Zombified
9th October 2004, 05:20 PM
As a long-delayed fulfillment of a promise to Rolfe, this is a review of one of several papers published by LR Milgrom which purport to establish a theoretical “metaphor” for homeopathy in terms of quantum mechanics. This paper is entitled “Patient-practitioner-remedy (PPR) entanglement. Part 1: a qualitative, non-local metaphor for homeopathy based on quantum theory”, Homeopathy (2002) 91, 239-248.
I’ve reviewed a couple similar papers before; this one has analogous problems.
First of all, why discuss a theoretical framework for homeopathy? Especially when available evidence strongly implies that homeopathy has no effect? Milgrom’s agenda is not only to paint a veneer of theoretical credibility over homeopathy, but also to suggest that traditional blind medical trials are not an appropriate tool to detect it’s effects. If Milgrom were only trying to explain homeopathy, the reply would be that there’s nothing to explain.
However, Milgrom is also claiming that homeopathy can’t be evaluated with traditional blind tests, so his explanation of why this is the case invites further examination.
While Milgrom waffles on the question of whether homeopathic remedies have any inherent properties in their own right and doesn’t really take a stand on what many of us would consider clear evidence, his real explanation of homeopathy does not rely on the remedies at all. Instead, he proposes an analogy to quantum mechanics, in the form of “entanglement” between the patient, the homeopath, and the remedy itself. It is the mental state of the homeopath and patient that make the remedy work.
You can see why this is appealing. First, it doesn’t rely on any physical property of the remedy, so any theoretical argument over Avogadro’s number, water clusters, etc, is irrelevant. Furthermore, he can dismiss many clinical studies of homeopathy, because they, for one reason or another, do not involve the entanglement process. This is a “sophisticated” version of the “no true homeopath” argument – in other words, its only homeopathy if it works.
In fact, Milgrom explicitly states this position later in the paper: “An unprescribed bottle of, say, Belladonna 20c sitting on a shelf could not be considered a homeopathic medicine” and refers to another paper saying a “remedy is homeopathic when it cures the case.” Milgrom’s position here is basically unfalsifiable.
Attacking the trial involves something of a straw man: Milgrom is basically objecting to a stereotypical clinical trial, studies that don’t involve a genuinely caring homeopath who does individualized remedies for each patient. I can imagine some ways to address these objections, but I don’t know what’s been implemented already. Perhaps those that know the history of tests of homeopathy can better address their design.
Of course, if a serious scientist felt an effect were real but was obscured by experimental problems, his solution would necessarily involve redesigning the experiment so that the effect can be detected. Milgrom does not bother to propose any way that homeopathy could be demonstrated without the problems he claims exist.
If you are familiar with Walach’s “Magic Of Signs” paper, this non-mechanical approach to explaining homeopathy will sound familiar; Milgrom refers to it several times. Milgrom’s paper is essentially an attempt to make Walach’s idea more palatable by stating it in terms of quantum mechanics, in the hopes that Walach’s idea of sympathetic magic won’t be so objectionable in that form. Many “alternative” apologists refer to quantum mechanics, because of its reputation for spooky and seemingly magical properties. So is Milgrom just throwing up the same smokescreen, or is there a kernel of an idea here?
Milgrom’s understanding of quantum mechanics, and particularly the entanglement process and its implications, is fatally weak. His apparent impression of entanglement is not even correct in terms of conventional quantum theory, let alone any leap to alternative applications.
Milgrom, like many alternative apologists, makes much of non-locality. Of course, interpretation has little bearing on the problem, since most interpretations end up giving you the same math, and in particular Milgrom chooses an interpretation constructed to be equivalent in its predictions to conventional quantum mechanics. And if you are dealing with a homeopath and a patient, it is basically irrelevant if the “information” about the remedy is communicated faster than the speed of light or not. Even more curiously, he chose the Transaction Interpretation. Given Milgrom’s interest in non-locality and the role of consciousness, this is a contradictory choice: the Transactional Interpretation is specifically designed to be a local hidden variables theory. The TI violates causality (microscopically) by sending signals faster than the speed of light, but it is not non-local in the sense that there is any action at a distance, as there is in a literal version of the Copenhagen Interpretation, because a particle interacts only with signals local to it. Furthermore, by obviating a role for observers by introducing hidden variables, the Transactional Interpretation avoids any involvement with consciousness. So if Milgrom really needs an interpretation of quantum mechanics, TI is an odd choice for him.
Milgrom makes some errors describing TI. In particular, he confuses advanced potentials with reversibility. These are more or less unrelated, although reversibility is a fascinating problem in interpretation in its own right.
