From Peter Rowland
London
I read the paper that gave rise to your story suggesting a mechanism by
which diluting homeopathic remedies might make them more potent
(10 November, p 4).
My initial guess is that the clumping of dissolved molecules it reports
arises from adsorption onto the vessel walls. This is a familiar hazard in
physical chemistry when playing with dilute solutions. It can mean that what is
measured is predominantly the material in the adsorbed (two-dimensional solid)
state on the walls, rather than in the solution. The shapes of the curves given
in the paper would accord with this, as would the fact that the dilution history
of the solutions affected the results.
But homeopaths, eat your hearts out. Much more fundamentally, the results
themselves deny that brine can exist at all. The smallest particles of
aggregated “NaCl” they report seeing in any of the solutions they handled
contained about 1010 NaCl pairs—equivalent to grains of about
10-12 grams of salt. If this occurred in reality, there would be no NaCl
brines in nature, including the oceans—only suspensions of small solid
sodium chloride particles. When did this happen? It sure would come in handy
when one was needing a pinch of salt.
