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"Quantum" homoeopathy: physicists required

Mojo

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Mojo
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"Because it's a pile of fairy-like twaddle, and beneath contempt. I wouldn't want to soil my reputation by appearing in print anywhere near it." would probably be the reason why no-one has.
 
Zep said:
"Because it's a pile of fairy-like twaddle, and beneath contempt. I wouldn't want to soil my reputation by appearing in print anywhere near it." would probably be the reason why no-one has.
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That is no doubt, a significant problem. An extension of that problem is how quickly Milgrom can dive into unsupported claims about QM, compared to how long it would take to explain the facts to those of us who are clueless about QM. (I barely survived an introductory course in chemistry grad school, many years ago.)

There are probably two more reasons we don't hear from Q Mechanics:

QM is so far from healthcare (even the real stuff) that Milgrom is not noticed by many physicists.

Second, it is sufficient to say there is no support for Milgrom's assumption that homeopathy works.

Still, I also wish a theoretician would take-on Milgrom.
 
That article is too long. I don't want to spend hours analyzing something that's obviously complete rubbish from start to finish. Their claim that double-blind homeopathy experiments will fail because of entanglement between a patient, a moron and some fake medicine, is so ridiculous it's not even wrong.
 
Barely scanned the paper; in essence he is saying that homeopathy is not amenable to double blind testing as it would interfere with the necessary quantum entanglement (whatever that is) between patient, drug, and practitioner. As he has not advanced an alternative method of testing the efficacy of homeopathic preparations, he is arguing in effect that homeopathy is unfalsifiable - surely he can see a problem with that argument?
 
In other words homeopathy won't work if you are skeptical about it - skepticism being well known to cause superposition collapse.
 
Fredrik said:
That article is too long. I don't want to spend hours analyzing something that's obviously complete rubbish from start to finish. Their claim that double-blind homeopathy experiments will fail because of entanglement between a patient, a moron and some fake medicine, is so ridiculous it's not even wrong.
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That's what I said. If some Q Mechanic would look at Milgrom's first paper (10 pages) and critique it in broad strokes (Homeopathy (2002) 91, 239–248) that would help. I found it as a free PDF a few years ago; but it seems one must pay for it now- I can e-mail it to any interested person (PM me).
 
Ah, quantum mechanics, what has the idiot done to you?

So, he basically claims that homeopathic treatment is, at least to some approximation, an entanglement of two possible states

1. The remedy is effective, the 'doctor' is helpful, and the patient gets better
2. The remedy is ineffective, the doctor is unhelpful, and the patient gets worse.

These three terms are separate basis states of the patient, doctor and remedy, meaning if we look at any of them individually, we'd see they each have two states. As per basic QM, a total state is a combination of each of these (you can imagine them like vector components if you don't know QM).

This is a "maximally entangled state", or to be correct, the probability of either of these total states is 0.5. While not corresponding to reality, at least the math is not wrong.

Then we get to equation 4. He concludes that a double-blind study eliminates the effect of the doctor, so the doctor's helpful and unhelpful state becomes zero. This is wrong. We can either ignore the doctor, literally erasing his state from the equation, so we have

1. The remedy is effective, and the patient gets better
2. The remedy is ineffective, and the patient gets worse.

or we leave the doctor in a 50/50 split between being helpful and not helpful. The doctor can't be zero, he has to be something. A wavefunction of zero isn't normalizable, meaning it's not a possible state. It would be literally impossible to do a double blind study, like an electron going to an energy level lower than the ground energy.

However, in this state, there is an equal probability of the patient improving or not, so he is correct that on average, we should expect no result. Of course, he's forgets that this is an average, so each patient either gets better or worse, and they are measured individually. Really, his equation is says that double-blind studies are helpful by removing the effect of the doctor.

Of course, he makes other errors. For example, he assumes his "assessment operator" (capital Pi) produces even results. For example, if the patient |P> gets better, the assessment gives
<P+|PI|P+> = +health
or if the patient gets worse
<P-|PI|P-> = -health

so that for an even split between P+ and P-
<P+/-|PI|P+/-> = 0

Which he doesn't state, has no reason to conclude, and as anyone who has ever thought about medicine realizes, is so completely stupid it's a wonder he can put on his pants in one try.

The rest follows in a similar manner, alternating between copying from an undergrad QM textbook and replacing the variables, and using the physics so poorly it's not even wrong.
 
Simple.

Quantum entanglement doesn't apply to the macroscopic world.
 
I'm on it, I have an eLetter in beta testing. (I'm the one who wrote that blog, by the way. Hello.)
 
