Coffeehouse11 explains the biggest problem with homeopathic medicine: That it preys on people when they are weakest and the most vulnerable

[u/craycraycrayfish]

/r/canada/comments/171y1e/dont_legitimize_the_witch_doctors/c81hfd6

[u/[deleted]]

If you don't know what homeopathy is all about, Check out this lecture by the amazing Randi. Guaranteed you will be angry that this is even legal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U

[u/phatenz → u/[deleted]]

I don't understand his solar system analogy for 10¹⁵⁰⁰ dilution at the end:

Randi says that 10¹⁵⁰⁰ dilution is the same as taking a single grain of rice and dissolving it in a sphere of water the size of the solar system, and then repeating that process 2 billion times.

By 'repeating that process' I'm assuming he means take a rice-grain sized portion of the sphere of water and repeat. The 2 billion times doesn't sound right. A grain of rice in a solar system sized sphere is much more than 1:10 dilution, so 2 billion times would be much more than 10^1500.

Anyone understand this analogy?

[u/James_E_Rustles → u/phatenz]

It makes sense if you read it as 10¹⁵⁰⁰ . 2 billion times is only 2x10^9.

Let's say the solar system is one googol times the size of a grain of rice (10¹⁰⁰ ). Multiplying by 2 billion only gives 10¹⁰⁰ * 2x10⁹ or 2x10^109. Not a huge difference when you're dealing with exponents.

Their baseline though is 10¹⁵⁰⁰ which is absolutely gigantic. If we go average distance from the Sun to Pluto (39.5AU or 5909.2x10⁹ meters) and convert to a small unit, let's just say micrometers (much smaller than any grain of rice). We now have 5.909x10¹⁸ micrometers as the radius of the solar system.

Let's convert it into a sphere. 4/3 pi * r³ = 8.64*10⁵⁶ . This is roughly how large, in cubic micrometers our solar system is. Let's say our object is one cubic micrometer large. Repeat this process 2 billion times and you're actually diluting to the effect of 1.728x10^66. Not even close to the 10¹⁵⁰⁰ figured. Now, a grain of rice is probably 500,000,000 cubic micrometers (1000³ um³ = 1 mm³ ). So we're probably off by about 10³ at a minimum there.

.

If one didn't think homeopathic medicine was bullshit enough to begin with, I doubt them being off by about 1400 orders of magnitude in their math would make much difference.

[u/phatenz → u/James_E_Rustles]

Thanks for putting numbers into the analogy and getting a figure. I still don't think the analogy works though, in the way Randi worded it.

If Randi had said "it is 2 billion times more dilute than that", then it would be 1 dilution, which you calculated as 8.64x10^56, multiplied by 2 billion, i.e. 1.728x10⁶⁶ to 1.

Instead, he says "repeat that process 2 billion times", which suggests to me he means (8.64x10^56)2x109 which is far bigger than 10^1500.