Nano is the new nothing

*** Numbers in this post are liable to change. Homeopathic maths is tough! Thanks to all the eagle-eyed readers out there who’ve corrected my sloppy zeroes. ***
Author Jeanette Winterson, who you may remember from such “magical realist” novels as Sexing the Cherry, is busy defending homeopathy in the Guardian today. Her article will get ripped to shreds by a thousand bloggers, so I’ll just concentrate on one aspect that I found vaguely humorous. Says Jeanette:

Objections to homeopathy begin with what are viewed as the impossible dilutions of the remedies, so that only nano amounts of the original active substance remain, and in some cases are only an imprint, or memory… …Such particles are also able to pass through cell walls, and they can cause biochemical change.

Oh Jeanie, if only this were the case with homeopathy. Let’s leave aside the ridiculous notion of water having a “memory” (you have to wonder, if you split the water into two bottles, which bottle will the memory live in?). Let’s look instead at that word nano. This doesn’t mean “very small”, it means “one billionth”, or in math terminology 10^-9. A typical homeopathic remedy is 30C. This means it has been diluted down so that it is one part active substance mixed with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
-000,000,000 parts water.

Nano = 10^-9
Homeopathic = 100^-30 or 10^-60

This means that a “nano” solution, if you want to call it that, is one billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) times stronger than a homeopathic solution.

Interestingly, a 10^-23 solution is likely to only have only one poor, lonely, molecule of active ingredient left. Therefore a standard 30C solution has only a 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000001% chance of having a single molecule of active ingredient.

It’s not just Jeanette who’s confusing “homeopathic” with “nano” - here’s Dana Ullman, who thinks that homeopathy is “nanopharmacology”. Very Small Pharma being obviously better for you than Big Pharma. Yuk yuk.

To conclude: homeopathic measurements are not nano. They are non-existent. Yet another example of homeopaths adopting scientific phrases and getting them all confused, like the cargo cult they are.

12 comments November 13th, 2007