Homeopathy

Hi all,

quote:

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Do you know what Avogadro's number is? It is the number of molecules of a substance required to have the same number in grams as its atomic weight. That is, since molecular oxygen has a molecular weight of about 16. Then if you have 16 grams of molecular oxygen, you know that you have Avogadro's number-worth of oxygen molecules.

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It is about 6.022e23.

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Now, if you do a dilution of 10-30, how many molecules do you think are going to be left if you only started with 1023 of them to begin with?

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Pardon me Rrhain,
your analysis is good - but it assumes one starts with exactly one mole of water, which may not be accurate. Don't they start with a liter or some larger amount?Anyway -
The break even for 1 molecule would be about 10^7 moles of water wouldn't it? That's about 180 tonnes of water?Is that about right?
180 tonnes of water at X30 dilution would have about 1 molecule of active ingredient left?Iasion

Doh,
silly me - solute/solvent...Ok,
so if we took 1800 tons of sugar,
disolved it in 18000 tons of water
(assuming roughly 10 to 1 water-to-sugar)
then did a X30 dilution,we would end up with 18000 tons of water with ONE sugar molecule in it (I still seem to have slipped a decimal place somewhere - oh well.)Anyway -
you didn't, like, think I was actually supporting this nonsense did you?I was just trying to get a rough idea of just HOW stupid it all is :-)Iasion