What the hell is this?

She burns like the sun...

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:27:17 GMT

... I can't look away

[BPSBD] There's some idiot who started a thread (edit: like this) at badscience.net called pathological science in astronomy - Stellar Fusion I in which he was wrong about just about everything. This post won't make much sense unless you've read all that, but posting a compilation of responses here will hopefully make it easier to find as that thread descends into Bickering.

The gist of the original poster's argument seems to be that since the ideal gas law PV = nRT says that volume goes down as temperature goes down, that balls of gas cannot possibly contract while heating up as they would have to in order to ignite fusion and become a star. But Boyle's law has been extended to include gravity and it demonstrates that a ball of gas can collapse.¹ Whether the ideal gas law applies to the sun is another matter.²

His misunderstand of the behaviour of gases comes from typical school textbook sentences such as “gases expand to uniformly fill the container they are in” but this isn't even true in something like a gas centrifuge, which is able to set up a pressure gradient in a gas and indeed cause two gases two separate by density. This isn't something which normally happens in the Earth's gravitational field on a laboratory scale, unless you have a very heavy gas such as (I'm guessing) sulphur hexafluoride, but of course the pressure of the atmosphere drops with altitude.

It gets worse, though, when we get to the subject of plasmas. Maybe it's not a coincidence, but it was Irving Langmuir who coined the term “pathological science” as well as the term “plasma” for an ionized gas. The equations which describe plasmas are of course dominated by the electromagnetic forces between the ions and the free electrons, which means again that gravity usually does not need to be taken into account in laboratory scale plasmas, but he seems to think (it gets hard to tell) that since gravity is negligible in laboratory plasmas that gravity no longer applies anywhere that there is a plasma. Plasmas, which are partially ionized gases, have just about the same mass as the same amount of neutral gas, and of course they don't actually screen gravity or anything like that. In fact, the Debye length in space is of the order of 10 metres (and much shorter in the sun). This gives you an idea of the maximum length scale over which electromagnetic forces can act before they get screened by mobile charge. Gravity is always attractive though, which is why it wins out over astronomical scales.

Anyway, solid objects (such as the sample) very obviously obey gravity's rules despite the plasma in my growth system, if they aren't mounted properly or if they break and fall off the heater.

Gravity is a very good explanation as regards the solar system anyway: the orbits of all the planets can be described, to an extremely good degree of accuracy, by

where μ is 1.32712440018 × 10²⁰ m³ s^-2 and a is the length of each orbit's semi-major axis.

Maybe the worst part, though, is the claim that the sun has a solid rock surface (although he also says that all stars are plasma) based on images such as this which show the emission from iron vapour in the corona (from TRACE.

The sun is too hot to have any solids in it, for a start. The solar spectrum corresponds to black body radiation at about 5500-6000 K, the temperature of the photosphere. The light from the hotter solar core is not seen since it does not easily pass through such a dense plasma; heat from the core actually propagates up to the photosphere by convection.

The corona is at a much higher temperature (and lower density) such that the emission from highly ionized iron can be used to visualize it. The main purpose of the TRACE mission is to explore the relation between diffusion of the surface magnetic fields and the changes in heating and structure throughout the transition region and corona. The iron is only a small fraction of the sun's composition, and its high degree of ionization means it must be at around 10⁶-10⁷ K in the corona.

As for nuclear fusion itself, which he doesn't seem to believe in, both high temperatures and confinement are needed to induce it, but it has been demonstrated on Earth with electric currents or radiation and adiabatic compression. So it all makes sense to the rest of us. More sense than the sun being a solid rock which keeps the Earth in orbit by electromagnetic forces transmitted through plasma anyway.

Thanks to the other members at badscience.net for support, by the way. Especially as expressed in this thread or this post...

W. B. Bonnor. Boyle's Law and Gravitational Instability. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 116 351-359 (1956) [ http ]
David B. Clark. The ideal gas law at the center of the sun. J. Chem. Educ. 66 (10) 826 (1989) [ http ]

10:23

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 07:38:27 GMT

[BPSDB] Sceptics stage homeopathy ‘overdose’: ‘The society [of Homeopaths]' chief executive, Paula Ross, said: “This is an ill advised publicity stunt in very poor taste, which does nothing to advance the scientific debate about how homeopathy actually works.”’

It. Doesn't. Work.

There's no ‘scientific debate’ to be had about how something works if it doesn't work and it the quality of your science is represented by nonsense like this.

Another thing Milgrom is wrong about

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 07:07:07 GMT

[BPSDB] So it seems that Lionel R. Milgrom's legal knowledge rivals his physics for ignorance, delusion, and disregard of reality:

All the while, speaking with a voice of (worthless) authority.

Jesus' blood never failed me yet

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:42:02 GMT

It's on the news that a priest was stopped at the exit of the Milano-Torino autostrada with a blood alcohol level of 0.08% (the legal limit in Italy is 0.05%) and had his licence taken off him. He had to call “friends and family” to come and take him home.

The priest claimed to be tee-total, except for the fact that he had celebrated four masses that day and obviously there's wine in that. Whether there's the amount of wine necessary to put you over the limit (or on the U.K. limit) isn't necessarily the point. Having drunk the wine in some sort of cannibalistic cult ritual rather than in a bar with friends doesn't make you any less dangerous on the motorway. I bet those crackers don't help soak much of it up either.

Another happy customer

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:09:31 GMT

BPSDB There's a plethora of a letter at A Case of Chiropractic Manipulation Immediately Relieving Depression with Chronic Pain:

Patient A, a 41-year-old Taiwanese male, suffered from intermittent dysthymia which presented with minor low mood, insomnia, anxiety, chest tightness, back pain, and subjectively mild occupational difficulty... patient A received a single chiropractic spinal manipulation. The chiropractor noticed a minor deformity in the thoracic spine, and a traction technique was administered. He experienced immediate relief from back pain. The following day he reported complete relief of chest tightness, dysthymia, fatigue, and insomnia, with HAM-D, TDQ, and VAS scores of 0 for all.

“No, no, I'm fine now, no need to do any more chiropractic on me, I'll be off then...”

Reminds me slightly of various Blue Jam sketches. (Meanwhile, proper holistic back-pain suggestions.)

Attenti alla omeopatia

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:14:00 GMT

Ho appena sentito, sul Radio Monte Carlo, qualcuno (una “farmacista”) che spiegava quale sono le remedie omeopatiche di portare in vacanza. Volgio dire, in italiano (ma non so se i motori di ricerca troveranno comunque) che omeopatia è una grande cagata che non funzione per niente e non ha nessun base nè scientifico nè medico, ed è presente in farmacie solo così che Boiron possono pigliare soldi. Evitalo.

(I've just heard on Radio Monte Carlo, some “pharmacist” or other banging on about which homeopathic remedies to take on holiday. At least he didn't mention malaria, but he did mention “Sol” for sunburn. Readers of this blog will know what a big pile of nonsense this is, I just don't expect that listeners of Radio Monte Carlo necessarily will. Italy apparently has an above average number of users, if you believe that link.)

Maybe I'll edit this post a bit after I've had more of a look around, to find out how entrenched the woo is...

Experimenting with phenomena...

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:00:59 GMT

... which aren't actually there at all

[BPSDB] It's Homeopathy Awareness Week, and I can think of no better way of stopping people wasting time and money on homeopathy than by making them aware of exactly what homeopathy thinks it is. To this end, we have jdc325, Zeno, APGaylard, AndyD, Zygoma, The Quackometer, David Colquhoun, Orac, and Steven Novella (Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week, Homeopathy Awareness Week) helping to spread awareness of what a great big pile of nonsense homeopathy is. It's not “herbal,” it's not “natural,” it doesn't “work” by “stimulating your immune system” and it's not a viable alternative to the Western Big Pharma hegemony. This is because homeopathic preparations contain nothing of the ingredient(s) listed on the label (although other stuff may be in there), what with it/them having been diluted out of existence in a strange procedure invented about 200 years ago in Germany (while many modern pharmaceuticals are based on plant extracts, more tightly controlled in terms of dose and purity than herbal medicines themselves); if there's no active ingredient then obviously it can't be anything more than placebo, a result repeatedly found in trials of homeopathy, so there's no reason to try to invent increasingly far-fetched explanations of how homeopathy “works”.

Following Lionel R. Milgrom's¹ editorial, which had very little to do with what Otto Weingärtner ² wrote, it's the turn of Alex Hankey.³

“As a theoretical physicist, Weingärtner seems an unlikely candidate to have made several useful contributions to understanding homeopathy,⁴^,⁵ but “seeing is believing,” and he belongs to the ranks of those like myself, for whom seeing particular medical conditions improve by applying homeopathy convince that genuine phenomena await scientific explanation. Characteristic reactions to prescribed remedies result in the most spectacular cases, differing completely from improvements seen in placebo cases, where pathology improves without a “healing crisis.” In my opinion, conducting trials on cases for which such extreme reactions may be expected would be the best way to demonstrate that potentized remedies do indeed have systematic, observable physiologic effects. If a “healing reaction” is induced by taking a homeopathic remedy, as often occurs on the path to cure, only the remedy could have produced it. What better proof could be given of actual physiologic effects of taking a potentized remedy?”

Hankey is right in his implication that a theoretical physicist ought to know better; however, a scientist is well within his job description to try to find out what science is going on behind an apparent observation. The obvious answers are nearly always the right ones, though, and if medical conditions really seem to improve after the patient has taken some water (usually with ethanol or salt in it) from which all traces of an irrelevant substance have been removed, or some sugar pills onto which a drop of this water has been allowed to fall, or some pills which were once in contact with the pills in the previous subclause, then you really need to ask yourself if the patient wouldn't have got better anyway. The workings of the human immune system give a far more satisfy explanation. Bear in mind that patients with minor acute conditions are often going to get better anyway, and that patients with fluctuating chronic conditions often seek help when they are feeling particularly bad, and then it's obvious how something called “regression toward the mean” can make people think that whatever they tried last did the trick. But the “healing crisis” is something particularly insidious which homeopaths have invented in order to explain the other possibility - that the patient is going to keep getting worse since the treatment is doing nothing. Once you're in the mindset that whatever happens to the patient is because of homeopathy, you are lost, rationalizing desperately as random stuff happens. All those boring times when the remedies do nothing at all are filtered out of your memory (“... even Kent said that sometimes with the best intention and the best homeopathic prescribing, the remedy doesn't work - so what is going on? Entanglement is a much more subtle thing than just intention. I don't quite know what it means yet.”).

“But some scientists seem prepared to assert that, if a phenomenon does not yet possess a shadow of a scientific theory, then no scientific theory is possible, and the phenomena concerned must lie beyond the domain of science.”

No, we're prepared to assert that, when presented with a phenomenon whose purported explanation goes against a couple of centuries' worth of extremely successful science, that we're going to need pretty good proof that this phenomenon is actually happening. That proof does not exist,⁶ so there is no reason to make up new science and instead there is perfectly good other science (psychology instead of physics) to explain why people believe things which are not true.⁷^,⁸ It is the quacks who keep telling us that our science is inadequate to explain their results, but they can't resist appropriating sciency-sounding language to make their nonsense more impressive⁹ just like they are always willing to flag up a double-blind randomized, controlled trial of a non-individualized remedy when they think it gives them the result they want¹⁰^,¹¹^,¹²^,¹³^,¹⁴^,¹⁵ but then claim that RCTs don't work and that remedies need to be individualized when,¹⁶ as in the majority of cases,¹⁷ it doesn't. Knowing how something works comes long after we decide whether it works or not at all.

“Weingärtner's present contribution is to formulate a means of analyzing a series of experiments that contain conflicting results.”

His insight is that you should take an average of lots of measurements. It really is as simple as that. The more times you measure something, the closer the average should get to the true value. That's why big trials are better than small ones.¹⁷

“Many medical disciplines present similar challenges to science.”

Do they? There's no citation for this. Does he mean that physics can't be used to gain insight into psychology or does he not realize that biology is also a science? Of course we don't have all the answers yet as science continues to grow and progress on all fronts.

“The idea that we now possess all the theories we shall ever need to treat either day-to-day or laboratory phenomena is a gross exaggeration of our scientific expertise.”

There would be no reason to be in the laboratory if we had all the theories we shall ever need, and I for one am happy that there is still a job for me to do.

“Many disciplines of science are slowly undergoing revolutions. New forms of fundamental physics are proposed annually.”

Are they? Like the superstring theory review¹⁸ Hankey cites (wrongly) from 1986?

“Scientific studies of out-of-body experiences, hypnotic regression, past lives, and the afterlife, are revolutionizing our understanding of the world in which we live, and bringing hope to millions.”

It's particularly heinous to tack this sentence about paranormal phenomena onto the end of a paragraph about advances in science, since the science here is in the psychology, not the paranormal.

“These minor scientific revolutions prove that the metaphysics of classical physics and Bohr-Heisenberg quantum physics is simply too limiting. Such “materialist” metaphysics bears no relation to the wider world of human experience, only to the narrow world in which the scientific community's leaders allocate funds for experiment.”

