Shirley,

Thanks for the references on "Potentisation Inquiry". The first one looks like a good start:

Geckeler & Samal :
PASTE START
"A team in South Korea has discovered a whole new dimension to just about the simplest chemical reaction in the book - what happens when you dissolve a substance in water and then add more water. Conventional wisdom says that the dissolved molecules simply spread further and further apart as a solution is diluted. But two chemists have found that some do the opposite: they clump together, first as clusters of molecules, then as bigger aggregates of those clusters. Far from drifting apart from their neighbours, they got closer together.

They even tested "plain old sodium chloride" and the clumping still occurred.

Dilution typically made the molecules cluster into aggregates five to 10 times as big as those in the original solutions. The growth was not linear, and it depended on the concentration of the original solution.

"The history of the solution is important. The more dilute it starts, the larger the aggregates," says Geckeler. Also, it only worked in polar solvents like water, in which one end of the molecule has a pronounced positive charge while the other end is negative."
END OF PASTE

There seems to be a correlation here with the lengthy Homeopathic procedure, where the substance dissolved in the solution is reduced 1:1000000 during trituration, and then 1:50000 BEFORE the potentisation steps begin. I think had Geckeler and Samal used 95% ethanol, and the proper Homeopathic preparation (optimized by Hahnemann) the results would have been better.

There are problems with this solution.
The weight of evidence is with the "subtle energy fields" hypothesis, so it is a matter of proving its existence to the satisfaction of Science, if that is possible at all.

[ 07. July 2003, 16:28: Message edited by: Timokay ]