Readers of the magazine will arrive on Monday 10 April Skepticr, scientists and skeptics gathered to enjoy homeopathic drinks and snacks. They may also ingest arsenic; rat poison. They do so at exactly 10:23 am.
The founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, was born in 1755, on April 10. That is why the Week of Homeopathy will start next (Easter) Monday and that is what the editors of Scepter reason for a so-called 10:23 action.
10:23 refers to Avogadro’s constant. That number (more than 600 trillion, or a 6 with 23 zeros: 6×1023) indicates the number of particles in a mole of dust. You might drop out there, and the average homeopath doesn’t care either. It represents the ratio between the number of particles and the amount of dust. If you continue to dilute endlessly, you run into a limit beyond which a substance no longer exists. Homeopathy deals in such non-existent substances.
Sugar granules and a drink
I once took homeopathic remedies. A jar of granules that I had to melt under my tongue and a drink that burned down my throat. The concentration of active substance was indicated by a number and the capital letter D or C. It concerned sugar granules and a drink of 70 percent alcohol. You will be weaning and getting back into drinking the homeopathic way! I was young and naive and still had faith in natural remedies, but neither sugar nor alcohol had any effect.
Alcohol is still popular in homeopathy. It’s amazing that its influence is ignored. Alcohol would preserve the ‘active’ ingredient. That ingredient is so diluted that 1 atom of it would require you to swallow an ocean of alcohol. A homeopathic arsenic dilution can therefore be consumed without danger. For some homeopathic remedies you need a thousand times the mass of the sun in solvent for one active atom. Health!
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes about something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.