Now that's just nonsense. Quantum physics bears no relation to “the wider world of human experience” only in the sense that it's not feasible to derive psychological principles directly from quantum electrodynamics (which isn't exactly “Bohr-Heisenberg”),¹⁹^,²⁰^,²¹ even if chemistry is built on physics and biology is built on chemistry.²² I don't know quite what to say about manner in which “the scientific community's leaders allocate funds for experiment”. I wonder who these “leaders” are and if I can submit a proposal? We're currently having to ask the CARIPLO foundation or the European Commission.

“So how does this affect CAM?”

I don't know, Alex, why don't you tell me?

“The idea that CAM disciplines can be theoretically understood by extending known laws of biophysics is slowly gaining currency.”

No, not according to people who understand biology or physics it isn't.

“Many CAM disciplines have excellent phenomenologies.”

... but most have rubbish ones.

“This makes it much easier to frame theoretical hypotheses for how they may work.”

... if they work (which they don't).

“Ayurveda is a case in point. Clinical observations over several millennia have developed a coherent phenomenology that can be tested and verified by theoretical models and predictive experiment.”

Well, my online access to the journals doesn't go back that far.

“Ayurveda basic concepts are proving highly susceptible to theoretical study.”

No they aren't: if there's no citation it isn't true.

“When this has been achieved for homeopathy,”

... it won't be, because homeopathy doesn't work.

“... and associated aspects of energy medicine and vibrational medicine,”

“Associated” according to you, but every quack seems to have their own strange mental map of how different made up things relate to each other.

“... it will become possible to design better experiments. Until that time, Weingärtner's new approach should rule the roost.”

You already know what counts as a better experiment,¹⁷ and why there's nothing to design.⁶ You just choose to ignore the evidence rather than admit you might be wrong. You are not doing science.

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.

Golden Balls

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 09:37:57 GMT

[BPSDB] I don't want to spend too much time picking apart Lionel R. Milgrom's¹ reading of Sir Michael Rawlins's speech in his J. Alt. Complement. Med. editorial which has very little to do with Otto Weingärtner's² recent defence of the attempts of Shang et al. and Maddox et al. to teach homeopaths about doing experiments properly³^,⁴ instead of craply.⁵^,⁶ Holfordwatch have already taken apart Patrick Holford's attempt at quote mining it, and Badly Shaved Monkey introduced the subject at JREF and badscience.net, and I've tried to explain how the DBRCT is just the most reliable way of working out if your intervention is actually doing anything or not, to minimize the errors and converge on the right answer in the way which Weingärtner² describes (and it wouldn't be necessary to be scrabbling about in the statistical noise if homeopathy worked as well as some of these people claim it does). More recently (I admit it's taken me a while to get around to finishing this post), David Colquhoun has highlighted the criticism which the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) have drawn, whose jobs it is to make sure that medicines work and are worth using, over recommendations related to quackery. The NICE guidelines related to lower back pain are especially important in the light of the British Chiropractic Association's attempts to sue Simon Singh, but what's most relevant to this post is the possible illegality of a label on a bottle of “Arnica 30C” pills which says “a homoeopathic medicinal product used within the homoeopathic tradition for the symptomatic relief of sprains, muscular aches, and bruising or swelling after contusions” when (a) the pills contain no Arnica, what with it having been diluted by a factor of 10⁶⁰, and (b) there is no evidence that these pills will do anything at all; in fact there is positive evidence that homeopathic Arnica pills do nothing.⁷

It's also true what Milgrom says about science being “more in hock to powerful interest groups” such as the French homeopathy company Boiron, who were paying two of the co-authors on the discredited⁴ Nature paper from the Benveniste group.⁵ Except he said “science” when he meant “quackery” (and see also “Homeopaths in sacka with Big Quacka”).

What remains is the erroneous⁸ belief that Lüdtke and Rutten and Rutten and Stolper ⁹^,¹⁰ have discredited Shang et al.³ when in fact Rutten and Stolper ¹⁰ merely make a bunch of obvious⁸ false statements about Shang et al.³ while Lüdtke and Rutten ⁹ (having been published in a proper journal rather than the Faculty of Homeopathy's house fansheet)don't say much at all; both of them confirm that rubbish trials make homeopathy look more likely. Milgrom writes that

Randomness of experimental reproducibility, however, is not the sole preserve of homeopathy. This phenomenon is exhibited during studies of parapsychology and psi phemomena, and Weingärtner's arguments are general enough include these. Indeed, it is just conceivable such arguments might be usefully applied to other areas (e.g., the known reduction in effect sizes obtained from RCTs on drugs, compared to effect sizes obtained in real-life practice,¹¹ or tackling another important area of science where random reproducibility exists [i.e., in systems close to chaos]).¹²

Listen, Lionel: we know that if we're doing a noisy experiment with a weak effect, that we need to do it well and repeat it many times to build up good statistics and see if the effect is really there. That's all this means. Bernoulli knew it and Shang et al. knew it. There's no magical new insight here. We've already seen that the effects of homeopathy disappear into the noise as the experiments are done better.³ You can't just take the badly-done studies with positive effects as proof that homeopathy works and dismiss the negative ones as flawed or subject to (completely unphysical) “non-local” effects. Science would be impossible in a world as you see it. Clearly, science is possible otherwise I wouldn't be able to write this post and you wouldn't be able to read it, and this is objectively true despite whatever post-modern harbles-du-jour¹³ you subscribe too, so give up.

The other editorial related to this article,² from Alex Hankey,¹⁴ will be next.

.pdf of Sir Michael Rawlins's presentation

(and see also Fusion is a dish best served cold).

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.

A little bit of what we call... “manipulation”...

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:13:16 GMT

[BPSDB] I haven't really been able to keep up with all the stuff going on with Simon Singh and the British Chiropractic Association... has anyone linked to youtube.com/watch?v=jZG10g2HOw0 yet?

Let me come with you, I can see... I can see perfectly...

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 12:26:23 GMT

[BPSDB] Recently I have been mostly reading “Homeopathic Pathogenetic Trials Produce Specific Symptoms Different from Placebo”¹ and at first sight the result looks very interesting: homeopathic remedies or placebo were given to healthy volunteers in a double-blinded manner, “proving symptoms” were assigned to their remedies by a materia medica expert, and it turned out that the symptoms matched the remedies the participants were taking. In fact they matched very well: out of the 165 symptoms experienced by the 25 participants during the four day trial, on average the participants in the two groups taking different homeopathic remedies experienced five or six symptoms specific to those remedies each while the participants in the placebo group experienced about 10—11 “non-specific” symptoms each. The number of inconsistent symptoms experienced in each group (i.e. non-specific symptoms or symptoms associated with the wrong remedy experienced in the homeopathy groups) was zero. These impressive results even contradict some of the rubbish results in the literature.²^,³ Out of the discussion at JREF, where you can find many quotes from the paper which I don't want to reproduce here, I've developed the following thoughts.

Here's a summary of what is supposed to have happened in the paper, as I understand it.

HM produces list of 20 remedies and selects 25 participants out of 59 trainee homeopaths;
IP chooses two of the 20 remedies “at random” (salt and arsenic) to give to the selected participants, prepares remedy and placebo pills and sends them to the study centre in randomly numbered containers;
RS assigns random numbers to participants according to software - “code was kept safely by the study centre”;
HM as “proving director” conducts interviews with participants to verify symptoms noted by participants in their diaries;
?? collates symptoms across all participants in a “head-to-foot” scheme;
?? sends list of symptoms (disconnected from participants) and names of the two remedies used to MM;
MM collates symptoms with the two remedies or the placebo using software;
?? collates symptoms, now labelled according to remedies by MM, with the participants they came from;
RS perform statistical analysis of symptom collation;
?? breaks blinding and performs final analysis.

The protagonists are

HM: Study director (Heribert Möllinger, first author)
HW: Study designer and overseer, and editor of Forschende Komplementärmedizin (Harald Walach)
IP: Independent pharmacist (at Dolisos, Lausanne)
RS: Independent researcher (Rainer Schneider, co-author); HW and RS, while reporting different affiliations, were both supported by the Samueli Institute
MM: Materia medica expert (Reimund Wagner, acknowledged)
??: For when it's not obvious who did it.

Now firstly, it seems like the blinding was designed to make sure that MM would not be able to cheat in the assignment of remedies to participants, since he only received a list of disconnected symptoms. However, I'm not sure exactly who it was who reconnected the symptoms, with their guesses as to which remedies “caused” them, back with the list of participants. But we know that the blinding code, created by RS, “was only fully revealed once the database of symptoms was classified by the materia medica expert and the statistical analysis had been done blindly...” by RS. I think it would have been better if IP had created the blinding code and not sent it to the study centre until after the statistical analysis. This is the sort of thing which peer-review is supposed to spot, in the cases when one of the authors isn't the editor of the journal anyway.

So there's the possibility that RS could have just changed the which patients certain symptoms were supposed to have come from, once the symptoms were labelled with remedies. I don't know if he could have done this without HM (the lead author, who collected the symptoms from the participants via diaries and interviews) noticing - given the different affiliations, did HM ever see the list of assigned symptoms? There's no innocent explanation for how this can have come about that I can think of, and I'm not saying that this is what happened, just that the existence of this possibility is a weakness of the trial design. HW believes in magic,⁴ maybe RS's computer fixed the results on its own. And somehow came up with 0±2 for the number of inappropriate symptoms in each group; how can you add only positive integers together and end up with 0±2? And what kind of statistical analysis could have been done blindly anyway?

Secondly, there were 7 participants receiving placebo who recorded an average of 11 non-specific symptoms each, so that's about 80 non-specific symptoms out of the reported total of 165. The 10 participants on Nat. mur. had 5 symptoms each so that's about 50; the 8 on Arse. alb. has 6 each so that's also about 50. It adds up to 180 which isn't much over the 165 reported. Given that MM knew what the participants had been given, it seems about right that he would assign the symptoms in the proportions 30%:30%:40% for salt:arsenic:placebo, guessing roughly equal numbers of participants in the three groups. But then if RS is deliberately reassociating symptoms, now assigned to remedies, with the participants who got those remedies you might indeed get the strange result that all the non-specific symptoms, which you would expect to have been at a similar “background” level for all groups, have been assigned to the placebo group which therefore had double the number of symptoms compared to the groups on homeopathy.

So we're left with a result which is too good to be true and the knowledge that the co-author who generated the blinding codes was the same one who did the “blind” analysis on the results. Excuse me if I don't start tearing up my physics, biology and chemistry textbooks just yet.

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.

If at first you don't succeed

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:31:31 GMT

[BPSDB] Otto Weingärtner explains, in the latest issue of J. Alt. Complement. Med.,¹ that in clinical trials more accurate results come from those trials which have larger numbers of participants, supporting the methodology of Shang et al..² Shang et al. ranked trials of both homeopathy and proper medicine according to the “quality” and number of participants, and found that better quality trials of homeopathy with larger numbers of participants tended to show smaller differences between homeopathy and placebo. This is in accordance with Bernoulli's “weak law of large numbers” which explains how data scatters randomly about the true value but the mean converges to be as close as you like to the true value as you obtain more and more data. By taking more and more data, by performing trials with many participants and by performing meta-analyses to pool the results of trials, the effects of random scatter are slowly averaged away.

Of course, that's not what Weingärtner thinks that he has explained. He rather thinks that he has come up with some way to excuse the problems with reproducibility that homeopaths think they have. It doesn't help that homeopaths either don't understand, cherry-pick, or move the goalposts of trials, seeming to describe trials which show that homeopathy is indistinguishable from placebo as “inconclusive” and only accept as “negative” trails which show that homeopathy is worse. It also doesn't help that the “positive” trials, which tend to be those of low quality or with fewer participants as well as a few statistical blips (5% of p<0.05 trials come out positive just out of luck, by definition), are all added together with equal strength and set against the “negative” ones. If there are more “positive” trials than “negative” ones then they claim homeopathy works. What they should of course be doing is a meta-analysis to look for the strength of the effect (not just its yes/no existence) which of course turns out to be vanishingly small (so that if there were an effect, which there isn't, but if there were, it would be so small so as to be useless) when investigated properly. But stronger evidence that this would be required to accept something as implausible as homeopathy, as Le Canard Noir explains in a post which turns out to be hardly about home opathy at all.

No, if a homeopath fails to reproduce the possibly anecdote-level (or possibly made up)³^,⁴ positive results which confirm their delusion, then they don't start to revise their worldview but go looking for someone with a scientific qualification to copy something out of a textbook and pad it out it with nonsense. Weingärtner's abstract and introduction claim that he will describe an “experimental situation for distinguishing a homeopathic potency and its solvent” but this of course isn't the discredited⁵ Rao et al.⁶^,⁷ and there is no experimental content; he assumes that “every effort is made to exclude artifacts, systematic errors, and things like that” while not actually explaining how one goes about doing so (that's what double blinding and randomization are for, in the presence of systematic errors the average of many measurements does not actually tend to the correct value). The paper apparently will present ideas from a previous paper in “more detail” and will discuss “nonlocal effects” in “a more comprehensible way” and having read it I can't imagine the low level of detail and incomprehensibility of the previous paper, which is in German in a journal called “Zeitschrift für Anomalistik” and therefore, frankly, worthless.

