13 Things That Don't Make Sense (27 page)

If you are unfortunate enough to suffer congestive heart failure or an arrhythmia, your doctor may well prescribe you drugs
containing cardiac glycosides. These compounds, which affect the way sodium and potassium ions move around in heart tissue,
are usually derived from plants. Four of those plants, including
Digitalis purpurea
, the most widely used of the cardiac glycosides, are conspicuous by their presence in Bharatan’s cardiovascular clade. In
fact, all thirteen plants in the clade contain chemicals that are used in Western medicine for the treatment of heart-related
problems: angina, heart pain, and irregular heartbeats, for example. Some of the chemicals reduce blood cholesterol, some
slow the heart’s contractions—there are all kinds of effects.

There are plenty of implications here, Bharatan says. First, the fact that the cladistics program found a pattern associated
with systems of the human body challenges the idea that homeopathy works through placebo. If it is just a placebo, it’s not
clear where the pattern would come from, she points out. Second is the fact that, in Bharatan’s analysis, plenty of plants
came up as “noise” in the data; they weren’t associated with anything useful, despite being in the homeopathic repertory.
The cardiovascular clade, for example, did not include twenty-seven plants that were present in the matrix and are commonly
used to treat symptoms of the cardiovascular system. Some of them, such as the tobacco plant, have a major effect on the heart;
somehow, though, the computer decided they were not part of this clade. It’s only a preliminary result, but it’s intriguing,
and Bharatan thinks her analysis might provide a scientific means of thinning out the overblown repertory of substances used
in homeopathic treatments.

Bharatan does not want to stop there, however. The third—and probably the most striking—inference of her work, she says, is
the suggestion from the cladistics that these homeopathic substances might be exerting a chemical action. Which means that
dilution and succussion—to most, the very essence of homeopathy—could be not just a waste of time but the root of homeopathy’s
problems. If its power lies in chemistry, there is no need to jump through the hoops of imprinting structure on liquids; Rustum
Roy might be barking up the wrong tree.

The whole concept of dilution and succussion is certainly questionable, she says; no one knows where it came from. Originally,
Hahnemann used undiluted doses of plant-based treatments but got unwanted side effects. That’s when he started watering his
remedies down and succussing them. “That’s what we can’t explain,” Bharatan says. “How did he come to try that out?” In asking
the question, Vilma Bharatan is echoing the past—and risking the rejection of her peers.

MORE
than a century ago, thanks to his disdain for extreme dilution, his fearless winnowing of the homeopathic materia medica,
and a strong desire to move homeopathy closer to allopathic medicine, Richard Hughes was dismissed by his colleagues as a
“skunk.”

The editor of the
Annals of the British Homeopathic Society
, Hughes was a hugely influential character who stirred up no end of controversy during his lifetime. He was the first to
stand up to Hahnemann, questioning his methods and criticizing those who followed him without thinking. Hughes (and many other
British homeopaths following his example) diluted their remedies far less. Hahnemann’s rule that the thirtieth potency—diluted
in the ratio 1:100 thirty times—should be used had fossilized homeopathy, Hughes said. Instead they used nothing more dilute
than 6C—six of the 1:100 dilutions. That, it should be noted, still reduces the material substance of the remedy to only one
part per trillion.

This move toward lower dilution was part of what motivated Hughes’s seven-year undertaking to rewrite the homeopathic materia
medica using only reliable evidence. Out went anything relying on reports from treatments with dilutions above 6C. Out went
purely clinical reports; Hughes dismissed them almost as hearsay. Everything was to be based on provings or reports of poisonings.
The result, the four volumes of the
Cyclopaedia of Drug Pathogenesy
, was Hughes’s magnum opus, hailed on his death in 1902 as “a work without parallel” and one whose pages would be “even more
frequently explored at the end of the twentieth century than at its beginning.” It wasn’t to be.

Hughes’s work had threatened to blur the line between homeopathic and allopathic medicine. He had expressed a desire to establish
an era where “the rivalry between ‘homoeopathic’ and ‘allopathic’ practitioners would no longer embitter doctors and perplex
patients.” It sounded ideal until, wide-eyed, he pointed out the consequences: homeopathy “would at once cease to exist as
a separate body.” This dangerous ideal, according to a 1985 article in the
British Homeopathic Journal
, is most likely what caused his “posthumous ostracism.” Nobody likes the prospect of being absorbed into a bigger organism,
and within a few years of Hughes’s death, homeopathy had retreated from its connections with science and become a metaphysical,
occasionally mystical discipline.

