OK, went and dunnit:
The experiments of Rostrum Roy. Source:
http://www.rustumroy.com/Roy_Structure of Water.pdf
Roy's experiments have already been hailed by some in the homeopathic community as the new vindication of homeopathic practice, even though Roy himself explicitly states that his reported results provide no indication of homeopathic efficacy.
However, let's look at what Roy is reporting.
The experimental results have been published as a lecture, no formal report has been published in any peer-reviewed journal.
Most of the report deals with water clusters. There is nothing new in this, as water clusters have been known for some time already. Water clusters are semi-stable configurations of up to some 400 water molecules. They exist under certain conditions when water is "stressed", either just around freezing, or in areas with surface tension.Obviously, water clusters are not in any way durable structures, otherwise water would not be a liquid.
Roy does not make any direct claims about a connection between water clusters and potentized homeopathic remedies, but he proceeds to report a set of spectroscopic analyses of some homeopathic remedies. Here, he attempts to show that the remedies have a spectrographic profile that differs from controls but is characteristic of the remedy.
In its subtler form, such weak bonds would also allow for the changes of structure caused by electric and magnetic fields and by radiation of all kinds, including possibly so-called “subtle energies”,which are the basis of an enormous range of claims about specially “structured” water.
Reference to subtle energies, the existence of which which is, at best, an unsupported thesis.
The burden of proof on critics of homeopathy is to establish that the structure of the processed remedy is not different from the original solvent.
Invalid attempt to shift the burden of proof.
The principal conclusions of this paper concern only the plausibility of the biological action of ultradiluted water remedies, they are based on some very old (e.g. homeopathy) and some very new (e.g. metallic and nanobubble colloids) observations which have been rejected on invalid grounds or due to ignorance of the materials research literature and its theoretical basis. This constitutes an excellent example of the common error in rejecting new scientific discoveries by using the absence of evidence as evidence for absence.
Straw man. Homeopathic observations have been rejected on many other grounds.
The “structure of liquid water” receives some 8 million hits on Google and the “structure of water” over twice as many. Any contribution that can be made to this vast body of knowledge is sure to be marginal. This paper does not report any such incremental advance with ultraprecise measurements about the structure of oligomers, femtosecond spectroscopy of bond breakage or phase transitions in glassy water.
Since when is Google searches a scientific authority (and this is not the last time he uses it)?
However, the rest is honest enough: They basically say that their paper adds nothing new to the research base.
Fig. 2 In sharp contrast with the hypothetical calculations based on Zachariasen’s random network theory, is the direct TEM evidence. Shown are some examples of binary and ternary glasses, some quenched, some heat treated which clearly show actual phase-separation. One can confidently assume that in many if not most glasses and in many liquids, structural (-composition) fluctuations must exist as precursors to such phase separation (after Mazurin and Porai-koshits) [11].
How exactly can one "confidently assume" that we can infer anything about properties of liquids by studying solids?
Turning from the possible nanoheterogeneity of structure, to kinetics , we examine the argument that the “rapid breaking and remaking of bonds” excludes the possibility of different structures co-existing in liquid water. One can safely assume that these kinetics do not change just because phase separation may be involved at essentially a single temperature. Obviously these very fast kinetics of breaking and re-formation of bonds are irrelevant since they take place within each structural arrangement of units, without statistically affecting the structure of the units themselves.
Another bland assumption. How on earth can we "safely assume" that kinetics do not change? How is it obvious that the constant and very fast very fast rearrangements within a given structure does not affect the structure as a whole?
Another relevant example, albeit metastable, is that of glassy carbon. TEM studies (Fig. 5)show that in glassy carbon, interlocking mixtures of 1—2 nm regions of sp2 bonded graphite are mixed with sp3-bonded diamond regions [21]. As we will see later, the relevance of this line of argument by analogy has now been established beyond any doubt.
Here, we get eerily Hahnemannian: After a row of more or less unsupported assumptions, the arguments is considered established beyond any doubt. I thought this kind of arrogance went out of fashion after the 19th century.
The appropriate question is on the longevity of particular structures, and the statistical distribution of particular structures, and the statistical distribution of such as a function of temperature.