It's not worth going through the “maths” in the paper, unless you consider it a great insight that an experimental result depends on both the experiment itself and on the external factors which influence it, so that you won't get the same result from the same experiment unless the external factors are the same. That's why experiments are repeated, so that the external factors average away.

This article has prompted two editorials, one from Alex Hankey and one from Lionel R. Milgrom,⁸^,⁹ and if they can spin this out to three articles then so can I: Golden Balls.

Postscript...

The remarkable claims made in Nature (333, 816; 1988) by Dr. Jacque Benveniste and his associates are based cheifly on an extensive series of experiments which are statistically ill-controlled, from which no substantial effort has been made to exclude systematic error, including observer bias…The phenomenon described is not reproducible in the ordinary meaning of the word... Among other things, we were dismayed to learn that the salaries of two of Dr. Benveniste's coauthors of the published article are paid for under a contract between INSERM 200 and the French company Boiron... We conclude that the claims made by Davenas et al. are not to be believed.

John Maddox, FTW.

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.

freeblogger

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:12:39 GMT

I know I haven't posted in ages, but http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/11/italian-bloggers-cal.html...

That is all. Oh, hang on, no actually it isn't.

Partecipa a freeblogger su beppegrillo.it

Go to hell

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 14:14:50 GMT

[BPSDB]Good news and bad news: Ben Goldacre has won an internet against AIDS-denier and vitamin-pill mercenary Matthias Rath, while Sabina Guzzanti apparently faces up to 5 years in an Italian prison for insulting the pretentious old idiot who runs a big house in Rome where lots of men live together.

The former is an example of how quacks can only defend themselves with legal threats for money, because for there's no actually evidence-based rebuttal to their exposure as quacks and for some of them they may well be in it purely for the money (while maintaining that it's big pharma which is the one cynically making money out of sick people) while the others, who really believe their own nonsense, are only delusional rather than dishonest (if not necessarily less dangerous). In the case of Rath, his HIV/AIDS-based quackery really was seriously dangerous on a level which transcends the “worried well” middle classes pestering their GPs to be referred to a homeopath.

The latter manifests a different kind of legally-protected irrationality - while Silvio Berlusconi has spent much of his time in power changing the law to keep himself out of prison on (mainly) corruption charges (e.g. shortening the statute of limitations, creating the delaying tactic whereby a defendant can have a process moved to a different court if he thinks the judges ~~aren't going to let him off~~ might be biased, giving himself immunity from prosecution as a serving prime minister, having all processes except really serious ones suspend for a year) it seems the head of state of the Vatican has the same status of the President of Italy thanks to the 1929 Lateran Treaty and it is therefore a criminal offence to say, for example, that “Pope Benedict XVI would go to Hell and be tormented by homosexual demons”. (It would also be an offence to say that sort of thing about the president, I assume, but I don't think that the president would actually provoke that sort of insult and I doubt that there would be much this much fuss about it.)

Pope Benedict XVI will not go to hell because it does not exist. It's something made up entirely by the Judeo-Christian religion. But it's ridiculous (and hypocritical) to have laws against insulting religion or its figureheads; it's basically an admission that your all-powerful God just doesn't really care. How about, instead of trying to get the law to do your dirty work, any Catholics who feel that the Pope has been insulted (and I'm sure, or at least I hope, that it's basically none of them plus a few politicians who cynically want to exploit this to punish one of the most vocal critics of the Italian centre-right and its control of the media) can just pray for something bad to happen to Guzzanti - nothing at all will happen, which is as it should be.

Other links on the subject of Goldacre versus Rath:

It's a no-brainer

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:42:05 GMT

From the 3^rd September 2008 daily edition of The Roman Observer. The translation is my own, and in cases where I couldn't understand the Italian I've tried to render the English similarly incomprehensible. I will claim, in the case of inaccuracy, that my translation is divinely inspired or something. I'm publishing the full text because I doubt that there's going to be any other way to get hold of it after the end of today.

Signs of Death

40 years since the Harvard report

Forty years ago, towards the end of the summer of 1968, the so-called Harvard report changed the definition of death to be based no longer on cardiocirculatory arrest, but on a flat encephalogram: from that point the organ indicating death was no longer just the heart, but also the brain.¹ This involved a radical change in the conception of death - which resolved the problem of the disconnection of artificial respiration, but that more than anything made possible the transplant of organs² - accepted by almost all developed countries (where it is possible to realize these transplants), with the exception of Japan.³

Also the catholic church, in allowing organ transplants, implicitly accepts this definition of death, but with strong reservations: for example, certification of brain death is not used within Vatican City.⁴ The philosopher of rights Paolo Becchi now reminds us of this fact in a book (Brain Death and Organ Transplants, Morcelliana) which - apart from going over the history of the definition and of the debates which followed during the '70's, amongst which the most important is without doubt that in which the protagonist was Hans Jonas⁵ - faces the current, much more complex and controversial, situation clearly.⁶

The motive for which the new definition was accepted so quickly is found in the fact that it was interpreted not as a radical change in the concept of death, but only - writes Becchi - as “a consequence of the process of technology which has made available to medicine more accurate instruments with which to measure the loss of cerebral function.”⁷ The scientific justification of this choice sits in a peculiar definition of the nervous system, today put back into discussion by new research, which puts into doubt specifically the fact that brain death provokes disintegration of the body.⁸

As the sensational case of a woman who went into an irreversible coma and was declared brain dead before it was realized that she was pregnant demonstrated in 1992;⁹ it was decided to let the pregnancy continue, and this continued normally until a miscarriage.¹⁰ This case and others like it concluding with the birth of a baby have put into question the idea that in this condition one is dealing with a body which is already dead, cadavers from which organs can explanted.¹¹ It seems, then, that Jonas was right when he suspected that the new definition of death, more than from a true scientific advance, was motivated by interest, i.e. from the necessity of organs to transplant.¹²

Naturally, on this subject a dicussion has openedin the scientific world, partly summarized in a volume, curated by Roberto de Mattei, Finis vitae. Is brain death sill life? (Rubbettino), in which contributors¹³ - European and American neurologists, jurists and philosophers - agreed to declare that brain death is not death of a human being. The risk of confusing a coma (cortical death) with brain death is always possible.¹⁴ It is this worry which came to be expressed at the extraordinary assembly of 1991 by Cardinal Ratzinger from his report on the problem of the menaces to human life:¹⁵ “Later on, those for whom illness or accident causes to fall into an ‘irreversible’ coma, will always be put to death to fulfill the demand for organs to transplant or to be used for medical experimentation (‘warm cadavers’).”¹⁶

These considerations obviously lead to new problems for the catholic church, in which acceptance of the withdrawal of organs from brain dead patients, within the framework of a total and absolute¹⁷ defence of human life, is supported only upon the presumed scientific certainty that they are effectively cadavers. But putting the Harvard criteria into doubt leads to other bioethical problems for catholics: the idea that a human person ceases to exist when the brain no longer functions, while his or her organism - thanks to artificial respiration - is kept alive, carries an identification of the person with only the activity of the brain, and this enters into contradiction with the concept of a person according to catholic doctrine, and thus with the directives of the church when dealing with cases of persistent coma.¹⁸ As Peter Singer has pointed out, who takes a position opposed to the catholic one: “If catholic theologians can accept this position in the case of brain death, they should be able to accept it also in the case of anencephaly.¹⁹

Making a point on the question, Becchi writes that “the mistake, always more obvious, has been that of having wanted to risolve a legal-ethical problem with a presumed scientific definition,”²⁰ while the knot of the transplants “will not be resolved with a medico-scientific definition of death,” but via elaboration of “ethically and legally sustainable and sharable criteria.”²¹ The Pontificia Academia Scientiarum - which during the '80's was in favour of the Harvard report - in 2005 returned to the theme with a meeting on “The signs of death“. The 40^th anniversary of the new definition of brain death seems therefore to reopen the discussion, whether from the point of view of general science, or the catholic ambit, within which the acceptance of the Harvard criteria come to constitute a decisive hook for many other bioethical questions which are on the carpet today,²² and for which at the same time is worth putting back into discussion one of the few points on which laity and catholics have agreed in the last decades.²³

Some notes

It really said “no longer just the heart” [non è più soltanto il cuore]: cardiac arrest is of course relatively easy to detect but it only causes actual death a few minutes later (longer in the case of hypothermia) because it stops the blood (and therefore oxygen and glucose) flow to the brain. With cardiopulmonary bypass the heart can be stopped, operated on, and restarted.
Because if you wait for a dying person's heart to stop naturally before trying to transplant it, you'll find that it's irreparably damaged from oxygen starvation. It's better to stop a beating heart suddenly with potassium chloride.
I don't know what the point about Japan is.
I doubt that there is an eletroencephalograph machine in the whole Vatican, and certainly when Pope John Paul II was became ill at the beginning of 2005 he was taken to hospital in Italy. It's probably not the case that, when he died in his apartment in the Vatican, death was established by tapping his head with a little hammer and calling his name.
I don't know what this is about either.
Which is more than this article does.
It's the other way around - instruments which are able to measure brain function show that if the heart stops the brain can keep going for a few minutes and there is a chance that the circulation can be maintained and the heart eventually restarted (although the chances aren't as great as American medical dramas would have you believe).
What research? The UK uses Brain stem death as its definition - how more dead could someone be? If a person needs advanced life support to keep them “alive” then we have already gone well beyond what would naturally be considered life.
I don't know what case this is exactly, but it might be the “Erlanger baby”.
In other words, it succeeded up until it failed.
The fœtus is kept alive by the life-support system attached to the mother.
Yes, curse those doctors with their selfish desire to get their hands on a dead person's organs and use them to save someone else's life.
From only one side of the debate, it seems.
See note 8.
Sorry for the convoluted formulation, the Vatican really does write like this.
See note 12. It's not like doctors are tearing the still-beating hearts from young virgins and devouring them or something. (It's the catholics who eat flesh and drink blood.)
Total and absolute anything always leads to problems, but I hope it's only going to be a problem the next time a cardinal needs a new kidney.
Obviously the church should update its directives, but I have the feeling that they've been waiting for some non-consensus medical opinions to be expressed so that they could seize hold of them and claim that they were right all along.
Well I don't know what Peter Singer's position is or what point that quote is trying to make.
Is the problem not one of trying to apply medieval intuition to a modern medical and scientific question?
Well it won't be resolved, as far as the catholic church is concerned, with a “medico-scientific definition of death” as long as the catholic church feels the need to question that definition on vague spiritual or doctrinal grounds.
It really does mention a carpet, or rather a rug [tappeto].
In other words, “we sense that we can exploit the emotional response of the laity here and win back some influence”.

This follows on from the catholic church basically spoiling it for everybody with their opinions on persistent vegetative states (Eluana Englaro, for example) and terminal diseases. A recent example was the case of Piergiorgio Welby, a muscular dystrophy sufferer who was volutarily euthanized in December 2006, after having been unable to breathe naturally for about eight and a half years. The church denied him a religious funeral.

Someone wrote to Viz recently to point out that when we talk about “Acts of God” we usually mean bad stuff such as earthquakes and hurricanes which cause terrible devastation to life and property, while “Playing God” usually means that health professionals or biologists are trying to improve quality of life, often by trying to research or correct some sort of genetic mistake or developmental error, which one can only assume, if one believes that God does anything at all, was made in deliberately by God for some unknown (but probably unpleasant if you really think about it) reason.

Carry a donor card. Let your family know your wishes. Tell the catholic church to keep out of it.

Taking the moral Hyland

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:53:22 GMT

The recent fuss regarding the University of Pittsburg gives me an excuse to mention something I just noticed about Gerard Hyland's paper in the Lancet [1] on the “Physics and biology of mobile telephony.”

After admitting that the heating effect of the microwave radiation (MWR) emitted by mobile phones is insignificant, Hyland goes on to discuss “non-thermal” effects:

“The possibility that the pulsed, low-intensity MWR currently used in GSM mobile telephony can exert subtle, non-thermal influences on a living organism arises because microwaves are waves; they have properties other than the intensity that is regulated by safety guidelines. This microwave radiation has certain well-defined frequencies, which facilitate its discernment by a living organism (despite its ultralow intensity), and via which the organism can, in turn, be affected. The human body is an electrochemical instrument of exquisite sensitivity whose orderly functioning and control are underpinned⁶ by oscillatory electrical processes of various kinds, each characterised by a specific frequency, some of which happen to be close to those used in GSM. Thus some endogenous biological electrical activities can be interfered with via oscillatory aspects of the incoming radiation, in much the same way as can the reception on a radio.”

What I've just noticed is that his citation is to “Electromagnetic Man” by Cyril W. Smith and Simon Best [2].

Smith is the one who measures ‘resonant frequencies’ in homeopathic remedies with ~~dowsing~~ the ideomotor effect:

“Measurement by dowsing is no more subjective than early investigators describing what they saw through a microscope or telescope. The author is seated at a table facing the tube of imprinted water, which is resting between the hands and arms (facing West gives best sensitivity). Being left-handed, the author uses the left hand to hold the pendulum and the right hand to tune the frequency source. Where possible the writer prefers to use a toroidal coil fed from the electrical oscillator.