JJM said:
That's what I said. If some Q Mechanic would look at Milgrom's first paper (10 pages) and critique it in broad strokes (Homeopathy (2002) 91, 239–248) that would help. I found it as a free PDF a few years ago; but it seems one must pay for it now- I can e-mail it to any interested person (PM me).
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I saved it at the time, and I can post the url of where I put it, if that's not illegal. (Cough, cough.)

I sent it to some physicist friends and asked for comment. The first thing I got back was an email just saying "Dagenham East". (Three stops past Barking, for the uninitiated.) As BSM remarked, he must have got to Upminster by now!

Later, I got some more detailed criticism, mainly concentrating on the fact that Weak Quantum Theory dispenses with Planck's constant, which in effect pretty much dispenses with any contact with reality. Given that Planck's constant is one of the fundamental universal constants of nature, and fundamental to real quantum theory, any theory that dispenses with it doesn't have much hope of explaining anything. In effect, what Walach and his mates are saying is, just suppose Planck's constant didn't exist, or was any number I wanted it to be, preferably a very large number, maybe homoeopathy could be sort of quantum. But given the fact that Planck's constant does exist, and its magnitude is known quite precisely, and that it is a very small number indeed, such speculation has no basis in fact.

OK, that's what I got from the physicists I spoke to, and it's proved moderately useful in not sounding like a total goofus when homoeopaths declare that Milgrom has experimentally proved that homoeopathy works by quantum physics. I'm not sure how correct it is though, or how well it really addresses all the points Milgrom is trying to make.

A section of a letter where I tried to dismiss the whole farrago as succinctly as possible:
.... the latest proposal is to explain the discrepancy between the clinical anecdotes and the well-controlled trials by invoking an effect of the intent or understanding of the practitioner. It is not sufficient just to turn on this light switch, one has to know that the light is supposed to come on and intend that it should come on. The latest ploy is to dress this up as some sort of 'quantum' effect, and indeed the entirely self-referencing concept of 'weak quantum theory' (Atmanspacher et al., 2002) seems to have been invented by a group of homoeopaths to support this viewpoint. This may give them something to talk about during the long winter evenings, but a theory which summarily ditches Planck's constant (one of the three fundamental universal constants of nature, which appears in many important equations of quantum mechanics) probably doesn't have much of a future in real science.
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The danger of course is that one may make the debunking so abstruse that any point is lost.

By the way, welcome, shpalman! :)

Rolfe.
 
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He goes through great lengths to mathematically illustrate (not define) this collapse of the wave function. Aside from brushing over the tenants of homeopathy itself QM as used by him has major empirical problems. He even describes an interpretation of the "Delayed Choice Experiment". There are many reasons this is a Non Sequitur.

1) He's assuming QM and the interpretation of QM are one and the same. In fact QM and its' interpretation are entirely separate issues.

2) He's assuming that the Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) is the only available interpretation. In fact it is the only interpretation that could so loosely be used to make such an argument. The Many Worlds Hypothesis wouldn't work for him because with or without blinding you still have the same odds of a given outcome. The Transactional Interpretation wouldn't work because the wavefunction never collapses in the first place.

3) The formalism of QM was used to illustrate an interpretation in such a way as to imply a proof of the interpretation. Yet empirical data such as the Afshar Experiment was completely ignored. Theory: Race X consistently scores badly on test Y. Interpretation: Race X is dumb. It is logically absurd.

4) The tenets of homeopathy is too absurd to even bother with a refutation.
 
To simplify Milgrom's effort to its essence: If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.
 
Zep said:
To simplify Milgrom's effort to its essence: If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.
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That's about it except nobody has ever seen the eggs and nobody is quiet sure what ham is.
 
my_wan said:
The Transactional Interpretation wouldn't work because the wavefunction never collapses in the first place.
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Could I query this? I thought I read in one of his maundering papers that it was the Transactional Interpretation that he was actually using.

Oh yes, the summary at the start of his first paper.
A metaphor for homeopathy is developed in which the potentised medicine, the patient, and the practitioner are seen as forming a non-local therapeutically ‘entangled’ triad, qualitatively described in terms of the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. Homeopathy (2002) 91, 239–248.
Keywords: non-locality; entanglement; transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics; PPR entanglement​
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:confused:​

Rolfe.​

PS. I think BSM's version of this was "If my Auntie had balls she'd be my uncle. But she hasn't."
 
Or perhaps in Milgromese: If QM can be totally misconstrued, then QM explains how homeopathy works, if you ignore all the skeptics and believe that homeopathy works.
 
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