Quantum homeopathic flapdoodle

I had wanted to post something for World Homeopathy Awareness Week (WHAW), which ended a few days ago.

However, I have been hampered by the fact that, whenever I think about writing anything more about homeopathy, I tend to find myself losing conciousness. Or the will to live.

This partly reflects just how many words – undoubtedly running into tens of thousands – I have expended on homeopathy in other places – right back to around four years ago when I started commenting on Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog.

And, of course, my fellow-bloggers Stephen Curry and Richard Grant have already signposted WHAW here at NN. Not to mention Kausik Datta, who is partway through a multi-post broadside.

But I would still like to do my little bit to mark the occasion.

And also – the comments on Stephen’s blogpost reminded me that there always remain hard-core enthusiasts for Alternative Medicine Realities, people whom nothing could ever “un-convince”.

And, of course, there also remain people in science who can always use a small reminder of just how far from their world a fair number of the Alternative Medicine Reality people are.

So I thought I would give you a small literature comprehension exercise.—————————————————————————————————————————-

Unreality Detection 101

You are provided with the URLs of two freely accessible online papers concerning quantum mechanical descriptions of homeopathy.

Paper A – Is a Unified Theory of Homeopathy and Conventional Medicine Possible?

Paper B – Towards a Quantum Mechanical Interpretation of Homeopathy

One of the two is a spoof.

One of them is not.

After reading briefly through as much of the papers as you find necessary, answer the following questions:

1. A scientist or scientists with a PhD wrote
A   paper A
B   paper B
C   both paper A and paper B

2. The spoof paper
A   depends which universe you are in
B   is paper A
C   is paper B

3. The likelihood that a homeopath can tell which paper is the spoof is
A   high
B   low
C   homeopathically dilute

——————————————————————————————————————————

In case you were wondering, question three is set because homeopaths posting pro-homeopathy links on Twitter have linked approvingly to both of the above papers as:

“Evidence that homeopathy works by quantum mechanics”

Following which, any comment seems superfluous.

Though here’s one. Finally, whenever I think about homeopathy, the following line always floats back into my mind:

“Only two things are infinite…..

…the universe and human folly.”

“And I’m not sure about the universe.”

(Attributed to Albert Einstein)