And yet the spirit of Richard Hughes lives on. His materia medica, with its reduced-dilution “material doses,” is part of
the input data in Vilma Bharatan’s matrix, the same matrix that, in a cladistic analysis, suggests current homeopathic prescription
needs a radical rewrite.

The history of homeopathy makes it clear that the present standoff between allopathic and homeopathic medicine is an artifact
of the past, not an indication of a fundamental incompatibility. In all likelihood, the reason homeopathy won’t go away is
simple: there is something to its prescribing principle, the action of similars. If Hughes had had his way, all the surrounding
mysticism and mumbo-jumbo, the enfeebling dilution, and the noise of succussion would have been stripped away over the last
hundred years, and the essentials of that principle might have been incorporated into allopathic medicine. Drug companies
happily use local traditional knowledge of the healing properties of plants to find starting points for the development of
new medicines, and there is no reason to think they wouldn’t take homeopathic remedies just as seriously—if they didn’t come
with what Hughes referred to as the “fancies and follies” that have attached themselves to the basic prescribing principles.

Vilma Bharatan should certainly keep a tight hold on her cladograms; they might one day be seen as the filter through which
homeopathic medicine came in from the cold. The irony is that in the harsh light of scientific scrutiny, homeopathy’s only
chance for survival and dignity may lie in its willingness to die.

EPILOGUE

I
am in Wiltshire, England, on a final journey. Tomorrow I will be meeting with Martin Fleischmann, one of the two chemists
behind the 1989 cold fusion debacle. Tonight, though, I am lying on a hilltop and staring at the stars.

Immediately behind me is an Iron Age monument, the undulating peaks and troughs of an ancient fort. Its ditches and mounds
were built seven hundred years before the birth of Christ. Just below me, invisible in the dark, is a relative newcomer to
the landscape, a white horse that was carved into the chalk at the orders of Alfred the Great. No one is quite sure when that
was done—probably a thousand years ago. My view upward affords me yet another historical sight: in between the creation of
the fort and the creation of the white horse came the creation of the light streaming out from the belt of Orion. Though it
is only now hitting my eye, the three stars that make up Orion’s belt blasted out this light around fifteen hundred years
ago. It has been travelling ever since. When Alfred ordered the horse carving—as a celebration of his victory over the Danes—that
light was still 6,000 trillion miles away.

It’s nice to be able to put a figure on it; it is a privilege to live in an era when we know how fast light travels. In fact,
we are privileged just to know that it doesn’t travel instantaneously across the universe. We take such knowledge for granted,
but we shouldn’t; it was hard won.

In 1676 an anomaly in the orbit of Io, Jupiter’s innermost moon, led the astronomer Ole Roemer to make a very specific prediction.
Io would appear from behind Jupiter at 5:37 p.m. on November 9, 1676, he said—and that would prove light travels with a finite
speed. Roemer’s mentor, Jean Dominique Cassini, head of the Paris Observatory, rubbished the idea; light spread instantaneously,
he said. His beliefs led him to a different prediction. According to Cassini, it would be 5:27 when Io appeared.

Io appeared at 5:37 and 49 seconds. On hearing of this, Cassini announced that the facts fit with the story he had presented.
Although Cassini had made his (erroneous) prediction at a public gathering of scientists, not one of them demurred when he
denied it; they all backed him up. Roemer had to wait fifty years to be vindicated; only after Cassini had died did scientists
accept that the speed of light was finite.

In 1969 the astronomer J. Donald Fernie made a wry observation. He was writing about the decades it took for astronomers to
spot an error that had been made early in the twentieth century. “The definitive study of the herd instincts of astronomers
has yet to be written,” Fernie said, “but there are times when we resemble nothing so much as a herd of antelope, heads down
in tight formation, thundering with firm determination in a particular direction across the plain. At a given signal from
the leader we whirl about, and, with equally firm determination, thunder off in a quite different direction, still in tight
parallel formation.”

The words came three centuries too late to be of comfort to Ole Roemer, but we should take note; this is how science works.
Just as light travels with a finite speed as it moves across the cosmos, science progresses with more impediment than you
might ever have thought. However, there is no fundamental law that imposes a speed limit on science, to be sure. It is simply
the fact that human beings are involved.