Yes, that is obviously rather crucial.
Relevant data which bear on this question, but obviously provide no quantitative answers, are the facts that the concentration of the different clusters or fragments resembling “dense ice” which must be present in all water samples at say 3 or 4º C, is very much higher than that present at room temperature.
Essentially saying that we don't know, but making another assumption.
And these clusters do not disappear because of various
bond breakage phenomena. They are of course in thermodynamically stable equilibrium. (i.e. last forever).
Complete non-sequiteur. However, this is an interesting, albeit unfounded, claim: If we take it at face value and accept that those structures do "last forever", then how can they change to reflect properties of a given remedy? Seems Roy inadvertenly defeats his own line of logic, here.
Table I and Fig. 13 show the extreme degree to which water’s properties are anomalous. Note first in the figure that the properties of the vast majority of liquids have monotonic, linear, changes with some variable. Next, note the very, very different behavior of water. Next, note that it is not just one property in which very anomalous changes are found, but such changes are found in many properties.
Reiterating the well-know observation that water has a long row of rather unique properties. Water is, in terms of physical and chemical properties, a very unusual material, this is already well known.
However, this very observation considerably weakens Roy's many inferrences and assumptions about water, taken from other materials. How, when water is so special, can anyone assume that properties from any other materials can be taken to apply to water?
These anomalies clearly tell the materials scientist that there is no way to achieve these phenomena except by a combination of two of our key conclusions about the structure of water.
This is simply an assertion. And indeed, in the following:
Across the transition point in properties there has to be a change of structure. Secondly, there must be several quite separate structural transitions to account for just the property changes noted. There is no prima facie way of telling whether such absolutely confirmed familiar behavior can be explained by complex rearrangement of just two (or five) states or clusters, or whether it requires simpler re-arrangements of many different states. The crystal chemical connection invoked by Robinson is certainly operative, but it is not necessary that water consists of a mixture of only “two states”, which by some juggling could be adjusted to try to explain the plethora of anomalies by utilizing only two
structures. Our proposal is simply to posit that there are many possible structures.
It is admitted that this is simply an assumption.
So far, the paper has addressed the possible presence of durable structures in water. As can be seen, that part contains a lot of assumptions. Now comes the interesting part, namely, what has all this to do with homeopathy?
a. The role of epitaxy
Epitaxy, a term which does not appear even in most technical dictionaries, is a phenomenon very well known, studied and used in dozens of everyday technologies in materials science (See Barker; Royer; Pashley [48—50]). Yet it is never invoked directly in the literature on potential interference in the data, or on the super-sensitive molecular structural studies of water. It is not even referenced by the strongest supporters of homeopathy. Epitaxy is the transmission of structural information from the surface (hence epi) of one material (usually a crystalline solid) to another (usually but not always a liquid)
Subtleties of terminology appear in various papers, but it is structural “information” that is definitely transferred (for a recent example of the subtleties of the what and how information can be transferred in the preparation of certain industrially important phases, see Roy, Guo, 7 It is also plausible as reported by John Ives that especially with the succussing process, trace amounts of the glass (which is probably a complex aluminosilicate) are dispersed as nano-heterogeneities of silicate islands. (“Recent data on homeopathy research”, Proceedings at the Whole Person Health Summit, Washington, D.C., April 2005)
©2005 Matrice Technology Limited Materials Research Innovations 9-4: 1433-075X Materials Research Innovations Online 595
Bhalla and Cross [51]. In most cases, no (zero) matter is transferred from solid to liquid, but even major structural changes and patterning information is certainly transferred , e.g. GeO2 can be made to crystallize from aqueous solution in the quartz (SiO2) structure or the rutile (TiO2) structure (which is 50% denser), merely by using the appropriate epitaxial substrate. Hence it is clear that concentrations of the change agent or solute which dissolves in the liquid
phase, being changed, whether above or below Avogadro’s limit become wholly irrelevant, since it is zero.
Note the last paragraph (my emphasis). This is obvoiously false: Even if an imprint of a substance can be obtained and preserved in water (and bear in mind that this thesis is based on a chain of assumptions), then that substance must evidently
be present to make that imprint, even if no substance is transferred.
