Wunch of Bankers

The current issue of New Scientist has a cover story about water: You Need It, But You Won't Believe Why: Water's Quantum Secret. It's mostly about the hydrogen bonds between water molecules, and how they make water act quite unlike otherwise similar compounds. It's not anything new, but interesting enough if you haven't run into the topic before.

And then the article suddenly careers off the cliff into the Great Homeopathic Swamp:

That there is something more to water than hydrogen and oxygen is something many researchers welcome. But Rustum Roy, a materials scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park goes further. He thinks it is time for a radical overhaul of the scientific view of water - one which, he believes, has been dominated by chemistry for too long. [Oy. — Ed.] "It's absurd to say that chemical composition dictates everything," he says. "Take carbon, for example - the same atoms can give you graphite or diamond."

Well, duh, Mr Materials Scientist. That's due to the chemical properties of carbon.

In a review paper published in Materials Research Innovations in December, Roy and a team of collaborators called for a re-examination of the case against the most controversial of all claims made for water: that it has a "memory".

And I call for a re-examination of your head, Mr Roy. I think you were dropped on it.

The physical nature of water is quite straightforward: It does not have a memory. This has been verified experimentally so often that only the very deeply stupid and outright frauds suggest otherwise.

The idea that water can retain some kind of imprint of compounds dissolved in it has long been cited as a possible mechanism for homeopathy

See my comment on the stupid and the fraudulent.

which claims to treat ailments using solutions of certain compounds.

But doesn't.

Some homeopathic remedies are so dilute they no longer contain a single molecule of the original compound -

Exactly so. And homeopaths, who knowingly sell their customers distilled water and sugar pills, claim that these are the most effective.

- prompting many scientists to dismiss homeopathic effects as imaginary.

Bullshit, Mr New Scientist Editor.

What has prompted all competent and honest scientists to dismiss homeopathic effects as imaginary is that it doesn't do anything. It's been tested. It doesn't do anything. Yes, all physical, chemical and biological theory tells us that it won't do anything, but that pales beside the experimental evidence for it not doing anything.

Roy believes that by taking homeopathy seriously scientists may find out more about water's fundamental properties.

Pixy Misa believes that Roy was dropped on his head as a child.

The present editors of New Scientist, though, are merely an irresponsible bunch of scoundrels in it for the money.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:40 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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