suspect the theories there are more statistical and harder to test. Mind you, I believe those theories. For one thing, the idea of water memory violates my intuitions about entropy. But it seems incautious to see it as a violation of principle. This kind of thinking tends too far in the direction of thinking that airplanes violate gravity, or that there could be no brown dwarf orbiting the sun because that would “violate our theory of how the solar system works”, etc. – scientism, not science. Of course, as I said, I have no special knowledge here. Maybe water memory is categorically rather than empirically impossible. If this is so, I’d be interested to learn why.