@Jonathan Edwards The water memory debacle is explained away in his book. I am interested in knowing why it cannot work, can you explain this further?
Also what is the correct chemical formula?
To understand why it would not work all you have to do is think through what would actually happen. There are about twenty reasons why it cannot make sense.
1. For many homeopathic remedies the 'water with the memory' is evaporated off when the pill is made. So whatever memory might have been there is gone.
2. Even if there were memory holding groups of water molecules in the diluted solutions these would be further diluted so much that they would not have any effect of the sort the original molecule A had. So we cannot argue that the memory water is working because it looks like A - there is not enough of it to matter.
3. If water took an imprint of molecule A it would then be an 'anti-A' shape, just as the latex mold the dentist puts on top of your teeth is used to produce an 'anti-teeth' shape which is then filled with plaster to form a teeth shape. So the memory water is not going to act like A. If anything it will do the opposite by competitively binding any A present.
4. But even that is far too simple. The dentist's mold only works because your teeth are fixed in a jaw and you are only interested in the top of your teeth, not the roots, and the dentist remembers to pour the plaster on to the right side of the old having turned it upside down. Water does not have any of these options. So an imprint of molecule A will only be an 'anti-one face of A' shape. And that shape will fit with thousands of other molecules that have a similar face on one side but are different on other sides. And it gets worse and worse the more you think about it.
5. In order for this magic memory water to actually have an effect like A it will need to fill its 'anti-A shaped' dent with and A molecule. So to work it needs as much A as you started with - which completely destroys any point in using it.
The reason why we know that things are this difficult is that the human body does use 'anti-A shapes' in two very specific situations and in both of these extraordinarily complicated biochemical machinery is needed to get the copying to work. One is DNA, where a double helix is needed, together with a supply of bases attached to enzymes that are fitted up against the other strand at random until one fits - but you have to synthesise the bases first and have very precise regulatory mechanisms for the concentration of all the molecules. The other is antibodies - which I spent my life studying. Antibodies are anti-A shapes for antigens but they only work because the antigen is held in a particular position when it is recognised and the anti-A shapes cannot be made from A shapes. They have to be made at random in advance and then tried out one by one to see if they fit.
I could go on for several pages but you get the drift. Anyone who actually knows any biochemistry - or even high school chemistry should be able to see that the idea of water memory is nonsense. What is really intriguing is that professors of pharmacology in the 1970s actually believed it. It just shows how dumb a lot of people in science are!!