Milgrom refers to “Weak Quantum Theory” a few times. I have reviewed Atmaspacher et al on this elsewhere. Briefly, WQT is intended to apply quantum analogies to non-quantum systems. Unfortunately, nobody has explained how it is actually applied and interpreted, especially in those cases where WQT removes so much of quantum theory you cannot even discuss probabilities or superpositions of states.
But never mind TI or WQT; as I said, interpretation is a non-problem and WQT is useless. More fundamental is Milgrom’s misunderstanding of entanglement itself, regardless of interpretation.
In quantum mechanics, some measurements are not definitely determined in advance, but appear to have an element of randomness to them. When a measurement is made, the system’s state changes to one consistent with the outcome of the measurement, so that if the measurement is repeated the result is always consistent. But the system still has to obey the rules, like conservation of energy and momentum, so a random outcome in one part of the system can have corresponding effects on other parts of the system. If the system seems, from a classical macroscopic point of view, to have separate components, this can lead to some surprises.
The favorite example is particle spin. Spin is a form of angular momentum, which must be conserved before and after an event. If a particle with no spin decays into two particles, the resulting total spin must also be zero. If the spin an individual daughter particle can take either of two values (stereotypically called “spin up” or “spin down”), then the two particles must have opposite spins. There’s no reason why a given particle would have a spin in any direction, so if you measure one of them, it’s spin could come out either up or down. The other particle will then definitely work out to the other spin. This happens even if the other particle is so far away that no signal could reach it before the second measurement occurs. Classically, you’d expect that each particle is produced with a particular value and that the system doesn’t actually change. It’s possible to demonstrate this is not the case with quantum mechanics (without relying on increasingly improbable loopholes), but I’ve already spent too long away from Milgrom, so I won’t dwell on it.
The point that must be stressed, however, is that the measurement process cannot actually influence the outcome of the measurement. It can only choose which measurement to perform. This one serious error Milgrom makes: he imagines entanglement may be used to communicate therapeutic information from the homeopath to the patient, but entanglement can’t be used to communicate non-locally. This is a pretty bad problem for his model.
Milgrom goes into a section on aggravations and miasms that, to put it kindly, would be speculative even by the standards of the rest of the paper. It relies on nonlinearity in quantum mechanics, a matter which some physicists have speculated about, but upon which there are extraordinarily tight experimental limits.
After this digression Milgrom returns to the main thread, and this time he writes an expression:
Ψ<sub>PPR</sub> = αΨ<sub>Px</sub> + βΨ<sub>Pr</sub> + γΨ<sub>Rx</sub>
Here PPR refers to the total system, Px the patient, Pr the homeopath, and Rx the remedy.
If he is trying to write an expression for entanglement between three subsystems, he has done it completely wrong. One cannot add the wavefunctions for separate subsystems; what you need is a vector that includes components for each subsystem:
| PPR > = Σ<sub>a,b,c</sub> α<sub>abc</sub> | Px a > | Pr b > | Rx c >
In other words, some linear combination of basis vectors that have components for the Px subsystem, the Pr subsystem, and the Rx subsystem, and a, b, and c are labels for the various states those subsystems can be in. The | x > notation is Dirac’s notation for vectors in QM, where |a>|b> is a convention for a vector with components for multiple subsystems; it could just as well be written | a b >. Of course, there is also the small problem of using the notation Rx for something that is not a medicine.
This might seem like a trivial problem of mathematical grammar, but Milgrom's error is significant; his equation simply doesn't make sense. It implies that he doesn't really know what he is talking about: he would be unable to understand the real two-particle entanglement problem.
Nowhere does Milgrom establish by what mechanism entanglement is established between the components of the system in question. In quantum mechanics, entanglement comes about because related parts of a system must obey certain conservation laws and are therefore constrained to interesting subsets of all possible states. How does this work for homeopathic treatment? Milgrom does not really discuss this, except in broad, vague terms. He merely assumes that it happens.
As with all papers that purport to establish a theoretical framework for homeopathy, nowhere is there any sign of an operational prediction that can be used to confirm or falsify the theory. The theory is simply assumed true because it is conveniently consistent with the author’s wishful thinking.
In the section “Action At A Distance” Milgrom again dives down into the realm of Walach’s magical signs. He even gives some credence to reports of cures resulting from writing the name of a remedy down instead of actually succussing it. Milgrom justifies such nonsense by referring to the notion of acausality in quantum mechanics, which of course is no justification at all. Acausality in the TI deals only with signals between particles; there is no macroscopic connection, nothing to do with consciousness or any other metaphysical notion.
