 manage something for us. I'm going to tell you about something that is known to the world as homeopathy. Now, I actually would like a little light on the audience if I could, too, because I'm going to ask for hands in a moment. Homeopathy started about 225 years ago now. And it's largely misunderstood by the lay audience. I need light on this board over here. Rather, it will be more helpful. Thank you. I'm sorry, I didn't specify. And light in the audience as well. Now, I'd like to see hands, please. This is not holding your hand up. This is holding your hand up, just for your information. How many here? Well, if I can just get one person here who could give me a rough one-sentence idea, perhaps, of what homeopathy is supposed to be all about. Can I see a volunteer on that? Yes, sir. That's what Dr. Hahnemann said, like cures like. That's true. Any more on the theory? That's not much of a theory, frankly, what you've just said. But can you develop that a little bit for us? OK. That's essentially it, like cures like. And a fellow named Hahnemann, Austrian, pardon me, living in Switzerland many, low, many years ago. He came up with this wonderful idea, like cures like. And this is what homeopathy is all about. I'm going to step over to the board and hope that we might get some light up on it eventually. Maybe you can, I guess you can sort of barely see that. Maybe I'll move it over a wee bit and that might, ah, there we go. It's going to be a nice day after all. Now, this is the fundamental mathematics lesson that I give my lay audience. You'll forgive me for getting so basic. 10 to the power of 1 is 10. Hey, we all knew that, didn't we? 10 to the power of 2. It's the other way, yeah, that. Thank you. 10 to the power of 2 is 100. You see, it's the number of 0s after the 1 here, that is the indicated by the index. You follow this? OK. 10 cubed, 10 to the third power is 1,000. OK, now that we've got the basic mathematics lesson over, this is what homeopathy is all about. There are four general rules to homeopathy. This, I'm glad to see you're all seated, because this is going to floor you. If you haven't heard it before, first rule of homeopathy. You take a substance, we'll say substance X, and you give it to a healthy person. How you define that, that's up to you, probably somebody who is warm and can stand on his own, maybe that would be healthy enough, I guess. You give the substance X to the subject, and the subject, you then note what symptoms develop. They'll call them A, B, and C, all right? So we'll say that substance X is milkweed leaves or something like that, and the subject chews up the milkweed leaves, and then exhibits symptoms A, B, and C. We'll say the first one is, oh, let's say, the person's head swells up like a balloon. And the second one is, the face gets extremely red. The third one is that the person falls down on the ground in a dead faint every 20 minutes. Those are symptoms you would probably notice. So substance X produces symptoms A, B, and C, okay? You make a note of that, that's called approving, you put that in your book. That's the first rule of homeopathy. The second rule of homeopathy is that when a patient walks into your office, you as a homeopath, with a head swollen up like a balloon and very red, you say to that patient, wait a minute, you fall down on the ground every 20 minutes in a dead faint, and the patient says, doctor, you're so perceptive, you're absolutely right. Yes, I do. You must be a great physician. You say, ah, but I, my, as Newton said, my reputation rests on the shoulders of John, so it went before me. I go to the book and I look through and I see what caused that. Ah, milkweed leaves. Here, chew this milkweed leaf and it will go away because like cures like, you see? Don't look at me, that's their idea, not mine. Thus, the second rule of homeopathy. The third rule of homeopathy is you don't do that. In other words, you don't really give them the leaf. No, what you give them is highly diluted essence of the leaf. You ain't heard diluted yet. You think you know what diluted means. It means more like diluted than you would think. This is the way you do it. That's why I've got these numbers up on the board. I knew you'd figure out some use for them, all right. You prepare a number one solution. The homeopaths take one part of the substance and they mix it with 10 parts of water and they success it. That's a technical term which means shaking it 10 times up and down, 10 times this way and 10 times this way. In three different dimensions, you follow? That's called successing. I call it shaking it up. This is a technical scientific term, however. Everything is done in 10s in homeopathy. That's the magic number, 10, 10, 10, 10. That's why we use these 10s here, you see? So that's a one solution. That's one part in 10 of the original substance you follow. Okay, you take one part of that solution and you dissolve it in 10 parts of water and you get a two solution, one part in 100. You see where we're going now. You do it the third time by taking one part of the second solution and putting it in 10 parts of water and you continue on. How far do you go? Oh, you'd be surprised how far you can go with this. You see, they love dilutions of 10 to the 25th and 10 to the 50th, but wait, wait! Remember Avogadro? I never met him personally, my friend. Perhaps some of you have here, I don't know, but he died quite some time ago but he made a lot of trouble before he died. Avogadro came up with the thing he called his limit and Avogadro's limit says that once you get to 10 to the 23rd dilutions like this, 23 zeros after it, you get to a point where there's only one molecule or atom of the original substance left and by the time you get to the 24th there's one chance in 10 of there being one atom of the, you follow? Okay, but they like it at 10 to the 25th, 10 to the 50th, 10 to the 100th and such. Wow, they call that 100x. So if you see on the homeopathic medicine, 100x, don't worry. There's nothing there but water. Or in the case of tablets, lactic acid tablets, that's milk sugar that have been moistened with water that has one part in, you follow? There's nothing there. So don't worry about it too much. They like to go all the way to, everyone seated, good, they like to go all the way to the power of 1,500. That is dilute. I called my good friend Martin Gardner, formerly of Scientific American Magazine, an esteemed friend of mine. And I said, Martin, I appear in front of the scientific and lay audiences and I have to from time to time explain to them what these numbers mean. And 10 to the power of 1,500 is such a very high number. How could you demonstrate it in a practical sense? Well, it's not all that difficult. He said, he all worked something out for me. And he called me back after a while. And he said, I hope you're ready for this. I said, what is it? He said, that would be equivalent in making a homeopathic compound of taking one part of the original substance and diluting it, mixing it with a sphere of water the size of the solar system with the sun at the center and the orbit of Pluto at the outside. And then repeating that process two billion times. We have a problem here, however. You see, in an audience like this, I didn't think I'd be able to get away with that. What about the chooka-chooka-chooka-chooka-chooka-chooka? Or if you're going to stir it with a stick, where do you get the damn stick? You know, that's a big stick and a lot of shaking. Well, now I have here a bottle of this water. Sparklets, sport top. Oh boy, crystal fresh drinking water. It says right here, it's real water. Formula H2O, that's right. Now, I use a little bit of reason here. If the fourth rule of homeopathy is correct, then I got a treasure right in my hand here. Because the fourth rule of homeopathy says, the more dilute the medicine is, the more powerful it is. Oh boy. That means that this bottle of water, folks, this water has probably been around for, well, as Carl would have said, billions and billions of years. This water has to have gone through a lot of chooka-chooka-chooka-chooka, right? And since they say that one drop of homeopathy water, that's another rule, I forgot to tell you, mixed with other water, imparts that magic to all the riffs of the water, hey, this has got to be pretty powerful water, but in this bottle here, I'll try it. Oh, feels so much better. Oh, the improvement is incredible. This is homeopathy. This is what it's all about.