There are several factors in play. Sometimes, for example, people just don’t notice things. When Wilhelm Roentgen discovered
X-rays, at least one other researcher had already seen them but not remarked upon the strange nature of his observation. Sometimes,
on the other hand, the human mind knee-jerks against a radical new idea. After Roentgen made his announcement, Lord Kelvin
pronounced X-rays to be an elaborate hoax. Only later, after he had seen the experimental evidence, did Kelvin back down.

If other people don’t get in the way, circumstances will. In 1905 scientists weren’t really worrying too much about how the
universe worked. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Western world was dominated by heavy industry and agriculture,
and that was where researchers directed their efforts. So when a Swiss patent examiner came up with a startling theory about
the nature of space and time, no one took any notice. In fact, the theory of relativity didn’t even help Albert Einstein get
a job. When he applied for a teaching position, he enclosed his published paper and still failed to get an interview. It is
almost ironic: the publication that used the finite speed of light to revolutionize our view of the cosmos couldn’t do anything
to speed Einstein’s passage out of the patent office in Bern.

Sometimes the obstacle is a scientist’s own fear of the unknown. Henri Poincaré was closing in on the theory of relativity
well before Einstein. All the evidence was in place because special relativity is the perfect explanation for the results
of an experiment carried out in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. Unfortunately for Poincaré, he abandoned the research
when he saw its implications for space and time: that time slows down and speeds up depending on the way something is moving
through the universe. It was more than he could face.

Then, when all else fails to block progress, there is always the assumption that there is nothing new to discover. Albert
Michelson provided the classic example a whole decade before Einstein made his breakthrough. “The more important fundamental
laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered,” Michelson wrote in 1894, “and these are now so firmly established
that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.” Six years earlier,
the astronomer Simon Newcomb had said we are “probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.”

This self-assured triumphalism is not just an ancient phenomenon. In 1996 the science writer John Horgan published a book
called
The End of Science
. Within its pages, Horgan argued that science is, essentially, finished. We are near a final theory of physics, he said,
and there is little left of interest to discover in biology. All that is left is a bit of
i
-dotting and
t
-crossing. From here on in, science is boring; it is about filling in the details.

When Horgan’s book came out, it provoked great anger among scientists. Stephen Hawking called it “garbage.” Stephen Jay Gould
called it “idiotic.” It was even alluded to during a Nobel Prize acceptance speech that year; holding his Nobel for Physics,
David Lee announced that rumors of the death of science were “greatly exaggerated.” And yet the book had a significant and
lasting impact. Three years later, the Nobel laureate Phil Anderson coined the term
Horganism
to denote a corrosive pessimism about science’s future.

I have gotten to know John Horgan a little bit over the last couple of years, since we met at Cambridge University in the
summer of 2005. I hold enormous respect for him. But I too think he is wrong. Yes, we now know the speed of light thanks to
Ole Roemer, and we know myriad other facts about the universe and how it works thanks to the incessant progress of science.
But there is also plenty left to do—and I am not talking about the boring stuff.

Since leaving the Hotel Metropole in Brussels, I have investigated just thirteen of today’s scientific anomalies. Some are
more anomalous than others, but all cry out for explanations and further study. Some have yet to be taken seriously; others
are perhaps taken too seriously. The astronomer Simon White has, for example, suggested that the astronomical efforts directed
at solving the dark energy riddle are probably too large compared with the benefit they will most likely give. Occasionally,
the anomalies point us toward acutely uncomfortable facts that no one wants to face—such as our delusion of free will. But,
for all their diversity, their thrilling or disturbing natures, each and every case presents a wonderful opportunity for exploration
and discovery. They will also, as did radioactivity and quantum theory, lead us to uncover anomalies as yet unseen; as George
Bernard Shaw once pointed out, science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

The ancient light painting the dark canvas above me is testimony to the truth of Shaw’s statement. Roemer solved the problem
of Io’s orbit by postulating a finite speed of light. And a finite speed of light opened up another cosmic problem—one whose
solution seems to be opening up a thousand more.

The stars are huge thermonuclear explosions that send out light and heat in the form of packets of energy. Our Sun is a smaller,
closer version that gives us a more direct experience of light and heat; unlike Orion, it is close enough to bring us some
way toward its own temperature. Roughly nine minutes ago as I lie here, the Sun belched out a photon that is now warming someone
in Australia. I click my fingers now, and another photon rockets off from the Sun toward some early morning walker on Bondi
Beach. In nine minutes it will be there.