To summarize, Milgrom does not understand quantum mechanics, has chosen an inappropriate metaphor, and has misapplied what little he does know. His paper is a mash of wishful thinking and abused jargon very much in keeping with the traditional alternative apologist’s quantum smokescreen. It fails to justify the notion that homeopathy is unconstrained by physical mechanism or is opaque to conventional testing. Finally, he proposes no means to further investigate or test homeopathy in any way.
I’ve reviewed a couple similar papers before; this one has analogous problems.
First of all, why discuss a theoretical framework for homeopathy? Especially when available evidence strongly implies that homeopathy has no effect? Milgrom’s agenda is not only to paint a veneer of theoretical credibility over homeopathy, but also to suggest that traditional blind medical trials are not an appropriate tool to detect it’s effects. If Milgrom were only trying to explain homeopathy, the reply would be that there’s nothing to explain.
However, Milgrom is also claiming that homeopathy can’t be evaluated with traditional blind tests, so his explanation of why this is the case invites further examination.
While Milgrom waffles on the question of whether homeopathic remedies have any inherent properties in their own right and doesn’t really take a stand on what many of us would consider clear evidence, his real explanation of homeopathy does not rely on the remedies at all. Instead, he proposes an analogy to quantum mechanics, in the form of “entanglement” between the patient, the homeopath, and the remedy itself. It is the mental state of the homeopath and patient that make the remedy work.
You can see why this is appealing. First, it doesn’t rely on any physical property of the remedy, so any theoretical argument over Avogadro’s number, water clusters, etc, is irrelevant. Furthermore, he can dismiss many clinical studies of homeopathy, because they, for one reason or another, do not involve the entanglement process. This is a “sophisticated” version of the “no true homeopath” argument – in other words, its only homeopathy if it works.
In fact, Milgrom explicitly states this position later in the paper: “An unprescribed bottle of, say, Belladonna 20c sitting on a shelf could not be considered a homeopathic medicine” and refers to another paper saying a “remedy is homeopathic when it cures the case.” Milgrom’s position here is basically unfalsifiable.
Attacking the trial involves something of a straw man: Milgrom is basically objecting to a stereotypical clinical trial, studies that don’t involve a genuinely caring homeopath who does individualized remedies for each patient. I can imagine some ways to address these objections, but I don’t know what’s been implemented already. Perhaps those that know the history of tests of homeopathy can better address their design.
Of course, if a serious scientist felt an effect were real but was obscured by experimental problems, his solution would necessarily involve redesigning the experiment so that the effect can be detected. Milgrom does not bother to propose any way that homeopathy could be demonstrated without the problems he claims exist.
If you are familiar with Walach’s “Magic Of Signs” paper, this non-mechanical approach to explaining homeopathy will sound familiar; Milgrom refers to it several times. Milgrom’s paper is essentially an attempt to make Walach’s idea more palatable by stating it in terms of quantum mechanics, in the hopes that Walach’s idea of sympathetic magic won’t be so objectionable in that form. Many “alternative” apologists refer to quantum mechanics, because of its reputation for spooky and seemingly magical properties. So is Milgrom just throwing up the same smokescreen, or is there a kernel of an idea here?
Milgrom’s understanding of quantum mechanics, and particularly the entanglement process and its implications, is fatally weak. His apparent impression of entanglement is not even correct in terms of conventional quantum theory, let alone any leap to alternative applications.
Milgrom, like many alternative apologists, makes much of non-locality. Of course, interpretation has little bearing on the problem, since most interpretations end up giving you the same math, and in particular Milgrom chooses an interpretation constructed to be equivalent in its predictions to conventional quantum mechanics. And if you are dealing with a homeopath and a patient, it is basically irrelevant if the “information” about the remedy is communicated faster than the speed of light or not. Even more curiously, he chose the Transaction Interpretation. Given Milgrom’s interest in non-locality and the role of consciousness, this is a contradictory choice: the Transactional Interpretation is specifically designed to be a local hidden variables theory. The TI violates causality (microscopically) by sending signals faster than the speed of light, but it is not non-local in the sense that there is any action at a distance, as there is in a literal version of the Copenhagen Interpretation, because a particle interacts only with signals local to it. Furthermore, by obviating a role for observers by introducing hidden variables, the Transactional Interpretation avoids any involvement with consciousness. So if Milgrom really needs an interpretation of quantum mechanics, TI is an odd choice for him.
Milgrom makes some errors describing TI. In particular, he confuses advanced potentials with reversibility. These are more or less unrelated, although reversibility is a fascinating problem in interpretation in its own right.
Milgrom refers to “Weak Quantum Theory” a few times. I have reviewed Atmaspacher et al on this elsewhere. Briefly, WQT is intended to apply quantum analogies to non-quantum systems. Unfortunately, nobody has explained how it is actually applied and interpreted, especially in those cases where WQT removes so much of quantum theory you cannot even discuss probabilities or superpositions of states.