“A dowsing technique that leaves one hand free is essential for these measurements. The pendulum can be any small weight suspended from a length of dental floss (no twist spun in) to provide a period of about half a second. Its movement is sensitive to muscle tremor, and when the oscillator excites a resonance in the water the pendulum indicates this with a recognizable response after much practice. The frequency is read off the oscillator dial.”

I already worked out that a 2 GHz signal pulsed at 10&nbps;Hz does not become a 10 Hz signal. But if it really turns out that the idea of non-thermal effects of mobile phone radiation, due to the pulse frequency, was based on a book by someone who thinks homeopathic remedies are neutralized if you put them in a metal filing cabinet then the idea is even more knackered than I thought.

Walking into Lampposts

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:35:02 GMT

There's an excerpt from Rowena Ronson's book, Looking Back Moving Forward [1] featuring an interview with Lionel Milgrom, at Galahomeopathy:

“I think that essentially what goes on between the patient and practitioner with a remedy is a form of entanglement. You can consider that entanglement mathematically because mathematics is a language; a very sophisticated language, but it is a way of talking about something. What I have found is that the discourse of quantum theory, when you really get down to the nuts and bolts, is very similar to the discourse in homeopathy and that has been a real eye-opener for me in the last couple of years. If there is that similarity of discourses then we would be able to use the same sort of concepts as the quantum physicists. A lot of them get rather cheesed off by this because they think that we are robbing their territory.”

No, Lionel, that's not it. We just want to tell you that you're wrong about almost everything. We laugh when we read your articles which purport to use quantum mechanics to describe homeopathy but we cringe when we discover how quantum terminology is abused throughout CAM. When they then claim that we're the “scientific conservatives” who are stuck in an old non-quantum mechanical paradigm, and we get personally attacked because we disagree with them (see Dr. Aust) then we start to get cheesed off. I don't suppose any of the “highly competent quantum physicists (including a Nobel Laureate)” passed [sic.] whom he “continually run[s] [his] ideas” [2] would have anything to add, by the way?

“The remedy is part of the entanglement. So what does it mean to prescribe a remedy? Is it the pills or is it the process? Or is it some combination of both? And what, after all, is the remedy? Is it the pills, or the process, or some combination of both? And are we mistaken if we think the process and the pills are indeed separate? Maybe it is the whole shebang - process, prescription, the giving and the taking of the remedy... try plugging that little lot into a double-blind randomised controlled trial!”

Or, try explaining how Boiron (who make about about € 20 million a year in profits having spent € 47 million on marketing (and only € 2.5 million on research)) can sell over-the-counter homeopathic remedies. Or try explaining why Dana Ullman (see JREF again) kept trying to push that terrible [3] paper by Frass et al. [4] onto the potassium dichromate wiki page. It's obvious that homeopaths like double-blind randomized controlled trials when they are done badly enough [5] that the results happen to go the way the homeopaths want [6-10] (and try to cherry-pick positive results [11] out of trials which don't [12]).

“... before anything, there are just two people sitting in front of each other but when it clicks then its like being on a trail. You can sense the remedy and I suppose I start to ask questions around my understanding of the remedy picture.”

A short excerpt of the transcript of the Horizon homeopathy episode was posted at JREF to give an example of how this works:

NARRATOR: Scientists believe the mere act of taking a homeopathic remedy can make people feel better and homeopathy has other ways of reducing stress.

LIONEL MILGROM: And is there any particular time of day that you will, you'll, you'll have that feeling?
PATIENT: No.

NARRATOR: A crucial part of homeopathic care is the consultation.

LIONEL MILGROM: The stress that you have at work, is that, are those around issues that make you feel quite emotional?

PATIENT: No.

LIONEL MILGROM: The main thing about a homeopathic interview is that we do spend a lot of time talking and listening to the patient. We would ask questions of how they eat, how they sleep, how much worry and tension there is in their lives, hopefully give them some advice about how to actually ease problems of stress.

PATIENT: I just feel I want to have something more natural.

LIONEL MILGROM: Yeah...

Feel the entanglement!

“... even Kent said that sometimes with the best intention and the best homeopathic prescribing, the remedy doesn't work - so what is going on? Entanglement is a much more subtle thing than just intention. I don't quite know what it means yet.”

I know what it means.

There's no excuse for Milgrom not understanding entanglement (in its actual quantum mechanical sense, when two or more systems share some conserved quantity between them) or quantum mechanics generally if he's seeking to explain these concepts to homeopaths, let alone apply them to homeopathy itself. (And there's no real excuse for hiding in post-modernism, not least because he doesn't seem to understand that either [13,14].)

I'm still waiting for Milgrom to learn enough about quantum mechanics that he could perhaps cast his ideas in terms of, for example, the remedy as a ladder operator on the patient's wavefunction, or dis-ease [sic.] as a first-order perturbation on the Vital Force's Hamiltonian, because I realized some time ago that none of his ~~models~~ metaphors actually had any time-dependence in. In other words, there was never any mechanism in there which meant that something could change.

In Milgrom's model, homeopathy can't actually do anything.

At least he's right about that bit.

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.

That's the way (aha, aha)...

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 13:09:44 GMT

.. I Leick it (aha, aha)

Philippe Leick [1,2] wrote a letter [3] (as did many others) to Homeopathy to comment on papers by Lionel Milgrom [4] and Otto Weingärtner [5]. Milgrom responded [6], as did Harald Walach [7] (a coauthor of the Weak Quantum Theory paper [8], previously criticised by Leick [1]) and Leick dealt with this in a JREF thread.

These are the key points from Milgrom (another point is addressed elsewhere on JREF) which Leick deals with, to which I'll add my own comments:

1. [Leick and his fellow skeptics] ignore research that demonstrates (a) homeopathy's clinical efficacy over placebo, and (b) differences between solutions potentised beyond Avogadro's limit and pure water.

Regarding point (a), there is of course a certain irony. Milgrom is well aware that homeopathic remedies work no better than placebo in well designed trials [9] (even if he still clings to some misconceptions about that particular analysis) otherwise he wouldn't have spent all this time trying to “explain” this effect [10] with weak quantum-mechanical Patient-Practioner-Remedy entanglement [11-21].

It is interesting to note that the idea of Patient-Practitioner-Remedy entanglement really has nothing at all to do with the specifics of homeopathy, namely the alternating dilution of the active ingredient and the banging of the phial on a book or something, and apparently everything to do with the practitioner having the time to listen to the life story of the patient:

“A patient enters the practitioner's ‘space’ and for a time, becomes during the consultation ‘isolated’ from the surrounding environment. This produces a kind of ‘quantum superposition’ or ‘coherence’ between patient, practitioner, and therapy (in the case of homeopathy, this would be the remedy). When this state interacts with the outside world after the consultation, it gradually undergoes ‘decoherence’ (i.e., collapse of the quantum superposition), possibly to a state of cure.”

It ought to be obvious just from this that the nature of the “therapy” itself is irrelevant.

Regarding point (b), the work by led by Rustum Roy [22] was anything but ignored: it was exposed for the worthless mess it was [23]. Rao and Roy, who claimed to measure changes in ~~water~~ ethanol which was supposed to have had something homeopathically present in it, were last seen trying to measure changes in water that some people had been thinking about.

2. [Leick and his fellow skeptics] exhibit a fundamentalist adherence to (a) the DBRCT as the only way to demonstrate the efficacy of any therapeutic modality; and (b) one, positivist, interpretation of quantum theory.

There's nothing magic about the double-blind randomized controlled trial, as I've previously said: it's just the best way to work out if there's something really going on by systematically cancelling out confounding factors. If this Patient-Practioner-Remedy entanglement gave rise to real effects then there would also be a way to test it (we could design a trial with homeopathy versus pharmaceuticals, for example). Regarding quantum theory, there is no room for interpretation when it comes to quantum theory itself and it's obvious that even within the framework of weak quantum theory [8] Milgrom makes errors, such as not knowing the difference between an operator and a wavefunction, not realizing that states exist whether or not anything occupies those states, and not realizing that “0” is an impossible state. Milgrom has not responded to these criticisms, but instead responds to Philippe saying that I have compiled a list of errors and inaccuracies on my blog, “some of which may be trivial, some of which would shame a second year physics student (such as the claim that quantum mechanics is non-deterministic or giving the units of Planck's constant as [J/s] in Ref. [20])” with “there is nothing wrong with saying quantum mechanics is non-deterministic” based on Popescu [24,25]. Philippe replies,

“Now, this is a at best a gross simplification. The finer point being missed here is that, while quantum mechanics may not be completely deterministic, this does not automatically mean that Milgrom's statement is true. Whether the measurement process is deterministic or not depends on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the Copenhagen interpretation, it isn't. In the Many Worlds interpretation, it is. In any case, the evolution of the wave function according to Schrödinger's equation is fully deterministic.”

There's room for interpretation when it comes to asking what quantum theory actually means about the fundamental nature of the Universe; however, whenever some element of someone's interpretation [26] wanders into the realm of things which can be tested, such tests are designed [27] and eventually done [28,29] (by physicists of course, not homeopaths). John Gribbin [30], who prefers the sum over histories and the transactional interpretation, writes that “the one thing you must not do is believe that any quantum interpretation is The Truth. They are all simply crutches for our limited human imaginations, ways for us to come to grips with the weirdness of the quantum world, which never goes away and is outside the scope of everyday experience.” Milgrom's talk of “collapsing wavefunctions” seems to place him within the slightly outdated [30] Copenhagen interpretation; so much for the physicists being the conservative ones.

The experimental work of Gröblacher et al. leads to the conclusion that a broad class of non-local (i.e. allowing faster-than-light communication) hidden-variable theories must be excluded as possible interpretations of quantum mechanics and the authors go on to speculate on what this might mean: [29]

“We believe that the experimental exclusion of this particular class indicates that any non-local extension of quantum theory has to be highly counterintuitive. For example, the concept of ensembles of particles carrying definite polarization could fail. Furthermore, one could consider the breakdown of other assumptions that are implicit in our reasoning leading to the inequality. These include Aristotelian logic, counterfactual definiteness, absence of actions into the past or a world that is not completely deterministic [31]. We believe that our results lend strong support to the view that any future extension of quantum theory that is in agreement with experiments must abandon certain features of realistic descriptions.”

The implications of Gröblacher et al. may have us finding that reality is even more strange and counter-intuitive [32] than we thought, but it does seems that whatever there is, quantum mechanics describes it. (There's a good discussion of quantum mechanical determinism in Gross and Levitt's book [33], but this is based on the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics [34,35] which is probably not the right one.)

3. [Leick and his fellow skeptics] attempt to dismiss opposing arguments by disparaging the scientific views, competence and credibility of their proponents.

Look, if you're unable to do basic quantum mechanics, and then build a whole theory on top of this inability, there isn't really a nice way to say “this theory is meaningless because you fundamentally don't know what you're doing.” Just because Milgrom doesn't understand quantum mechanics, that doesn't make him as clever as Feynman [36]. There's no room for differing interpretations or philosophies when it comes to Milgrom's basic errors. If he wants to actually use (rather than just borrow a few technical-sounding terms from) quantum mechanics to explain something then he needs to play by its rules. Even weak quantum theory has rules. (In any case, the time when Milgrom pulled Feynman's authority over Simon Gates was not at all an attempt to disparage Gates's competence or credibility.)

Regarding epistemology versus ontology, Milgrom still doesn't get it: the double slit experiment stops working as soon as it becomes possible to know which slit the particle went through whether or not anyone actually knows it [37]. In a DBRCT, the person in charge always has the key regarding who got verum and who got placebo. From the point of view of the patient and practitioner the key might be like a set of “hidden variables” and entanglement should not occur anyway [27,29]. (I'm indebted to this comment for pointing this out.) You can't get all post-modern about knowledge when experiments [28,29,37] make it this clear.

But Milgrom has indeed “adopted implicitly a post-modern stance. This acknowledges there is no such thing as an objective reality that has only to be unveiled, and exists whether we observe it or not, and irrespective of the method in which it is approached.” There's an obvious reply to this, but the less obvious one is that objective reality still exists and it is a strange counter-intuitive quantum objective reality. There's nothing subjective about the result of an entanglement experiment; nothing subjective about the way in which an operator acts on a wavefunction; nothing subjective about whether homeopathy works or doesn't.

And finally, Milgrom cites this comment thread as an example of “the cynicism and disparagement that is the lingua franca of some sceptical blog-sites.” I can only assume that this is due to Adrian Gaylard's [39] quoting of an Italian journalist reviewing a book in which Del Giudice et al. are described (without being named) as “fornicating priests” for their part in perpetuating the cold fusion lie. Where have I insulted any homeopaths? It's not necessary. The facts speak for themselves. Objectively.

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.

Further misunderstanding of coherence

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:55:54 GMT

Comment on “Macroscopic Quantum Coherence in Patient-Practitioner-Remedy Entanglement: The Quantized Fluctuation Field Perspective” [eCAM Advance Access published online on May 14, 2008].

