 This goes back a little further than the last trip. It involves a substance that was so kindly brought to me by Ellie here. This is called water. And you may not know it, water has memory. Did you know that? Tell me something. A man named Jacques Benveniste did some tests over there. They were published in Nature magazine with the provision in the middle of the article that they published it only because he had agreed that an independent team sponsored by Nature and paid for it by Nature would go in there and see how his tests were being done. We did indeed and we showed there were serious problems with the protocol and he's still arguing it to this very day. The theory of homeopathy. I will share this with you. I won't go into again the whole thing, it's very involved. These things are never simple. It's not like gravity, things fall down. It's always much more complicated than that. There are about four premises of homeopathy I will share with you. First of all, you go back 220 years to Samuel Hahnemann in Switzerland. Think of the social system of the day and the social situation. Medicine was in its infancy. It was barely started, they were barely away from Paracelsus who made the wonderful discovery that you could use this medication non-organic substances. Up until then, pretty well, everything had been organic substances. He was using metallic salts, simple salts, recured chloride, lead acetate, things like that. He was treating the patients with these substances. It cured the disease very effectively. Unfortunately, the patients all died. So they had the best looking corpses in the hospital. But they had clear complexions, no symptoms whatsoever and they made beautiful corpses. Now, Paracelsus actually, you've got to admire him. He's one of the heroes of medicine because he was brave. He was a self-centered, arrogant idiot, but other than that, he was okay. As a scientist, he really did do some thinking about it and he was experimenting. Of course, he was experimenting on human beings that weren't in his family, but nonetheless, he was experimenting. And he did discover some very useful things and started people out on a new way of studying medicine. But in those days, back 220 years ago, all over Europe, all over the civilized world, indeed, more patients were dying under the hands of the doctors than were dying without the doctors. Poor people couldn't afford doctors and self-terminating diseases, things that they could recover from, that their immune system or natural processes would eventually bring to a close, either by death or from recovery, were taking place naturally. While the doctors were bleeding people and doing pretty ridiculous things with their bodies and giving them a lot of poisonous compounds as well. Which, all the way, they were poisonous. In some cases, in small doses seemed to have been affected. So it was encouraging. But think what happens now when this man, Hanuman, comes along with a wonderful theory that you don't have to give Nazi a substance to people, that ordinary water will do the job. Those people are effectively going to be receiving no treatment whatsoever, and they are going to join the group that is going to have a higher survival rate, people who don't go to doctors at all. The theory was this. The theory is sort of sympathies and likes curing like. The idea is that if you... This is the way they did their studies. They would take a healthy patient. That's a bit of terminology I can't quite define, but a patient who looked healthy, they bring him in, they say, okay, I want you to swallow this. And they'd give him something like extractive dandelion or extractive sand, or extractive... Well, they'll say extractive dandelion. That's a little less hard to choke down. So they give him that, and he develops symptoms. We'll say the symptoms are A, B, and C, and those symptoms are breaking out a red rash all over your body, shaking violently like that and fainting every 20 minutes. Those are pretty serious symptoms, you see. Suppose those are the three symptoms. He writes that down in his book. When they take the dandelion extract, they get these symptoms. A healthy person, that is. So then he waits, and he waits and waits and waits, and finally a patient comes in among many patients and says, doctor, I got a problem. There are three symptoms. What are your symptoms? Well, every 20 minutes or so I fall down to the floor. Wait a minute, got that in my book someplace here. You ever suffer from red rash? Yeah, I'm in a red rash all over my body. I know there was one here someplace in the experimentation. And they describe as symptoms A, B, and C, and he says, Eureka, le voilà. We have a solution for you. You're going to be cured by extract of dandelion. But wait a minute, second rule of homeopathy. You don't really give them the dandelion. What you do is you give them what they call diluted or attenuated solution of the dandelion. Now I mean attenuated, folks. They use terms like attenuated and they use terms like, there's my chalk, they use terms like attenuated and diluted. Now in order to be diluted you got to have, not diluted, diluted. Diluted