It's fecking water,,,

As I mentioned the other day, this posting from a friend spawned a few diverse discussions, one which is still ongoing.

My initial response concerned the text shared, specifically,

",,,[K]ind on the wallet,,,"
This is what they are paying for,,,fecking water!!

You see, one of the "laws" involved in homeopathy is the "law of infinitesimals" http://www.homeowatch.org/basic/infinitesimals.html which basically is taking a sample of a substance and repeatedly diluting it to the point of non-existence. It relies on the notion that water has memory, which is does not (although I have noticed that modern apologists for homeopathy are hijacking the notion of nanoparticles to get around that issue; more on that later if I can figure out all the fancy talk). As Barrett notes,

Modern proponents postulate that the solution retains a "memory" of the substance. If this were true, every substance encountered by a molecule of water, alcohol, or milk sugar might imprint an "essence" that could exert powerful and unpredictable medicinal effects. Moreover, water is never 100% pure, and impurities can enter the solution from the container or surrounding air. So if a few molecules could determine how a remedy acts, there is no reason to assume that the original substance will prevail over the impurities encountered along the way.

With that in mind, I posted the following video,,,

While I normally don't like to refer to YT videos as "evidence", this one is a really good demonstration of both the Avogadro Constant in action and homeopathy as a whole. Basically it demonstrates that the two leading principle of homeopathy are bunk: "law of infinitesimals" and "water has memory".

Now some people may be curious as to why I am insistent upon the Avogadro constant. As I have noted previously, ignoring the Avogadro constant violates the principles of chemistry, pharmacology, and the laws of physics by diluting their starting remedies to nonexistence.

The constant is not some random number chosen willy-nilly; it is not an arbitrary convention.

But there is something fundamentally very important in the concept behind the number; i.e., the knowledge of how many molecules/particles are in any given mass of a pure substance. Avogadro’s number might be arbitrary, but the science behind that number (that there are a certain number of particles/molecules per given mass of matter) tells us that 30C homeopathic dilutions don’t have a single molecule of starting substance left. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/08/17/what-doctors-dont-tell-you-about-homeopathy/#comment-444506
,,,
Odd, I see a formula for Avogadro’s constant, from the ratio of the molar mass of the electron to the rest mass of the electron. That doesn’t sound very arbitrary. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/08/17/what-doctors-dont-tell-you-about-homeopathy/#comment-444563

The Avogadro constant is a specific number 6 x 10^23. So in essence homeopathy is NOT being "kind to your wallet" as the above article notes. You are paying for fecking water or alcohol.

See also::  Alternative Medicine and the Laws of Physics

The notation 30X means the 1:10 dilution, followed by succussion, is repeated thirty times. That results in one part in 1030, or 1 followed by thirty zeroes. I don't know what the name for that number is, but let me put it this way: you would need to take some two billion pills, a total of about a thousand tons of lactose, to expect to get even one molecule of the medication. In other words, the pills contain nothing but lactose and the inevitable impurities. This is literally no-medicine medicine.
,,,
This is the point at which we are all supposed to realize how ridiculous this is and share a good laugh. But homeopaths don't laugh. They've done the same calculation. And while they agree that not a single molecule of the active substance could remain, they contend it doesn't matter, the water/alcohol mixture somehow remembers that the substance was once there. The process of succussion is presumed to charge the entire volume of the liquid with the same memory. Is there any evidence for such a memory?