Here, in the finite speed of light, is an anomaly. Though there is a marked difference between the temperature on Bondi Beach
and the chill here on an ancient English hillside, the universe as a whole is remarkably uniform. Wherever you go, it is all
roughly the same temperature: about three degrees above absolute zero, the coldest temperature possible. Which, given a finite
speed of light, doesn’t make much sense.

Perhaps that doesn’t seem too strange at first glance. After all, we’re quite used to things being at the same temperature.
I’m lying here on the grass, and my feet are the same temperature as my head. My back is slightly cold because the ground
is leeching some heat from me, but essentially I’m the same temperature all over.

That’s only true for the same reason as the stars shine, however: hot things emit radiation. The radiation carries energy
in the form of photons that collide with other things—generally less hot things. Collisions transfer energy from the hot thing
to the cold thing until they are both at the same temperature. Given enough time, things reach equilibrium.

The problem is, the universe hasn’t had enough time to reach its equilibrium. There must have been all kinds of chaos just
after the big bang; the universe was definitely not uniform at creation. And we know from various measurements of the stars
that the universe is expanding, which means that in the 13.7 billion years since the big bang, the hurtling expansion of space
has left some parts of the universe beyond the reach of others; the finite speed of light means the photons from the hot parts
have not had time to reach enough of the cold parts to bring the universe to equilibrium. Yet everywhere we look, from horizon
to horizon, the universe is pretty much exactly the same temperature.

Astronomers call it the
horizon problem
. Or rather they did until Alan Guth solved it. Put simply, here’s Guth’s answer: just after the big bang, the universe blew
up, very fast. Just like that. And it then stopped blowing up so fast and settled down to some respectable kind of expansion.
For no reason that we yet understand.

It solves the horizon problem because before this period of ultrafast “inflation,” the universe was small enough for photons
to travel all the way across it, getting everything to the same temperature. Only after that had happened did the universe
blow up.

No one knows how or why the universe might have started blowing up as Guth suggested. Or why the inflation suddenly stopped.
It’s hardly an explanation, really, but it is the best explanation we’ve got. Indeed, it is now so mainstream in cosmology,
so unchallenged as a hypothesis, that you’d be forgiven for thinking that inflation was part of the well-documented history
of the universe, somewhere just above the Battle of Waterloo on the scale of historically credible events. We may not know
every detail of inflation, just as we don’t know exactly how and when each of Wellington and Napoleon’s soldiers died on that
muddy Belgian field, but we now have good evidence that, just after the big bang, the universe did go through a phase of ultra-rapid
expansion. It is a very neat solution to a very big problem.

Not everyone is convinced. Princeton’s Paul Steinhardt doesn’t think inflation happened, and the Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin,
one of those pointing out the limits of reductionism, goes farther. The widespread acceptance of the standard ideas in cosmology—the
big bang plus inflation—is unwarranted, he says, because scientists have adopted the
cosmic microwave background
radiation that fills all of space as the main supportive evidence. This radiation, sometimes known as the echo of the big
bang, was generated three hundred thousand years after the beginning of the universe; the idea that it can tell us anything
about the first few moments of creation “is like trying to infer the properties of atoms from the storm damage of a hurricane,”
Laughlin says.

Alan Guth solved a problem to most physicists’ satisfaction. But Guth’s triumph is really a doorway opened, and a new series
of questions await us behind that doorway. They are not even difficult questions to generate, for the most part. Twenty-five
years on, for instance, we are still stuck for the simple why and how of inflation. If the horizon problem was an anomaly,
inflation is only a partial solution; really we have done little more than paper over our ignorance with an enigma.

The horizon problem is not, though, an anomaly I have explored in this book, partly because its explanation may well come
from anomalies we have visited here. Investigations into dark energy or cold fusion or varying constants might bring us some
deeper theory than quantum electrodynamics, for instance, and that new theory might play a role in explaining what could have
caused the universe to inflate.

The solutions to the other anomalies might have similarly wide-ranging implications: investigating the origin of death and
the story of the giant viruses might lead to radical revisions in evolution; understanding the placebo effect could—and probably
should—change the face of medicine; coming to grips with the delusion of free will could alter the way we look at human beings
and their responsibilities. It is safe to say, I think, that there is more than enough work ahead for the next generation
of radical-thinking scientists—and the generation after that.