Submitted 8^th July 2008, online 11^th July 2008

Alex Hankey (1) has written to support and defend Lionel Milgrom (2,3), but does so in his own terms of “quantum fluctuation fields” in biological systems (4) rather than Milgrom's model (often referred to as a metaphor (5)) of patient-practitioner-remedy entanglement (6) via “weak” quantum theory (7). Quantum fluctuation fields are supposed to demonstrate quantum coherence on a macroscopic scale, but the reasoning behind this is flawed; in any case, a link between these two models is not to be taken for granted (8,9).

Neumann et al. (10) have recently reported that they have achieved entanglement between two ¹³C nuclei in a diamond lattice (controlled via their coupling to an electron in a nitrogen-vacancy defect) and that the quantum correlated state persists for 3–5 milliseconds at room temperature, similar to the spin-spin relaxation time of the electron spins (6 ms). A quantum correlated state involving three spins (the two ¹³C nuclei plus an electron) persisted for less than 2 μs, because interaction with other spin impurities shortens the relaxation times of the electron's spin (11). This represents the reality of quantum correlations in solid matter at room temperature - persistence of an entangled state of two of three particles for milli- or microsecond timescales (respectively) represents a breakthrough. It is a long way from the kind of “macroscopic quantum coherence” which Hankey writes about (1). Hankey insists that coherence can be maintained over macroscopic distances in quantum systems at high temperature:

“All quantum field theories in solid state physics provide examples where this kind of assumption is made at a primal level, since the low energy forms of their various quanta are assumed to extend over the whole lattice being considered. Theoretically that is infinite in thermodynamic systems, and, practically, over a whole crystal, or whatever kind of domain is appropriate to the exciton under consideration, be it phonon, electron, magnon or other.”

Solid state physicists use Bloch waves to describe electrons in a crystal - they are made up of normal plane waves multiplied by a function with the periodicity of the crystal. Plane waves are eigenstates of momentum and are of course infinite in extent but no actual particles really have such well-defined momentum. In a thin semiconducting layer at low temperature (of the order of 1 K) it may be possible to see weak localization (12,13), which causes a slight increase in resistance when the charge-carrying particles (electrons or holes) become trapped in quantum-coherent loops. This coherence persists on a timescale called the dephasing time, which at 1 K (-272°C) in a good-quality sample may be of the order of a few picoseconds (14) and coherence may be maintained over length scales of around a micrometre. The dephasing time decreases as temperature increases. At 1 K the momentum relaxation time (the time it takes the particle to change direction significantly) is also just a few picoseconds, and due to the uncertainty principle this sets a limit on how well-defined the momentum can be. Far from extending “over the whole lattice being considered” the wavepacket of the charge-carrying particle in this example extends for about 1 μm at 1 K and only gets smaller as the temperature increases. Recently, Billy et al. (15) have observed a localization length of almost 0.6 mm in a one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium-87.

Incidentally, an exciton is a bound electron-hole pair, not a general term for phonons, electrons, magnons or whatever (although the electron-like quasiparticles which pass for electrons in a crystal may be considered as excitations of the Fermi sea, for example).

The Mössbauer effect (16,17) is the emission of a gamma ray by an atom in a solid, in which the crystal as a whole recoils a tiny amount (instead of the emitting atom recoiling alone by a relatively large amount, thus reducing the energy of the emitted gamma ray). It relies only on the fact that there is a significant probability (for gamma rays of relatively low energy) that the recoil, which involves just the atom which emitted the gamma ray, will not excite even the lowest-energy vibrational modes (phonons) of the solid (18). It happens because the tiny momentum kick from the emission of the gamma ray involves just one atom, and the low-energy phonons which can take that sort of momentum have very long wavelength so involve lots of atoms. I struggle to understand how this means that the system undergoes “a quantum interaction as a coherent whole”. It is actually the failure to interact which means the momentum kick is not lost to phonons and is therefore taken up by the entire crystal.

Regarding David Chalmers (19) it seems that Chalmers’ dismissal of Penrose's “nonalgorithmic processing” actually invalidates Hankey's “putting together” (20) of Penrose and Chalmers (21). Chalmers has already considered Penrose's ideas on conciousness and quantum gravity (22), and even if they were right (which is somewhat controversial, to say the least (23,24,25)) they are not what Chalmers was looking for in his “innocent version of dualism”. He is not particularly interested in general quantum mechanics either, which seems to further negate what Hankey is trying to suggest (and probably what Milgrom is trying to suggest, or at least what Hankey is trying to suggest about what Milgrom is trying to suggest). Chalmers also dismisses vitalism and therefore the “life force” which would be “equated with quantized instability fluctuations” (4). In any case, the non-trivial quantum effects (23) which Hagan et al. discuss (22) would take place in microtubules of diameter 25 nm and coherence might last for 0.01–0.1 milliseconds, although Tegmark calculated times of less than 0.1 ps (24). We are still a long way from macroscopic time- and length-scales.

Regarding phase transitions and the critical point (26), Hankey writes

“As the temperature T approaches the critical temperature T_c from above, the increase in specific heat means that extra heat energy is lost; implying that systems of critical fluctuations have anomalously low energy/heat content. This translates into low entropy content, since, by dq = TdS, heat change dq is directly related to entropy change dS.”

The third law of thermodynamics states that minimum entropy S of a system is to be found at the absolute zero of temperature. The entropy only increases as the internal energy q and therefore the temperature T is increased, by dq = CdT (where C is the heat capacity and is almost always positive). The high value of the specific heat at the critical temperature T_c means that to increase the T through T_c requires an anomalously large input of heat energy. This translates via dq = TdS to a large increase in entropy. Hankey seems to imply that a low-entropy state exists at T_c, but since entropy is a state function this cannot be true, and systems of critical fluctuations do not have anomalously low energy/heat content. It is just that a system at a temperature just below T_c has quite a low energy/heat and entropy content compared to a system just above T_c.

This would already seem to render most of Hankey's further reasoning untenable. The correlation length does become very large at the critical point, but this is not related to low entropy and it certainly has nothing to do with macroscopic quantum coherence. This is because the correlation length in a statistical mechanical sense is not directly related to the phase correlation length in a quantum mechanical sense. Spins, for example (26), correlate because they line up in each other's magnetic fields, not because there is some quantum phase interaction. (If the long-range correlation were quantum mechanical in nature then we would only be able to understand it by creating a wavefunction which contained all the particles' spin states combined in a non-trivial way; this is not usually necessary, unless T→ 0 (27).)

In conclusion, the link between coherence of some property near the critical point and coherence of the quantum phase is spurious and nothing to do with low entropy; Hankey's “quantized fluctuation fields” (4) do not seem to have anything to do with Milgrom's hypothesis of patient-practitioner-remedy entanglement (2,6) based on “weak” quantum theory (7) to explain what is only the placebo effect (28), apart from the vague appeal to quantum theory. Milgrom's work is not physics and neither for that matter is Hankey's.

References

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.

Weak quantum theory and quantum critical point fluctuations...

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:30:06 GMT

... do not in fact have anything to do with each other

While writing my eLetter regarding Alex Hankey's (1) support and defence of Lionel Milgrom (2), I took a look at a short letter written by Hankey entitled “Weak Quantum Theory: Satisfied by Quantized Critical Point Fluctuations” (3). Only the first page is freely available, but I’m assuming his reference to Walach is Ref. (4) and the reference to weak quantum theory is Atmanspacher et al. (5).

Atmanspacher et al. (5) give the following as their Eq. (1),

[P,Q] = PQ − QP = iℏ (1)

in which ℏ = h/2π (and h is Planck's constant). This is the commutator for two complementary observables P and Q. An example of two such observables would be the position in the x-direction, x, and the momentum in the same direction, p_x:

[x,p_x] = xp_x − p_x x = iℏ (2)

The momentum operator p_x actually has the form

p_x = −iℏ

∂

∂x

(3)

and is intended to operate on a wavefunction ψ like this:

−iℏ

∂ψ

∂x

(4)

in which ∂ψ/∂x just means “the rate of change of the wavefunction in the x direction”.

The position operator x is in fact just x, so we can expand Eq. 2 like this:

[x,p_x]ψ = −iℏx

∂ψ

∂x

+ iℏ

∂(xψ)

∂x

(5)

The second term now contains “the rate of change of ‘x times the wavefunction’ in the x direction” and the general rule for dealing with this is

∂(f g)

∂x

= f

∂g

∂x

+ g

∂f

∂x

(6)

where f and g are any general functions of x, so

[x,p_x]ψ = −iℏx

∂ψ

∂x

+ iℏx

∂ψ

∂x

+ iℏψ

∂x

(7)

in which the first two terms cancel out and ∂x/∂x = 1 so we are left with

[x,p_x]ψ = iℏψ (8)

so that

[x,p_x] = iℏ (9)

However, Hankey actually writes that

“In weak quantum theory, observables or weak quantum fields are postulated not to obey the usual quantum commutation relations, characteristic of ordinary quantum fields:
[ψ,ψ^†]=ψ×ψ^† − ψ^†×ψ = ih
…”

Firstly, we note that this equation appears to be referring to wavefunctions rather than observables, and that the distinction seems to be lost on Hankey. (Operators are functions which operate on wavefunctions to produce other wavefunctions, they are not in themselves wavefunctions.) Secondly, he has h on the right hand side instead of ℏ so he is out by a factor of 2π. Thirdly, he is taking the commutator of a wavefunction ψ and its Hermitian adjoint ψ^† (or possibly the complex conjugate ψ^* is intended as in Eq. (4)) rather than the commutator of two complementary observables.

Now ψ^* ψ = |ψ|² and for a normalized wavefunction,

∫

|ψ|² dx = 1 (10)

For concreteness let us consider the particle in a 1-dimensional box (length L) which has wavefunctions of the form

ψ_n =

√

sin

⎛
⎜
⎜
⎝

nπ x

⎞
⎟
⎟
⎠

(11)

where n is a positive integer. In this case, ψ_n^* = ψ_n so it is easy to see that [ψ_n , ψ_n^*]=0 and Hankey's Eq. (1) is invalidated. For completeness, using

p_x^* = iℏ

∂

∂x

(12)

(i.e. changing the sign of the imaginary part of p_x which is all of it) we find

[p_x,p_x^*]ψ = p_x p_x^* ψ − p_x^* p_x ψ = −iℏ×iℏ

∂²

∂x²

ψ +iℏ×iℏ

∂²

∂x²

ψ = 0 (13)

since i and ℏ are constants (i.e. they do not change with x). An operator A is actually “self-adjoint” if A^† = A. Operators corresponding to observable quantities always have this property, and would always give [A,A^†]=0. Ladder operators, which raise or lower the eigenvalues of other operators, are not self-adjoint. In fact, if X is a lowering operator for N then X^† is a raising operator for N (and vice-versa). But in this case it should be generally the case that X and X^† commute. Assuming [N,X]=cX (c is real and positive) and N|n〉=n|n〉,

NX\|n〉	=	(XN + [N,X])\|n〉	(14)
	=	(XN + cX)\|n〉	(15)
	=	XN\|n〉 + cX\|n〉	(16)
	=	Xn\|n〉 + cX\|n〉	(17)
	=	(n+c)X\|n〉	(18)

so if N operates on the state |n〉 to give the eigenvalue n, then X acts on |n〉 to give a state X|n〉 on which N operates to give n+c, where c is the commutator of N and X. X^† acts to lower the eigenvalue by c, so [N,X^†]=−cX^†:

NX^†\|n〉	=	(X^†N + [N,X^†])\|n〉	(19)
	=	(X^†N − cX^†)\|n〉	(20)
	=	X^†N\|n〉 − cX^†\|n〉	(21)
	=	X^†n\|n〉 − cX^†\|n〉	(22)
	=	(n−c)X^†\|n〉	(23)

We find that the eigenvalue of the N operator on a state |n〉 which has been raised and then lowered,

N X^† X \|n〉	=	(−cX^†+X^†N)X\|n〉	(24)
	=	−cX^†X\|n〉+X^†NX\|n〉	(25)
	=	−cX^†X\|n〉+X^†(n+c)X\|n〉 (using Eq. (18))	(26)
	=	−cX^†X\|n〉+(n+c)X^†X\|n〉	(27)
	=	nX^†X\|n〉	(28)

is n, as it was originally. We can also lower and then raise the state (as long as we are not starting in the lowest possible state),

N X X^† \|n〉	=	(cX+XN)X^†\|n〉	(29)
	=	cXX^†\|n〉+XNX^†\|n〉	(30)
	=	cXX^†\|n〉+X(n−c)X^†\|n〉 (using Eq. (23))	(31)
	=	cXX^†\|n〉+(n−c)XX^†\|n〉	(32)
	=	nXX^†\|n〉	(33)

and again we obtain n, meaning that it does not matter what order we apply the raising and lowering operators, which means that they commute: [X,X^†]=XX^†−X^†X=0. So, we have disproved Hankey's Eq. (1) for particular cases of self-adjoint and non-self-adjoint operators. The commutator, Eq. (1), only applies to pairs of complementary operators such as position and momentum. It does not apply to an operator and its adjoint, or to a wavefunction and its complex conjugate, at least in the cases I’ve just examined.