Roy's claim here is equivalent to claiming that since no part of an engraving patrice is transferred to the engraved material, there is no need to have the patrice at all.
There is only one term for this: Nonsense.
In homeopathy, a specific material (animal, mineral, or plant source), is added to the liquid (water or water + ethanol). The preparation of the homeopathic remedy involves multiple serial dilution steps, each followed by multiple succussions (vigorous shaking or turbulence—by hand or mechanically). The resultant remedy is hypothesized to catalyze system-wide, hierarchically self-organized changes within a clinically ill person or animal [53, 54]. However, this paper is not concerned with any clinical effects whatsoever. The only relevant question for us is, in what ways can the “active agent” change, affect or
“imprint” the liquid structure [55]. The biochemical and medical community, unaware of the materials research field, assume that it is only the presence in solution of finite concentrations of the active agent that can affect a liquid. They are clearly wrong: structure can be transferred by epitaxy with no presence whatsoever of the controlling phase.
My emphasis again. Roy builds on his invalid assumption and claims that his opponents are thereby proven wrong. In this, apart from having no basis, he builds a straw man. The biochemical and medical community is not much concerned with
structure. They are concerned with
chemistry.
Even IF Roy's imprint could exist, and persist in a fluid, it would just be an image of the structure of the medical substance. Since no pharmaceutical effect is known that is based on structure alone, this bumpy road seems to lead to a dead end.
However, Roy has other hypotheses:
He mentions the effect of collodial silver and the minute amounts that are needed to get a medical effect. That is, of course, interesting, but as he admits, event though small, the efficaous amounts of collodial silver are well above the avogadro limit (several orders of magnitude, in fact).
Then there is nano-bubbles.
c. Other methods of affecting structure.
The role of succussing: pressure generation and nano-bubble entrapment. Pressure, after temperature, is of course the most important of the intensive thermodynamic variables in deciding what structure will form under new environments. Pressure is well known to have profound effects on crystalline H2O. Some 13 different crystalline H2O structures are known in a modest P-T region.
So, once more inferring from solid state to liquid state, and assuming the same rules apply.
We have shown as reported above, that while it
is largely unknown among even materials scientists, it is fully established that all common glasses (frozen liquids) change structure (and their density and refractive index properties) continuously with pressure, and they can be retained in their new states rather easily.
Here is another place where all this analogy making fails to compute. Common glasses are amorphous, and it could be argued that they are in the liquid mode always (although lots of physicists would disagree). Water, however, is
not amorphous; in the solid (frozen) state, it is crystalline. So, at best, this is irrelevant.
He continues to explain how pressures generated during succussion might generate nano-bubbles, which might persist for prolonged periods. He then suggests that active substance could be trapped in those nano-bubbles. That might perhaps happen, but the nano-bubbles will obviously be diluted away at at least the same rate as non-entrapped active substance, so the thesis is really uninteresting.
But it doesn't end here. Roy speculates on about how there could possible be something about potentized homeopathic remedies, and with the next thesis, he heads off to the deep end:
d. The influence of magnetic and electric fields, and human “intentions” (subtle energies)
Human intentions. ... At this point one would be absolutely justified, from a scientific POV, to simply stop reading and dismiss the paper. I have not done so, however.
While the E or H fields contribute relatively little to the Gibbs free energy stability of most materials,10 they become profoundly important when these effects can be “locked into” a material as, for example, ordered domains in a magnetic ferrite, or in the domain structure of ferroelectric transducers. All modern electronics depends on memories which utilize such materials.
(my emphasis)
Incorrect. Not that it matters to the subject at hand, but it does demonstrate that the writer is perhaps not entirely up to date. The last statement has never been entirley correct, and it has not even been remotely correct for the last three decades.
There follows something about the effect of gigaherz fields on certain solids, but no hint about how that is relevant for the subject at hand.
Then:
In Tsinghua University in Beijing, Raman spectra were taken of distilled water before and after implantation of “qi,” or intention, by Dr. Yan Xin, the best known of China’s Qigong grandmasters, from a great distance (10’s to 1000’s of km.).
