Particles everywhere.  Quarks strangely up the continuum, where they can be postulated without arbitrary precision to flow among the hadronic mesons and baryons; Leptons down the scale of posited particulates, where electrons roll neutrally, defiled among the 105.7 MeV/c² of muons and the apathetically gyrating tauons of a great (and probabilistically determined) Quanta.  Sleptons in the supersymmetric marshes, Higgsinos on the hypothetical heights.  Quarks creeping into the collider-beams; Gluons lying out on the fields, and hovering in the rigging of the august atom; Higgs bosons drooping on the W, Z bosons and the massless photons.  Higgs field like molasses in the eyes and throats of ancient university professors, wheezing lyrical over their lecterns at their wards; Protons and plumbons in the spoon and bowl of the afternoon muesli of the wrathful scientist, leucous in their locked labs;  Uncertainty principles cruelly pinching the lobes and hippocampus of their equivocating little ‘search babe in the back.  Chance people on the galleyways peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of particles, with particles all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.*

Oooh…  Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?  If you’d believe anything, and I don’t,  didn’t know anything, and I don’t, then you’d swear I knew of what I was on about, and I don’t.  Still, it is rather lovely, isn’t it? Me and Dickens… aside from 150 years and light years of ability in the sphere of stylistics, we’re like this: *crosses fingers*

So what is that?  That, my great and only friends, is a cacophony of sumptuous, semiotic manifestations that garners much to appearances, and less to substance. In other words, it’s word soup.  Bullshit.  Beautiful bullshit, perhaps a load that the bull in question felt a sudden, artistic need to shape and sculpt into transcendent forms, but, still, finally, when all is silkily said and finally done, and aside from the rose delicately balanced in its crescendo, it is still a steaming pile of moderately meaningless gibberish.

Beautiful, big words alone or juxtaposed do not a great point make.

So where am I going with this?  Let’s take The Great theme of our time, The 1023 Campaign, keep the foolishness of our homeopathic foes in mind and then turn our minds back to the riffed theme at the top of the article:  Particles stuff and Quantum Mechanics stuff.  I say ‘stuff’ because I really don’t have anything but the slightest knowledge of what that lark is all about.  I’m a budding linguist, and the days when my journey through the xylem and phloem of the tree of knowledge may have led me to unfurl as a physicist in full flower have long since leaved.  Yes.  Leaved.  Enjoy.

Quantum Physics is a discipline steeped in strange, counter-intuitive hypotheses, models and theories.  Homeopathy is a pseudo-science steeped in strange, counter-factual claims, nonsense and woo.  Take one unintelligible discipline to the layman, add one irrational field of bullshittery and blend into a smooth paste of fantastic claims with accents of soaring rhetoric and serve it all up in a bed of self-reinforcing believers.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the majestic poppycock that is:

Quantum Homeopathy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_y4-z-kDqQ

You may remember this lady, Dr Charlene Werner, being ripped apart a little while ago all over the interwebs with her unorthodox take on relativity, quantum theory and spelling/pronunciation.  Yes, Stephen HawinGs and Einstein tell us that e=mc sq and all of matter is little vibrating strings that we can ignore because it all comes down to one tiny little ball, like a bowling ball, and that means that the photo receptors in our eyes are incredibly important and science should have fallen into Hahneman’s Homeopathy camp (Maybe the rates were too high, or the redcoats were a little too fond of fraternising with your wife while you were off taking care of the nippers?) 200 years ago, oh, and our ears too, they’re very important for picking up the vibrations from the strings because we’re so well designed.  Einstein proved it.

See, I’m going to credit her a little bit here, and say she’s actually read a little bit of our stricken science-meister’s books, specifically “Universe in a Nutshell”, and didn’t understand a single word, but can remember a few items of vocabulary and madlib them together into something that people who believe in fairies, trolls, ghosts, EFT or Homeopathy would nod at sagely, chew on their organic, wholemeal tofu treats, and take as a seriously scholarly interpretation of the most up-to-date discoveries in the physical sciences that fit in perfectly with homeopathy and the only reason that medicine doesn’t take it seriously is because of all those nasty Big Pharma companies that only want to poison absolutely everyone so that they can have all the money and rule the world, but then have to do all the menial chores and build everything because they don’t think everything through thoroughly and unbiasedly like us homeopaths. *breathes* Ee gads! The mad, bad, power-mad and something-ad fools!