Hankey's Eq. (3) looks a bit like the standard deviation (ΔX = √〈X²〉−〈X〉² for some operator X, where 〈X〉=〈ψ|Xψ〉) and as he correctly points out all the quantities in his Eq. (3) are numbers and so “commute with everything”. They are all actually real numbers, equal to their complex conjugates, so it therefore makes no sense whatsoever for him to try to construct the commutator in Eq. (4) or to substitute in from Eq. (3). In fact he seems to have lost the distinction between wavefunctions and operators again.

This was all an attempt to find an object which obeys a “more general commutation relation” which does not involve Planck's constant (but presumably a much larger number) but Hankey's Eq. (5) contains h anyway (6), so it's not as if he's completely escaped from the constraints applied by Planck's constant, despite have escaped from the constraints of reality.

References

A. Hankey, Evid. Based Comp. Alt. Med. (eCAM) Advance Access published online on May 14, 2008. L. R. Milgrom, Evid. Based Comp. Alt. Med. (eCAM) 4, 7 (2007). A. Hankey, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 12, 105 (2006). H. Walach, Forsch. Komplementmed. 10, 192 (2003). H. Atmanspacher, H. Römer, and H. Walach, Found. Phys. 32, 379 (2002). Also note that the commutation relation for the x and y components of angular momentum is [L_x,L_y]=iℏ L_z, i.e. not exactly iℏ, but nobody is suggesting that this is therefore “weak” quantum theory. This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.

The futility of transcendental speculations

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:17:38 GMT

Lionel Milgrom's latest paper, “A New Geometrical Description of Entanglement and the Curative Homeopathic Process” [1], as introduced by Alex Hankey (“Self-Consistent Theories of Health and Healing” [2]) quotes Hahnemann saying that

“The unprejudiced observer is well aware of the futility of transcendental speculations which can receive no confirmation from experience.”

Milgrom's futile transcendental speculations have been going on for six years. This latest paper is light on equations but heavy on pictures and mysticism and further from science (and indeed reality) than ever. But it's still possible to find some things which are meaningful enough to be wrong.First we find complaints and special pleading to be allowed to overturn evidence-based medicine (EBM) and the double-blind randomized-controlled trial (DBRCT):

“EBM and the DBRCT, like much of biomedical science, are rooted in the reductionist philosophy of logical positivism combined with local realism. The latter states that: (a), the universe is real and it exists whether we observe it or not; (b), legitimate conclusions and predictions can be drawn from consistent experimental outcomes and observations; and (c), no signal can travel faster than light [3,4,5]. In questioning (a) and (c) above, quantum theory transcends local realism [4] and the reductionism of biomedicine [5]. Attempts at explaining homeopathy's efficacy have made use of concepts generalized from the discourses of semiotics [6,7] and quantum theory [8,9,10].”

EBM just means that someone's checked that it actually works - if it could be demonstrated that homeopathy worked at actually curing diseases then it would be part of EBM. In fact anything in CAM would quickly become part of EBM if it worked. What we actually get is subjective reports of improvements in self-limiting or cyclic conditions, while journals publish flawed, biased articles on effects at the fringes of statistical significance [11,12,13,14,15].

There's nothing magical about DBRCTs either, they are just the most rigorous way of trying to sort out if there is actually any weak effect there. If homeopathy really worked as well as its proponents seem to suggest then the results should be blatantly obvious and there would be no need to dig so hard to find them. Let's pedantically consider each letter.

T for Trial: You have to test something to make sure that you aren't just remembering the positive anecdotes and forgetting the negative ones.
C for Control: You compare your treatment group with a group receiving no treatment, to make sure that it's really the treatment having an effect. It's usual to give the control group a placebo.
R for Randomized: To make sure that the patients in the treatment and control group are similar, so that similar disease progressions would be expected in each group if the treatment were ineffective. Otherwise you could deliberately or subconciously put the healthier people into the treatment group and then of course they likely to be healthier at the end of the trial. It's good to have large groups.
B for Blind: The patient shouldn't know whether they are getting the treatment or the control because this could bias their self-reported symptoms and also their expectations.
D for Double: The doctor shouldn't know whether a patient is in the treatment or control group either, or else he or she can deliberately or subconciously influence the patient.

A DBRCT is just the best way of minimizing all the possible biasing factors in the case that the effect of the treatment is less than blatantly obvious. So it's not surprising that good quality DBRCTs tend to come out negative for homeopathy while less well-controlled trials show positive effects - that shows exactly that the positive effects of homeopathy are nothing to do with the remedies themselves [16,17,18,19].

And then, on with the entanglement, as if I haven't already explained how the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger [20] system actually works, or why most of what he says about entanglement isn't correct.

“Entanglement is said to occur in a quantum system when its seemingly separate parts are so holistically matched or correlated, measurement of one part of the system instantaneously (i.e., not limited by the speed of light and without classical signal transmission) provides information about all its other parts, regardless of their separation in space and time, or their size [21].”

Italics are his. I've tried to explain entanglement in other posts, and I've tried to clarify that “size” doesn't mean “number of interacting particles” since even maintaining seven nuclear spins in a state of coherent quantum phase is quite hard [22]; macroscopic coherent states do not persist for very long at all [23,24]. Superconductors and superfluids work because of ways in which the particles in question are prevented from interacting [25,26]. Apparently,

“the Memory of Water [27] also relies on macro-entangled coherence, albeit between large numbers of water molecules [28].”

which isn't true at all, and not just because there is no such thing [29]. The Memory of Water is supposed to be a physical effect whereby the structure of a sample water depends on what used to be in solution in it: it's nothing to do with coherence of the quantum phase. (Del Giudice et al. [28] seem to be talking about coherence of dipoles in an electric field, not coherence of the quantum phase.) Milgrom then goes on to explain:

‘Nonlocal correlation is not the only prerequisite for entanglement. A quantum system's processes must also be describable in terms of a “non-commuting algebra of complementary observables.” [4]’

All this means is that it matters what order you do certain pairs of measurements in, since eigenstates of one operator are not eigenstates of another. I just found the quote marks interesting, as if he's pasted that in without knowing how to explain it. To be fair, I can't be bothered to explain it either. But this complementarity means, according to Milgrom, that

“To fully explain quantum phenomena, therefore, it is necessary to have two different but complementary concepts. The answer one obtains performing two different sets of observations depends entirely on the order in which they are performed; yet both are necessary in order to acquire a complete picture of the system.”

A “complete picture of the system” is not actually possible in these terms. It is impossible to have a system in two complementary states at the same time. A “complete picture” in terms of macroscopic variables (such as position and momentum) therefore does not exist. We just have the idea that there's a wavefunction which exists but is not directly observable, on which we can operate in various ways in order to obtain observable results.

Having misunderstood and misrepresented quantum theory, Milgrom now goes on to do the same for weak quantum theory (WQT) [30]. Leick has already pointed out [31] that

‘Milgrom writes “Complementarity and indeterminacy are epistemological in origin not ontological”, [5] which is a serious misquote of the original paper, where it says that “[...] there is no way to argue that complementarity and indeterminacy in weak quantum theory are of ontic rather than epistemic nature.[...] one would expect them to be of rather innocent epistemic origin in many cases.” [30] The difference between the two versions cannot be emphasized enough, as quantum effects such as entanglement are due to the ontic nature (ie not simply to our incomplete knowledge) of complementarity and indeterminacy!’

But what does it mean that WQT “relaxes several of its nanoscopically limiting axioms, including dependence on Planck's constant.”? Planck's constant h is what connects quantum theory with reality - it turns out that light comes in photons and the energy of each photon is proportional to the frequency of the light, with the constant of proportionality being h. This is how Planck was able to solve the problem of black-body radiation. If “complementarity and entanglement are not restricted by a constant like Planck's constant” then what do we have in its place, to connect WQT with reality? The simple answer is that there is no connection to reality so it's not even a sensible question. The more involved answer is that “WQT has no interpretation in terms of probabilities” which amounts to more or less the same thing. How can Milgrom then write that “the product 〈Ψ_PPR|Ψ_PPR〉=|Ψ_PPR|² presumably represents the probability of cure”? (If Ψ_PPR is properly normalized then 〈Ψ_PPR|Ψ_PPR〉=1 and it says nothing about the “probability of cure” or anything - to find that he’d have to define an “cure” operator and calculate its expectation value.) By the way, it's often more convenient to work with ℏ = h/2π so you'll see that in some equations later on.

I have already wondered what use WQT would be in answering objective questions like “does homeopathy work?” if it doesn't seem to have any interpretation in terms of observables. Medical effects are quantifiable. Anyway, Milgrom then goes on to introduce Walach's use of semiotics [7] and there's a box-out which contains the unintentionally ironic Hahnemann quote. Semiotics is more linguistics than science, it's got no place here. The way we interpret signs and produce meaning has got nothing to do with the molecular biology of how actual pharmaceuticals work.

The rest of the quote in the box-out explains that the observer

“can take note of nothing in every individual disease, except the changes in the health of the body and of the mind (morbid phenomena, accidents, symptoms) which can be perceived externally by means of the senses... All these signs represent the disease in its whole extent, that is, together they form the true and only conceivable portrait of the disease.”

The first part of that may have been true a couple of hundred years ago but it isn't true now. The second part was never true: we now know about germs, viruses, genes, DNA and molecular biology. Symptoms are part of the body's reaction to an underlying pathology. They are not the pathology itself. The same pathology can present in different ways in different people, and many symptoms are shared between different diseases.

A few kets finally turn up now, as Milgrom once again formulates his patient, practitioner and remedy wavefunctions. He then decides to attach one of Walach's semiotic sign-object-meaning triangles (each corner of which seems to represent an operator or possibly the expectation value of it) to each of the three corners of the patient-practitioner-remedy triangle. It's meaningless, but where it becomes actually wrong is in the invocation of complex numbers and a strange sort of quantum origami. Already in part C of his Fig. 2 the bra-ket notation seems to have broken down - and how he manages to fold the “corners of the large triangle to create a pyramid with a hexagonal base” is beyond me, since a pyramid with a hexagonal base needs six sides and a triangle only has three corners. This folding appears to have turned the states into their complex conjugates, but then Milgrom reflects the whole thing so that it's upside down and then unfolds it and it turns out to be twisted through 60°. How is that supposed to happen? It's nonsense mathematically (not to mention scientifically) and I don't even think it makes geometrical sense. Which directions are real and which are imaginary doesn't seem to be made clear for fairly obvious reasons - taking the complex conjugate means mirroring in the Real line but each of the three corners is flipped over a different line in the 2-d plane, and then the whole “pyramid” is mirrored in the whole 2-d plane which apparently represents the “homeopathic operator, Πr”. This is all I suppose taking place in the

‘“therapeutic state space” [32] (an analogue of the complex mathematical Hilbert space more familiar from orthodox quantum theory) [4].’

In the nicest possible way, how many readers of J. Alt. Complement. Med. are familiar with Hilbert spaces? He seems to think that in an equation such as 〈Ψ_PPR|Πr|Ψ_PPR〉=⟨Δ S x⟩ that it's the operator which is making the complex conjugate 〈Ψ_PPR| out of |Ψ_PPR〉, which just isn't the way it works at all. (Anyway, if you fold over the corners of an equilateral triangle so that you are left with a regular hexagon, the triangles will meet in the middle when they are flat against the hexagon - the pyramid they define has zero height. And each wavefunction exist in its own Hilbert space so I don't know what it's supposed to mean to put them all in each others’ spaces.) It's hardly worth looking at his Fig. 3 where he does it all again only with tetrahedra. The lack of any explicit conceptual difference between Figs. 2 and 3 demonstrates how arbitrary and meaningless it is, since he can apparently produce two completely different pictures to represent what is supposed to be the same things, and this makes it useless trying to work out on which level to take it seriously - there isn't a level on which it makes any sense. (There are probably lots more versions of this quantum homeopathic origamy nonsense coming soon to “peer reviewed” journals with low editorial standards near you.)

Meanwhile, there's a second box-out on the Kochen-Specker theorem [33]. This is a theorem which says that it's not possible to find a direct correspondence between quantum mechanical observables and classical quantities. The first half of the box seems to be ok, up until the part where he he claims that

‘signs and symptoms of disease are considered observable manifestations of an “invisible” disturbed vital force, Vf.’

This is apparently because Auyang [4] said

“Eigenvalues are analogous to symptoms of a disease, which are disturbances of the body that show up and indicate something that does not show up. Just as a cold persists though its symptoms are suppressed, so a quantum system's wave function has a definite amplitude, even though it has no eigenvalue...”

and Milgrom has taken this analogy far too seriously. Common cold viruses are not invisible. (I'm not sure what “no eigenvalue” means in this context either: is it that the eigenvalue is zero or that the state is not an eigenstate? Measurement is supposed to collapse a mixed state into an eigenstate.) There's a mention of self-adjoint operators, which are those operators which operate on states to give physical observables. (There are, for example, ladder operators which operate on states to give new states.) It's not exactly true that “they consist only of real numbers” because for example the momentum operator for the x direction is −i ℏ ∂/∂x - rather, it means that the operator is a Hermitian matrix which is equal to its own conjugate transpose and it has real eigenvalues (but see also the spectral theorem).