is easy, but diluted you got to have a solvent and you got to have a solute. A solvent is the liquid or whatever or the larger amount of substance and the solute is what's dissolved in it. Okay, if you don't have one of those elements you haven't got a solution. You got only a solvent or a solute. Well, they have attenuations of various degrees. Now I'm not going to trouble you with powers of 10 and all that sort of thing, but if they take one part of the substance and put it in 10 parts of water and shake it up it's called successing, not shaking up. They got to have a technical term for it. A certain way it's got to be shaken and then what you've got is called a one solution. That's called a one solution. If you take one part of that and put it in 10 parts of water, put it in 100 now, that's called a two solution. So it's directly related to the number of zeros on the amount of water, the comparative amount of water. So if you have a five solution it's five zeros after the one and one part of substance in that. Now as soon as you get up around 23, 24, 27 and such depending on the substance you get to what they call Avogadro's limit. This guy Avogadro was a troublemaker way back when and he came up with this limit which says that there's only, at that point for that particular substance in the solution you now have other being one molecule of that substance present. If you do it again you've got one more order, one more dilution. There's one chance in 10 other being one molecule of the substance in this liter or whatever of water. Well folks, the homeopathy people start off at a dilution of 10 to the 50th, generally speaking. There are 10 to the 23rd stars in the universe. That's what I call dilute. Oh, but you ain't heard dilute yet. They go all the way up to 10 to the power of 1,500. That's extremely dilute. Now look at what that means. I called my friend Martin Gardner and said, Martin I really need something for the layman. I don't know what 10 to the 1,500 is. It's a huge number, very, very, very large number but how do I illustrate that? He said I'll call you back. Later on the day he called me back and he said okay, you got a pencil ready? I said yep. He paused for a minute and he said now I'm going to call you back. This can't possibly be right. It's ridiculous. 20 minutes later he called me back and said no, I was right first time. He said it's equivalent to I hope you're ready for this. I haven't told you the fourth quality of, the third one is by the way, the more dilute the medicine is the more powerful it is. So as you get up to 1,500 it's getting more and more powerful. It works the other way. We might think it would work the opposite way but apparently not. And the fourth rule you still haven't heard. That's a doozy. Martin said if you take one grain of rice crush it up in a teaspoon you then dissolve that powder in a sphere of water the size of the solar system with the sun at the center and the orbit of Pluto at the outside then you repeat that process 2 billion times. Now there are naturally as might have occurred to you a couple of technical problems here. First of all how are you going to mix it? Maybe the dough just with a stick. Where the hell do you get the stick? And you have to mix it for billions and billions of years as Carl would say. You have to stir it for a long time and it's very difficult to mix it up but nonetheless that's what it calls for to get that kind of dilution. Now for the fourth rule of homeopathy. Every molecule of water which you have so prepared when it comes in contact with any other molecule of water immediately passes on its quality to all of that water. I have a question. Now I'm only a layman but boy I've got terrible questions to ask these people and I've asked them this and they say it's a non-significant question they refuse to address it. Since water has been around for billions and billions of years all of what I've got in this little cup of water here a lot of that's been around for billions and billions of years and in this process it must have come upon contact with other molecules that have been in contact with lots of other molecules which have been in contact with each and every possible organic and inorganic substance available on planet Earth. And since the more diluted it is the more powerful it is feel much better. What's wrong with that question? Why don't you give them ordinary tap water and know they'll give them extractive cadmium or something like that which don't fear it has no cadmium in it it's the purest water you're ever going to drink. There's no way and they admit there is no way of telling the cadmium attenuated solution ho-ho with the lead attenuated solution with the gold attenuated solution and they even have substances like sulfur and sound quartz ordinary quartz which doesn't dissolve in water to any appreciably extent at all. You shake one part of quartz or ten parts of water try to detect the quartz friends I ask you by the most sensitive of tests but they say it works. Oh really? Does it really work? Well the people report it works. What about the people who die? Well it doesn't hear from them.