Now, that’s the completely insane version from our cousins across the ocean, those benighted souls who must labour on without divine guidance from Her Britannic Majesty and dreary direction from Gordon Brown… but I digress.  The point to follow from here is that there’s another type of Quantum Homeopath, a more insidious sort who, if the lay-sciencey-interested person didn’t know homeopathy was total tripe, might be taken in by the somewhat artful rhetoric, the impressive list of qualifications on offer, and the lack of understanding that’s out there in the world surrounding Quantum Mechanics generally.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a very British, professorial variety of howling crankery: The one and only, the inimitable, the great and wondrous Lionel Milgrom BSc, MSc, PhD, CChem, FRSC, MARH, MRHom and his epic article…*clears throat*

“Journeys in The Country of The Blind: Entanglement Theory and The Effects of Blinding on Trials of Homeopathy and Homeopathic Provings”

To save you time, I’ll bring the abstract here:

“The idea of quantum entanglement is borrowed from physics and developed into an algebraic argument to explain how double-blinding randomized controlled trials could lead to failure to provide unequivocal evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy, and inability to distinguish proving and placebo groups in homeopathic pathogenic trials. By analogy with the famous double-slit experiment of quantum physics, and more modern notions of quantum information processing, these failings are understood as blinding causing information loss resulting from a kind of quantum superposition between the remedy and placebo.”

The article ‘proper’ then starts off by talking about Nelson.  No, that’s not the one from The Simpsons, philistines, but Trafalgar-Nelson, monocularly-sighted-Nelson, “I see no ships”-Nelson.  Yeah, that one.  One-eyed.  Blinding.  See where he’s going there?  Lovely rhetorical device.

See all of those lovely big words?  See how he’s lovingly managed to stitch them into something that resembles a lovely, coherent structure of lovely sentences?  He even uses, lovingly, props that look remarkably like lovely equations! Well done that lovely man.  Clearly, that PhD has left its mark… and it looks lovely.

Now, I’m not going to be debunking this chap again, that’s been done to excess here, here, here and here for starters, but the argument goes like this:  Quantum physics is really weird, and the act of looking at something in the domains where quantum phenomena are observable can completely change what is happening, therefore homeopathy must be a quantum phenomenon, because we all know it works when you don’t examine it, obviously, but as soon as you start to really look it at, it’s absolutely crystal clear that it doesn’t work.  At all.  Not even a little bit.  So there we are, homeopathy is a quantum effect and you can’t examine it at all, in any way, ever, or it won’t work, but it does, because it just does.  Don’t mind this bloke behind the curtain…

Personally, I think he just wanted to write about Young Slits, and there are different genres for that, Lionel Milgrom BSc, MSc, PhD, CChem, FRSC, MARH, MRHom, oh yes.  Very different genres.

If you want to howl with laughter, read his interview here.

“And because one is suddenly asked to review one’s life as a sequence of apparently connected events – when as far as I can tell they represent moments when I may have been more or less conscious or aware (consciousness/awareness, you understand, being something that fluctuates – lawfully – from moment to moment) – then the effort to ‘join up the dots’ into something ‘rational’ can produce a certain kind of inner vertigo like looking down the wrong end of a telescope….Well, I am digressing, and we haven’t even started yet!”

Nice use of ‘rational’ there, then “life as a sequence of apparently connected events”, and he’d already managed to squeeze in a dig at skeptics in the first sentence of that, his first answer…  it gets much better the further you go.  If you fancy a laugh over lunch, then give it a go.

Unconscious self-parody doesn’t get better than this.

The final thought on weird physics and homeopathy.  If we leap over from the world of the quantum to thinking about multiple universes, won’t there be a universe somewhere in the great inter-cosmological superpositional play where we all die on the 30th?  Possibly. Won’t there be a universe where women find me irresistible?  You’re in it, baby. *smoothes eyebrow*  Won’t there be a universe somewhere where water has a memory and homeopathy works?

Come on, now you’re just being silly.

*Please.  Don’t.  It’s rhetorical.