The Kochen-Specker theorem [33] knackers hidden variable theories, in which the quantum mechanical correlations leading to entanglement are explained by theorizing that the system somehow already “knows” which state it's going to turn out to be in when you measure, even if this information is not available from the wavefunction. It turns out that you can't have definite values of all the hidden variables corresponding to quantum mechanical observables all the time which are independent of the way in which they might be measured. This is because for classical quantities it shouldn't matter in what order you measure certain properties, but for certain complementary pairs of quantum mechanical observables it does indeed matter in what order you measure. This is actually only a problem if the Hilbert space has three or more dimensions [34], and Milgrom decides that since his homeopathy Πr mirror is a 2d plane, so the “therapeutic state space” is this 2d plane on which the Kochen-Specker theorem need not apply. In fact he's drawn his mirror as a 2d plane embedded in a 3d space, and if he wants a pyramid which goes upside-down then he needs at least a 3d Hilbert space to do it in. It's clear that in the real world there are wavefunctions which really do “exist” in Hilbert spaces with three or more dimensions out of which observable quantities can be extracted with the appropriate measurement operators: the theorem just says that these very observables were not some how “in there” before we did the extraction. What comes out actually depends on the interaction between the measuring operation and the wavefunction, so the intrinsic properties of the wavefunction (and I maintain that it does have them) are not those which correspond exactly to things we are intuitively familiar with, such as position or momentum. So I don't think that the Kochen-Specker theorem is particularly relevant to what Milgrom is trying to do, and he wouldn't be able to get around it anyway because he's working in 3d not 2d. (What he's drawn isn't a Hilbert space anyway: states exist as rays in a Hilbert space, not polygons.)

On to Fig. 3 anyway. As I mentioned, for some reason this time he folds up the big triangle into a tetrahedron. Does this represent a mathematical transformation of some kind? (No.) There are no brakets arounds the Ψs this time, perhaps that's the difference. The practitioner has a wavefunction Ψ_Pr and therefore a triangle, but then apparently “sits at the center of tetrahedron” too. There's clearly no special reason for this apart from Milgrom wanted it that way and thereby made it up (and in the text it's “the patient notionally at the tetrahedral epicenters”.). And then of course the practitioner also has an operator Πr which is supposed to be a mirror which somehow also twists the tetrahedron in a way which doesn't make a huge amount of sense (and I don't think this is a self-adjoint operator if it flips between these two states). Then there's another box-out regarding chirality and there's nothing wrong with it, apart from that it's almost totally irrelevant, only serving to remind us that Milgrom used to be a chemist.

The final step is to combine the original tetrahedron and the twisted one into the shape called the stella octangula which Hankey got so excited about. (But he also folds up the big triangle into a small flat triangle which apparently introduces a 60° twist. I don't think he runs with this; he was just getting carried away. I don't know why the Ψs have now moved to the corners where previously we had operators.) The twisting is supposed to be the practitioner showing the cure to the patient or some nonsense like that. It's not a real-space twist: it doesn't matter which way the patient is “looking” or “going”. States evolve through Hilbert space according to the time-dependent Schrödinger equation:

HΨ = iℏ

∂Ψ

∂ t

(1)

where the left side has the Hamiltonian operating on Ψ (which classically involves the kinetic and potential energies, where the former involves taking derivatives with respect to space - stationary states are energy eigenstates) and the right side involves taking the derivative with respect to time. (This equation is completely deterministic, by the way.) How should we describe pointing “the patient in the direction of cure” now exactly?

The problem I always have with Milgrom is that I try to read it as if it were science. I assume that there's sense and meaning in there but the concepts are difficult and require work to get to. The problem is that there's no sense or meaning, and I end up doing a lot of work trying to get the right level into focus when there is no right level. It's meaningless. I don't think it's even correct geometrically. It's nearly finished though so that's good.

We only have to deal with the stella octangula's role in quantum teleportation first [35,36,37,38]. I'm not interested in the stuff about the Platonic solids or the “classical four elements”, or the Merkabah. (Read Finding Moonshine if you want a more sensible discussion about symmetry and that.) It's the link back to quantum mechanics which is more troubling, since some might see that and think Milgrom's on to something. Let me assure you he isn't. The picture which Aravind [38] draws is a representation of operations described by Bennett et al. [36] when dealing with a entangled state of two spin-1/2 particles - it gives a way of understanding which combinations of spin states are more entangled than others, or something. The corners of a tetrahedron A, B, C and D represent four Bell states while the centre E represents a totally unpolarized state. Aravind explains:

“The twirl operation can also be visualized readily on the Horodecki diagram. The effect of a twirl on an arbitrary Bell diagonal mixture is to project it orthogonally onto the line AE containing the Werner states. For a non-separable state in the A-sector of the tetrahedron, this reduction is achieved without any loss in entanglement but for states in the B, C and D sectors there is a complete loss of entanglement. The proper way to reduce the latter states is to either subject them to a modified twirl [36] that projects them onto Werner-like states in their own sectors or else to transfer them into the A-sector (by a suitable unilateral rotation) and then apply the standard twirl.”

There's an octagon embedded in the tetrahedron, formed by the intersection of the tetrahedron and its inverse, within which lie all the separable states. How does this compare to Migrom's picture? Milgrom built up his intersecting tetrahedra from at least three “particles” so he would need a different shape (probably in more than three dimensions) to represent all their states; the centre, representing complete unpolarization and being the most unentangled state in Aravind's picture, is the patient (probably) in Milgrom's picture, but the patient is also a face; in Aravind's picture the vertices of the tetrahedron represent maximally-entangled Bell states, while Milgrom seems to have expectation values or operators or something. So it's clear that just because he has contrived to arrive at the same shape doesn't mean that he's somehow doing something connected to what these guys are doing. (It may not be a total coincidence either that Sandu Popescu [39] is acknowledged by Aravind [38] and cited by Milgrom [40] in his reply to Leick [31].)

To conclude, then: in order to avoid facing the fact that quantum mechanics is simply not relevant to the system of a homeopath and a patient [41], Milgrom concludes that the “state functions representing each of the Px, Pr, Rx, and the PPR entangled state are not related to quantifiable physical observables”, admitting how useless it all is for actually working anything out; but when he states that “it is clear that the nature of the therapeutic process requires its initial separation and ‘isolation’ from the usual external environment, as a necessary prerequisite for the coherence of entanglement to occur, and cure to begin,” he admits something I think we already knew: that it is necessary to be out of touch with reality to be a homeopath.

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.

Inconsistent with health and healing

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:32:44 GMT

In his editorial introducing Lionel Milgrom’s latest paper, “A New Geometrical Description of Entanglement and the Curative Homeopathic Process” [1], Alex Hankey (“Self-Consistent Theories of Health and Healing” [2]) can’t even spell homeopathy: he cites Simon Baker’s letter to eCAM (in response to “Journeys in the country of the blind” [3]) as “Re: Homeoathy and hubris”. There’s also a citation to a letter written by someone called “Chrastana”. (This is after Lionel Milgrom got confused between Simon Gates and Simon Baker and ended up replying to Simon Bates.) There’s clearly little hope for any sort of scientific or technical accuracy when basic proof-reading is clearly beyond both Hankey and the staff of J. Alt. Complement. Med in which this is published.

It doesn’t take long for Hankey to have a dig at so-called “scientific conservatives” as if the ones who are desperately trying to dig a 200-year-old quasi-mystical idea out of the deep grave marked “contradictory to all of current modern physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine” are the innovators, not the scientists who have shown why we need to leave Hahnemann’s ideas behind. To summarize: the past couple of hundred years have seen the development of the germ theory of disease, the discovery of viruses, the development of genetics, the discovery of DNA and of its structure and the birth of molecular biology generally, the development of atomic theory and the arrangement of elements into the Periodic table, and the formulation of quantum mechanics and special and general relativity. All of these things are very well confirmed by experimental evidence and most of them contradict the principles of homeopathy. The germ theory of disease contradicts those who still believe in miasmas, molecular biology basically contradicts all that stuff about the Vital Force, and atomic theory explains that the kind of dilutions frequently used by homeopaths contain nothing of the supposedly active ingredient (as if containing a tiny amount of it would really make any difference anyway). But sadly, quantum mechanics, if understood poorly enough, seems to give the homeopaths hope that they haven’t actually been wasting their lives. In the final insult they then claim that it’s the rest of us who are stuck in an old paradigm. When Philippe Leick said that [4]

“the claim that dilutions beyond Avogadro’s limit can have any specific effect linked to the properties of the original substance... if solved to the satisfaction of the adherents of homeopathy, probably will revolutionize physics.”

he was pointing out just how much we’d have to throw away if it were true (which it isn’t).

One thing which has come out of quantum theory of the solid-state is the transistor, and therefore the computer, without which none of this would be happening. David Chalmers and Roger Penrose are invoked by Hankey to explain what’s wrong with modern science, in that it apparently doesn’t have a theory of consciousness.

Now the only Penrose I’ve read is the The Road to Reality [5], so I’ve mainly bypassed all that quantum-gravity–consciousness [6] nonsense [7,8]. (In The Road to Reality Penrose complains that string theory [9] is useless because so far it’s only been able to create the graviton, and then tries to explain his twistor theory, which he’s been working on for 40 years, and which has so far only been able to create half a graviton. But he’s an extremely clever mathematical physicist even if I think he’s wrong about a couple of things. His insights into thermodynamics and entropy are interesting [10,11].)

But when it comes to the philosopher David Chalmers, Hankey cites “Facing up to the problem of consciousness” [12] which is a bit shorter than Penrose’s and is dealt with in another post, in which I try to argue that Chalmers’ dismissal of Penrose’s “nonalgorithmic processing” knackers Hankey’s “putting together” of Penrose and Chalmers. Chalmers has already considered Penrose’s ideas, and even if they were right (which I for one am not sure about) they aren’t what he was looking for. He isn’t particularly interested in general quantum mechanics either, which further knackers what Hankey is trying to suggest (and probably what Milgrom is trying to suggest, or at least what Hankey is trying to suggest about it). Chalmers also basically knackers all of homeopathy and frankly quite a lot of CAM by dismissing vitalism.

Hankey says that “creative thinkers... recognise such laws as necessary bases from which to depart...” and in doing so misses the point that you have to understand a rule completely in order to know its limitations (these guys only think they understand the rules based on some popularizations) and the Dalai Lama quote about “The most important rule is to know how to break the rules” was probably about politics rather than science, in which the rules really can be broken because they are made up and imposed by humans rather than being discovered facts about the universe. Every research scientist, meanwhile, is trying to test, extend, and validate whatever laws have so far been discovered in whatever field he or she happens to be working in (and maybe even helping to discover new laws). It’s what we do all day.

It’s interesting how Hankey and those like him immediately react to criticism by complaining about the attitude of the complainants rather than by pointing to evidence for their positions: it’s becauese they lack the tools to deal with criticism, what without having any actual evidence. He just has philosophy and mysticism, understood at the same superficial level as he understands quantum physics.

In the end Hankey sees all of Milgrom’s work as having “striking confermation” because of the shape he makes up at the end is bit similar to another shape Hankey can think of. Analysis of Milgrom’s work will have to wait until another day - until then you can make do with “mere chemistry”.

References

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.

Consciousness... consciousness of other people... consciousness of beer... unconsciousness...

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:30:25 GMT

In his editorial introducing Lionel Milgrom’s latest paper, “A New Geometrical Description of Entanglement and the Curative Homeopathic Process” [1], Alex Hankey cites “Facing up to the problem of consciousness” [2] by philosopher David Chalmers, which merits a blog post of its own. Hankey’s editorial itself is dealt with in the post entitled Inconsistent with health and healing.

Consciousness... consciousness of other people... consciousness of beer... unconsciousness...

Chalmers distinguishes the ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems related to explanations of consciousness. The easy problems relate to the explanation of what he redefines as awareness;

the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;

the integration of information by a cognitive system;

the reportability of mental states;

the ability of a system to access its own internal states;

the focus of attention;

the deliberate control of behavior;

the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

whereas the hard problem is that of explaining experience:

“When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.”

Chalmers maintains therefore that what is required to explain experience is something which does not fit into or arise out of cognitive science and neuroscience,

“These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say.”

and even some sort of quantum mechanical effect or Penrose’s “nonalgorithmic processing” can’t be the missing ingredient, because these are physical effects which should already be covered by the time that cognitive science and neuroscience have done their stuff. Chalmers still wants to know why any such purely physical process should give rise to experience - “Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical... When it comes to a problem over and above the explanation of structures and functions, [reductive] methods are impotent.” He then goes on to explain that he’s not being vitalist, but he admits that his position, in which he wants to “take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time,” qualifies as a variety of dualism. He maintains though that it is an “innocent version of dualism... nothing in the approach contradicts anything in physical theory.” Well he says that, but he can’t know that without knowing something that nobody else does about cognitive science and neuroscience, or making his idea so nebulous that its connection to reality can be wherever it’s easiest to hide. The fact that this idea’s “overall shape is like that of a physical theory” is useless if he’s already decided that there’s nothing physical about it. (Incidentally, he mentions Maxwell’s introduction of electromagnetics as “new fundamental components of a physical theory” in addition to the wholly mechanical processes that previous physical theories appealed to” but it’s important to remember that electromagnetics led to special relativity [3] (and from there to general relativity) which changed mechanics quite a lot, so it’s not necessarily safe to go adding new fundamental entities without expecting anything else in the rest of physics to have to change. Anyway, mass and charge are fundamental because they are conserved quantities (once we realize that energy has mass [4]) and conservation laws relate to symmetry; it’s hard to argue that “experience” is a conserved quantity.)