We are beginning to understand why the good professor has opted
not to submit this paper to a peer reviewed scientific journal. .. Or if he has, why it has not appeared anywhere.
Having finshed the hypothesis, Roy goes on to evaluate the durability of such putative effects:
e. The kinetics of structural change
A final important issue in attempting to bring some of the results into the context of current (not classical) physio-chemical thought, concerns the kinetics of any structural change. We have dealt in earlier sections with responses to specific objections. If indeed one were to imprint “epitaxially”, specific structured information on to a homeopathic liquid remedy, or expose it to a human intention field, how long would such a (metastable) imprint last?
Surely a relevant question, and Roy goes on to compare with the structure of diamonds, which is also labelled metastable, and observes that diamonds are virtually forever. A rather interesting comparizon, considering that he has earlier in the paper pointed out the profound difference between the use of the term structure in solid state mechanics and liquids (the chapter 'Deconstructing the terminological confusion around the term “structure of water”').
Anyhow, the longest concrete timespans that Roy seem to be able to deduce from various sources seem to be in the order of hours, which obviously will not serve for homeopathy. He basically leaves it there.
In the chapter
f. Experimental tools for determining the structure of liquids including water
are reflections on how these theses could be tested.
g. Data from the literature on homeopathy consistent with the newer materials science models. This paper has attempted to review the literature on the structure of water through the prism of materials science, hence focusing on that literature. Of course large amounts of very relevant research also exist in the homeopathy literature, and in the following section we attempt merely to connect the two approaches.
That's fair enough.
The central thrust of this paper, which has presented an argument that nullifies the simpleminded argument of “zero concentration of solute, hence no possible effect,” is that it is structure NOT composition which has the effect.
This, however, is circular reasoning. Roy mentions a set of putative mechanisms that might preserve structure, but that does not in any way nullify the notion that composition is what is needed for effect. He presumes that homeopathy works (showing his real colors, here), and concludes that since the only mechanisms he could think of implied structure, he has now shown that structure is what counts.
That is very poor science.
He goes on to reference some of the usual host of studies that have, over time, provided various results that could be interpreted in favor of homeopathy, but does honestly acknowledge that none are beyond criticism.
This is where the paper ends. The conclusion is, in my opinion, not valid because of the mentioned uncongruencies and logical leaps.
In this presentation
http://www.rustumroy.com/May 16th Webinar.pdf ,
Roy presents a synopsis of the above paper plus some spectroscopic analyses of samples of homeopathic remedies.
One very interesting thing is that while all the above theories deal exclusively with
water structures, the analyzed samples are water/
ethanol based. Which essentially means that all bets are off (if there were any bets to begin with).
His key conclusions are:
Key Conclusions
• Homeopathic remedies are spectroscopically distinct from the
original solvent (water/ ethanol).
• Different potencies can be distinctly distinguished by the UV-VIS
and the Raman spectra.
The first one is, of course, interesting, however, the experiment doesn't really show that. It is stated that the remedy is purchased from the Hahnemann lab, but there is no indication of the source of the water/ethanol. Even if it is from the same lab, there is no guarantee that it is from the same batch, and even if that is the case, the results don't prove that the different spectra have anything to do with the homeopathic "content".
Spectroscopy is a very sensitive measuring method, essentially able to detect even very few molecules of a substance. Therefore, to infer anything from this, the controls must be established using extremely rigorous methods (a problem that haunts all spectroscopy trials for homeopathy published so far).
For spectroscopy to be valid, the control solution must be from the same batch as the one used for the remedy, and it must have gone through the same potentization steps, sans mother tincture, of course. Otherwise you have absolutely no way of knowing if you are just detecting random impurities introduced through the lab procedures.
In this context it is important to remember that the best commercially obtainable purity of water corresponds to 5-6C, so even the most rigorous laboratory practices will leave you with high potency remedies that have been in contact with several orders of magnitude more random impurities than anything else.
The same criticism is valid for the Raman spectra. All the trial demonstrates is that the samples happen to be not precisely identical.
Hans
