I recently came across some startling information about homeopathy dilutions, and as a result of this information I thought I would verify how much water would be needed to directly dilute a solution to 30C.
To answer this we need to look at how substances are diluted in homeopathy. If we take a typical homeopathy cure for insomnia, which happens to be pure caffeine, we would start off by diluting this into 100ml of water.
We would then take 1ml of this solution and dilute it into another 100ml of water.
This is the same as diluting the original solution in 10,000 ml of water.
The process is called serial dilution and is normally used when diluting solutions of chemicals or even bacterial cells. When diluting bacteria we would start off with billions of bacterial cells in a solution and dilute them serially in 10ml of water 3 or 4 times to achieve a solution of liquid with a countable level of bacteria. This solution is then spread across an agar plate and incubated. The resulting growth of bacterial colonies can then be counted and the original concentration can be worked out.
In order to achieve a dilution factor of 30C you would transfer 1ml of solution into 100ml of water 30 times. To work out the actual amount of water needed to directly dilute the original substance we need to multiply the volume of water by the amount of times we dilute. Because we are increasing the dilution factor of the original solution by 100 each time we dilute we must multiply the initial solution by 100, 30 times, which is also 100 to the power of 30. Working this out gives us a very, very large number.
100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 = 10030
This works out to the following number
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ml
This can also be written as 1x1060 ml, or a 1 with 60 zeros behind, which is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres or 1x1030 litres.
To work out how big this is we need to convert it into cubic meters, there are 1,000 litres per cubic meter so this sum is quite easy.
1x1030 litres / 1,000 = 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 m3 or 1x1023 m3.
This is clearly a very large number, and because humans have trouble understanding just how big numbers are we need to put this figure into some sort of context. There are 9,460,536,207,068,016 meters in a light year so this roughly works out at a cube of water 10,570,225 light years across. Since our own galaxy is about 100,000 light years across we could fit it into the cube over 100 times.
We can take this a step further by looking at how long it would take to drink this amount of water. Assuming that a dose is 10ml we can work out how long it would take to consume the whole thing. Let's say that we have 6 billion people, and we give that population 2 billion doses of the solution every second.
1x1060 ml / 10ml pre dose = 1x1059 doses
At 2 billion doses per second and 6 billion people we would be administering 1.2x1019 doses per second.
Time required = number of doses / number of doses per second Time required = 1x1059/1.2x1019 = 8.33x1039 seconds
1 year is about 3.1557x107 seconds so this works out at:
8.33x1039/3.1557x107 = 2.64x1032 years or 260 million trillion trillion years.
The universe is only 13 billion years old, so if we assume that 25% of this mixture must be consumed before a single atom of the original solution is contained in a dose (which it probably wouldn’t). This is still 6.6x1031 years or 66 million trillion trillion years.
Amazingly, even if you take the dilution factor down to 13C this is still the same as a single drop of the original solution in all the water on earth. I find it astonishing that anyone could even slightly entertain this as being feasible. Talk about crap based medicine! If you think that homeopathy works then I have one question for you. Would you take a homeopathic contraceptive? Try it and let me know about the results.
If you are wondering how to test homeopathy then go and buy a homeopathic solution of 30C of caffiene (the cure for insomnia) and take about 600 times the stated dose. I absolutely assure that the only effect it will have is to make you want to go to the toilet, lots. Of course homeopathic remedies are also available in sugar form and I don't advise you swallowing over 6kg of sugar as it will probably make you ill. Note that it won't be the homeopathic remedy making you ill, just the volume of sugar.
If you want to check this for yourself and are wondering how to divide 1x1060 by 1,000 without breaking your calculator did you know you can use Google to do maths? You will need to type the number in long hand (as in 1 followed by 60 zeros), but it will work.