But never mind TI or WQT; as I said, interpretation is a non-problem and WQT is useless. More fundamental is Milgrom’s misunderstanding of entanglement itself, regardless of interpretation.
In quantum mechanics, some measurements are not definitely determined in advance, but appear to have an element of randomness to them. When a measurement is made, the system’s state changes to one consistent with the outcome of the measurement, so that if the measurement is repeated the result is always consistent. But the system still has to obey the rules, like conservation of energy and momentum, so a random outcome in one part of the system can have corresponding effects on other parts of the system. If the system seems, from a classical macroscopic point of view, to have separate components, this can lead to some surprises.
The favorite example is particle spin. Spin is a form of angular momentum, which must be conserved before and after an event. If a particle with no spin decays into two particles, the resulting total spin must also be zero. If the spin an individual daughter particle can take either of two values (stereotypically called “spin up” or “spin down”), then the two particles must have opposite spins. There’s no reason why a given particle would have a spin in any direction, so if you measure one of them, it’s spin could come out either up or down. The other particle will then definitely work out to the other spin. This happens even if the other particle is so far away that no signal could reach it before the second measurement occurs. Classically, you’d expect that each particle is produced with a particular value and that the system doesn’t actually change. It’s possible to demonstrate this is not the case with quantum mechanics (without relying on increasingly improbable loopholes), but I’ve already spent too long away from Milgrom, so I won’t dwell on it.
The point that must be stressed, however, is that the measurement process cannot actually influence the outcome of the measurement. It can only choose which measurement to perform. This one serious error Milgrom makes: he imagines entanglement may be used to communicate therapeutic information from the homeopath to the patient, but entanglement can’t be used to communicate non-locally. This is a pretty bad problem for his model.
Milgrom goes into a section on aggravations and miasms that, to put it kindly, would be speculative even by the standards of the rest of the paper. It relies on nonlinearity in quantum mechanics, a matter which some physicists have speculated about, but upon which there are extraordinarily tight experimental limits.
After this digression Milgrom returns to the main thread, and this time he writes an expression:
Ψ<sub>PPR</sub> = αΨ<sub>Px</sub> + βΨ<sub>Pr</sub> + γΨ<sub>Rx</sub>
Here PPR refers to the total system, Px the patient, Pr the homeopath, and Rx the remedy.
If he is trying to write an expression for entanglement between three subsystems, he has done it completely wrong. One cannot add the wavefunctions for separate subsystems; what you need is a vector that includes components for each subsystem:
| PPR > = Σ<sub>a,b,c</sub> α<sub>abc</sub> | Px a > | Pr b > | Rx c >
In other words, some linear combination of basis vectors that have components for the Px subsystem, the Pr subsystem, and the Rx subsystem, and a, b, and c are labels for the various states those subsystems can be in. The | x > notation is Dirac’s notation for vectors in QM, where |a>|b> is a convention for a vector with components for multiple subsystems; it could just as well be written | a b >. Of course, there is also the small problem of using the notation Rx for something that is not a medicine.
This might seem like a trivial problem of mathematical grammar, but Milgrom's error is significant; his equation simply doesn't make sense. It implies that he doesn't really know what he is talking about: he would be unable to understand the real two-particle entanglement problem.
Nowhere does Milgrom establish by what mechanism entanglement is established between the components of the system in question. In quantum mechanics, entanglement comes about because related parts of a system must obey certain conservation laws and are therefore constrained to interesting subsets of all possible states. How does this work for homeopathic treatment? Milgrom does not really discuss this, except in broad, vague terms. He merely assumes that it happens.
As with all papers that purport to establish a theoretical framework for homeopathy, nowhere is there any sign of an operational prediction that can be used to confirm or falsify the theory. The theory is simply assumed true because it is conveniently consistent with the author’s wishful thinking.
In the section “Action At A Distance” Milgrom again dives down into the realm of Walach’s magical signs. He even gives some credence to reports of cures resulting from writing the name of a remedy down instead of actually succussing it. Milgrom justifies such nonsense by referring to the notion of acausality in quantum mechanics, which of course is no justification at all. Acausality in the TI deals only with signals between particles; there is no macroscopic connection, nothing to do with consciousness or any other metaphysical notion.
To summarize, Milgrom does not understand quantum mechanics, has chosen an inappropriate metaphor, and has misapplied what little he does know. His paper is a mash of wishful thinking and abused jargon very much in keeping with the traditional alternative apologist’s quantum smokescreen. It fails to justify the notion that homeopathy is unconstrained by physical mechanism or is opaque to conventional testing. Finally, he proposes no means to further investigate or test homeopathy in any way.