But finally we get to the three principles which Chalmers thinks might go into a theory of consciousness:

Structural coherence
Organizational invariance
The double-aspect theory of information

The first two of these are described by Chalmers as nonbasic principles but he considers the third and final one to be his “candidate for a basic principle that might form the cornerstone of a fundamental theory of consciousness.”

Structural coherence

“Any information that is consciously experienced will also be cognitively represented.” No argument there: put someone in an fMRI machine or PET scanner and watch the correlations between what they report and what’s going on in their brain. You have a cortical map of your body, and other parts of the cortex map visual or auditory fields.

Organizational invariance

“Any two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences.” The thought experiment here is to consider two conscious systems which have the same structure but are built from different components, and imagine that they might have different experiences, and then imagine progressing piece by piece from one to the other. The experience should surely need to change as we went from one system to another, but Chalmer decides this has to happen suddenly at one step in the progression rather than smoothly across the whole range; is there any real reason for that, or is it just that he is thinking in terms of mutually exclusive experiences of the same external phenomenon? One system might see red and have the experience of red, and another might see red and have the experience of blue, but is there one in the middle which would have the experience of grey or purple? This is the sort of question which reminds me why I have little patience for philosophy. It’s the sort of thing students discuss in pubs. Maybe we could sort it out in this case by examining the visual cortex, but then we’d probably be back to “awareness” rather than “experience”.

The double-aspect theory of information

Shannon [5] introduced the concept of information entropy to quantify the information content of a message. You can actually get an idea of the entropy of a Word document or something by seeing how much you can compress it with winzip (OpenOffice documents are already compressed). Documents which compress a lot contain a lot of repeated information^* and have a low entropy, whereas a truly random string of bits is incompressible and has high entropy. But information entropy doesn’t say anything about meaning: that seemingly random string of bits might turn out to be an OpenOffice document, once you’ve installed the software on your computer which allows it to make sense of it and translate it into text on the screen... and then it might turn out to be in a language which you don’t understand, until you learn that language and then you have the mental software to translate the text into mentalese [6]. It’s fine to represent information as if it lived in its own information space, because on a certain level that string of bits and the pattern of lights on the screen have the same information content even if they have completely different physical forms, but it doesn’t give the information space any physical reality. You always find that the information is encoded in some physical medium, whether it be magnetic domains on a hard disk, charges on the gates of transistors, the orientations of liquid crystal molecules, or firing patterns of neurons. In some sense it’s the same information, but it relies on either the computer or the human having the right software in order to get the meaning out. How that translation into mentalese [6] leads to “experience” of that information isn’t at all obvious. It still seems like “awareness” to me. What’s fundamental about information? It’s just an arrangement of something which isn’t quite as random as it could be.

(* - recently I had to make some posters in PowerPoint and I noticed that even simple edits caused the file size to increase significantly, but I discovered by accident that using “Save as” instead of “Save” cause the filesize to decrease back to its original value, even if you didn’t actually change the filename or anything.)

So what we are left with probably isn’t as exciting as Hankey seems to make out.

References

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.

It doesn't count anyway

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:53:49 GMT

I wonder about the applicability of the new list of “social sins” supposedly introduced to make the confession more relevant, and thereby essentially modernizing the catholic church's reactionariness. But how many of the faithful would go to church to confess that they have done some sort of reckless genetic manipulations? Does the sin of pollution include the way that the Camorra have ruined Napoli? It's probably useful to remember what the seven original deadly sins are for; they are all natural and beneficial human urges taken to unhealthy or antisocial extremes.

Lust: Sex is necessary for the continuation of your genetic material, which is an evolutionary psychological imperative.
Gluttony: Eating is also necessary, or you die.
Greed: Wanting to have stuff is part of a drive towards success which facilitates the first two sins.
Sloth: Lack of sleep kills you faster than lack of food.
Wrath: Anger is what stops other people from taking the stuff that you've worked hard to earn.
Envy: Envy is what drives you to be better than your neighbour, who is your main rival when it comes to the first sin.
Pride: This is what you've earned, your reward for when you've done the right amounts of the previous sins. (“Shame” is your punishment when you've done too much.)

But of course eating more than your fair share, or lazing about while other people do the work for example, is antisocial and it gets you into trouble. As civilization grew it was no longer possible for everyone in a society to feel personally connected to everyone else they would interact with (as would have been possible in a tribe of one or two hundred people) so belief in some sort of moralizing gods serves to impose the rules necessary for relatively harmonious social living. But we have Hobbes's leviathan to do that for us now. So what about the new (mortal) sins? Are they unhealthy, antisocial exaggerations of positive human traits or are they attempts for the Church to score a few points and complain a bit about the usual stuff?

I doubt there's an official list (and the follow-up at cismon clarifies that the Vatican has not published a list of new sins) - it's not so clear to me what Girotti said exactly (is he worried about those particular genetic manipulations which might get out of control, or is he worried about genetic manipulations generally because some of them might get out of control?) but let's take the BBC list:

Environmental pollution: This makes it a sin to not take advantage of the current Italian government incentives to trade in your old car for a new Euro4 one, cleaning the air of the city and stimulating the car manufacturing industry at the same time. I'm not sure if I count CO₂ itself as a pollutant, although Girotti mentioned ecology so contributing to climate change is probably included. I hope the Church is going to become carbon neutral.
Genetic manipulation: It's probable that the Church mainly has a problem with experiments of embryonic stem cells, as part of its general incomprehension of embryogenesis, along with its counterproductive attitudes towards IVF. It's not clear, though, if when Girotti speaks about experiments ‘whose outcomes is (sic.) difficult to foresee and keep under control’ [esiti è difficile intravedere e tenere sotto controllo] it's only Girotti who wants to be able to predict and control the developments relating to this research, in which case he should have done some more biology in school.
Accumulating excessive wealth: The irony of the Church saying this - have you seen the inside of St. Peter's? - has not been lost on anybody. But maybe he just wants to support the socialist left against Berlusconi's centre right, despite political statements being forbidden from Italian media at the moment due to imminent elections.
Inflicting poverty: This counts as one choice with the previous point, but who would actually be culpable for inflicting poverty? Apart from those who discourage birth control in poor and overpopulated areas, obviously.
Drug trafficking and consumption: I assume we are talking about those drugs considered illegal at the most recent time of asking. Abuse of legal drugs (such as alcohol, which is a key part of Communion) is not explicitly mentioned, but this too ‘weakens the psyche and obscures the intelligence’. I don't think he is referring to medicines either when he says drugs. So this is basically that Drugs are Bad, mmmkay?
Morally debatable experiments: Thanks, “morally debatable” anything are obviously morally debatable. From what Girotti said this seems to be the same as “genetic manipulation” but the BBC felt the need to pad things out to get seven new sins.
Violation of fundamental rights of human nature: This too was mentioned in the same breathe as the experiments and the manipulations - it's those which cause the violation according to Girotti. He presumably doesn't like the idea of biologists “playing god” because obviously that's the Vatican's job.

Maybe at some point soon I'll at least translate his answer to the question about the ‘many scandalous and sinful situations within the Church’ which should be good.

Sin in a Cathedral

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:51:38 GMT

It's all over the news (and Gimpy's Blog and badscience.net and Jesus and Mo and JREF) that molecular biology is now considered a sin, along with pollution and drug abuse and that, but it seems the text of Nicola Gori's interview of Gianfranco Girotti is only available in Italian, and even that not from the website of L'Osservatore Romano, where this was published in the daily Italian edition of the 9^th of March. I'm going to try to translate the whole thing eventually. Please point out anything which could be rendered better, but don't blame me for not making sense or misrepresenting. Text is liable to change without notice as I discover errors, but the more I study it the more I feel that it doesn't make a huge amount of sense in Italian either.

In conversation with the regent of the Penitentiary at the conclusion of the course for confessors
The new forms of social sin
by Nicola Gori
Genetic manipulation; environmental pollution; social inequality; unsustainable social injustice: these are the new forms of sin facing us on the horizon of humanity, almost as a corollary to the unstoppable process of globalization. A new test also for a ministry, that of the Apostolic Penitentiary, which works hard to reaffirm even its own role in times in which there is less perception of sin itself. Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, bishop regent of the Penitentiary, speaks of it in this interview given to L'Osservatore Romano, the day following the conclusion of the course for confessors.

The Apostolic Penitentiary seems a mysterious object to the public, but also to a good part of the faithful.
There's some truth in that. Being the oldest surviving part of the Court of Rome - after the closing of the Datary in 1967 and the Chancery in 1973 - it is little known even by most of the clergy. The reason maybe would be found in the fact that its activities hide from the visibility which is more associated with the work of the other ministries. The Apostolic Penitentiary, among the ministries of the Court of Rome, in fact, is that which carries out, always in a direct manner, a truly spiritual activity, that most consonant with the fundamental mission of the Church, which consists of the salus animarum [the health of the soul]. It is the universal and exclusive organ of the Pontiff in the matter of “foro interno” [personal conscience]. One has recourse to the foro interno not only for sins, censures and irregolarities, but also in general for occult situations, such as for example dispensations [and stuff] deriving from occult circumstances. It examines and resolves cases of conscience which come to be proposed. It resolves doubts in moral and legal matters, when one deals with occult circumstances or individual concrete facts.
What is the value of your answer?
We are dealing really with an authoritative value - according to the cases, didactic or liberating - only for real and singular circumstances which come to be proposed and not instead for the other cases, but then for the others these answers can extend themselves as prudential criteria...

So I got bored at this point and skipped to the most relevant part:

Which are the new sins according to you?
There are various areas within which today we find sinful attitudes regarding individual and social rights. Apart from anything else, the area of bioethics, within which we cannot not denounce some violations of the fundamentals of natural human rights, through experiments, genetic manipulations, whose outcomes are difficult to foresee and keep under control. Another area, actually social, is the area of drugs, through which one weakens the psyche and obscures the intelligence, leaving many youngsters out of the ecclesiastic circuit. Again: the area of social and economic inequalities: because of this the poorest become poorer and the rich richer, feeding an unbearable social injustice, the area of ecology, which is currently relevant.

And that's basically it, it seems. Very short on specifics, almost as if he doesn't know what he is talking about.

Join us next time when we answer such questions as “Doesn't the frequent recourse to indulgence give incentive to a magic mentality in the face of guilt and punishment?” and “Regarding abortion, one has the diffuse sensation that the Church doesn't keep in consideration the difficult situation of women.” But first, a look at what the original sins mean and whether the new ones haven't basically just been made up.

Regrets to inform you that Quackometer.net is dead because Netcetera were stupid

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:27:28 GMT

I don't think that Joseph Chikelue Obi ever got back to Netcetera over why he wanted a couple of pages taken off quackometer.net, but maverickly and ethically decided to get lost like the loser he is. That didn't stop Netcetera pulling the entire site today, as if Obi's threat was something to take seriously. It turns out that their Terms & Conditions read “you give us money to host your site, we take it down whenever we get a bit scared or something”. quackometer.net was on its way over to Positive Internet anyway. But you'd think these guys would have learnt by now that pissing off the Little Black Duck is a great way to wake up to several blog posts pointing out what cretins you are.

Quackometer.net is now up and running again, on a better host, so the only losers are in fact Joseph Chikelue Obi and Netcetera.

And see also Bloggerheads (and again) and The Lay Scientist. And lolquacks.

And as of Monday March the 3^rd, something new at LayScience.

What the hell is this?

She burns like the sun...

... I can't look away

10:23

Another thing Milgrom is wrong about

Jesus' blood never failed me yet

Another happy customer

Attenti alla omeopatia

Experimenting with phenomena...

... which aren't actually there at all

Golden Balls

A little bit of what we call... “manipulation”...

Let me come with you, I can see... I can see perfectly...

If at first you don't succeed

freeblogger

Go to hell

It's a no-brainer

Signs of Death

40 years since the Harvard report

Some notes

Taking the moral Hyland

Walking into Lampposts

That's the way (aha, aha)...

.. I Leick it (aha, aha)

Further misunderstanding of coherence

Submitted 8th July 2008, online 11th July 2008

References

Weak quantum theory and quantum critical point fluctuations...

... do not in fact have anything to do with each other

References

The futility of transcendental speculations

Inconsistent with health and healing

References

Consciousness... consciousness of other people... consciousness of beer... unconsciousness...

Consciousness... consciousness of other people... consciousness of beer... unconsciousness...

References

It doesn't count anyway

Sin in a Cathedral

The new forms of social sin

by Nicola Gori

Regrets to inform you that Quackometer.net is dead because Netcetera were stupid

Submitted 8^th July 2008, online 11^th July 2008