1: I've been writing for Dolores Jacinta for a while now: chapter two, the atheist's guide to spirit was for her when she was sending all those virtual kisses from the antipodes. But she's gone, like the candle's flame

2: I was surely stoned

3:noticing here that at 10 to the minus 27 there are two spots I should mention that MAME spotted out each dilution three times - so the darker spot may be two of those and the lighter spot the other.

4: labelled with histological stains, rather then P32 [radioactive phosphorus]

5: that's what Hahnemann called the serial dilutions when he was inventing homeopathy, "potencizing" (or rather the German equivalent). So the specific dilutions are "potencies."

6: named after the French mathematician who demonstrated this phenomenon in mathematical systems

7: Ian Stewart: Does God play Dice

8: Del Giudice: Water as a Free Electric Dipole Laser: Physical Review Letters: 29 Aug. 1988, 61:9:1085-88

9: There's more to say about this later

10: Hans Jenny's work may help explain why I use this metaphor. Jenny shown a light through a vibrating liquid to create some amazing (moving) patterns.

11: I can illustrate what we mean by entrainment by telling you about one of Pomeranz's ultradilution runs. Remember, he was trying to duplicate Benveniste's ultradilute antigen findings, so the lab was making up serial dilutions of antigens to human basophilic white blood cells to see if these "homeopathic"-antigens would cause histamine release from the basophils. In one particular run we seemed to get degranulation at two separate intervals with these two patterns overlapping, summing with one another (in a linear fashion), and in that, to some extent hiding each other. This was the apparent pattern in the low dilutions, up to about forty-five, and then these two waveforms (when plotted out in a graph of successive dilutions they appear as waves) seem to "entrain" each other - a "compromise" was reached - and thereafter we saw peeks and troughs with a new periodicity. So with entrainment we have two periodic functions and they "entrain" one another to give one resultant function. This indeed is part of the essence that makes an oscillation "non-linear": where two periodic functions don't simply sum, but interact, we say they are "non-linear" - that is, they don't add together in a linear fashion like the waves in a pool.

12: Lynn Trainor

13: one of the most basic tenets of science.

14: there are those who say you only need to be carrying the remedy to feel the effects. You can have it in your pocket. Then again, Jean Munro, a Clinical Ecologist, reports patients coming out with rashes on their hands, like stigmata, simply from holding a phial of diluted (potentiated) antigen. "Try wrapping it in metal foil," advised Cyril Smith (another physicist). Screened with metal foil or gauze the remedies no longer provoked a skin response. Further, metal gauze of one dimension will screen out the signal while a different sized gauze will allow the signal to pass. This suggests that the effects are radiated. But if remedies are radiating, then they use energy. They should run down. With time they should become inert. It is for these sorts of reasons that the journal Nature, and "straight" science, have so much trouble with Benveniste's ultradilute antigens.

15: in homeopathy to succuss the remedy you might pound it lightly against a book, or your palm, through an arc of about 10 centimeters, impacting it 20 times. In the lab, with the ultradilutions, you succuss by touching the little plastic veil to a "vortex" devise that is standardly used to mix these little vials.

16: in Homeopathy we latinize it and call it Nat mur, short for Natrium muraticum

17: There the body becomes sensitised to a small quantity of a substance: the immune system comes to recognise and is primed to respond to a subsequent exposure.

18: Clinical Ecologists deal with environmental hypersensitivity. One of the chief treatment modalities is to give a hair of the dog. Having identified, by challenge, the substances which cause a patient to produce symptoms, a dilution of that same substance is found, again by challenge - by presenting the patient with it - a dilution is found which will neutralise the symptoms and protect the patient. What they are doing here is essentially "homeopathy", though here "same cures same" rather than "like cures like". The dilutions used by Clinical Ecologist, the "Miller dilutions", are in the pharmaceutically range. They start with a 1 in 20 mother serum, Miller's 0, and then dilute 1 in 5, so Miller's 1 is 1 part in 100, Miller 2's is 1 in 500. Typically they are going to find their neutralizing does at around the 4th dilution (Miller's 4 is 1 in 12,500). Clinical Ecology, then, is treating like with like, but it is not using ultradilutions.

19: Cohen: Conference on Radiation Hormesis: an Overview: Health Physics Vol 52, p.519. 1987.

20: Furst: Hormesis Effects in Pharmacology: Pharmacological Inversions as Prototypes for Hormesis: Health Physics, vol 52, p527.22

21: Though one potency may cause an aggravated "healing crisis", where another just simply cures, and these responses are not predictable - though we do have the rule that the higher potencies give a deeper and stronger response - but ultimately the "cure" will be effected regardless of the potency

22: this is way back in Feb. 1989 when Teresa and I were slowly and painfully falling apart

23: Moorjani and Coey: Magnetic Glass: Elsevier 1984

24: I guess it's quite complex if you don't have a background in genetics.