Homeopathy challenge

is a controversial branch of alternative medicine that is under attack from the scientific mainstream. People like have written extensively on the subject, but what it boils down to is this:

And being me, of course I get into arguments with these folks from time to time. So let me state my position clearly for the avoidance of doubt.

I do not believe in homeopathy. That does not mean I cannot or would not believe in it if the evidence was sufficient, but right now the best evidence seems to be against it. A pro-CAM academic found in this study [PDF] that there was no measurable difference between homeopathy and placebo but that the style of homeopathic consultations had an effect on patient outcomes. This makes perfect sense and (unlike homeopathy) is consistent with what we already know. Science works by extending what we currently know, this can sometimes lead to a complete change in thinking (e.g. the early days of particle physics).

OK, that's overly simplistic: science actually raises hypotheses and theories which are tested over time until either they break (and are replaced by new and better theories) or they become established through consistently succeeding in explaining the observed facts better and more completely than any competing hypothesis. Examples:
 * Evolution is a theory, it cannot be definitively proven, but it consistently explains the observed facts (from the fossil record right through to small-scale subspecies adaptations) better than the competing hypotheses, all of which seem to involve the input of God. Scientists consider that this violates.
 * Gravity is a theory. We do not know how it works, but we do know that it does work because millions of observations both on earth and throughout the history of astronomy consistently show that our model of the force of gravity is correct. We cannot say with absolute certainty that a given brick will never fall upwards, but we can say with total confidence that it has never been observed to date and would be inconsistent with everything we currently know about gravitation.
 * Some things in quantum mechanics are by definition unknowable, due to . This effectively sets a limit on what we can know, but (and here's the important bit) the uncertainty principle is known and understood and consistently explains the observed facts (or sometimes lack of, if you see what I mean).

Science observes, hypothesises, refines and re-evaluates.

There is a tension between homeopaths and scientists because at a very fundamental level accepting homeopathy requires you to believe in something, whereas science requires you to understand it. Belief can be shared, ask any evangelist, but homeopaths want to be taken seriously as a branch of medicine, and medicine is very firmly on the road away from being a black art and towards being a science. There is a lot we still don't understand but there is a lot we do understand and the number of new discoveries that turn existing knowledge on its head does not seem to be increasing.

This is well expressed in the words of, who is described by arch-homeopath as a supporter of homeopathy:

Over time you would expect homeopathy to have addressed these problems. It hasn't. Hence the problem.

Darwin is a good example to quote (though celebrity endorsements are not in themselves any kind of evidence, just look at ). I do not need to believe in evolution in order to accept that it explains the observed facts better than any other competing theory; for now that is good enough and if a better theory comes along then we'll deal with it. In order to accept homeopathy I would have to set aside a path of development of ever more refined theories over a couple of hundred years, and go back to a point of accepting something which was hypothesised in 1796 and has been accepted by homeopaths, , ever since. Not just one thing: three tings, all of which are to me highly implausible because they directly contradict theories and knowledge which have been developed over many iterations to more and more closely explain what we find in the real world.

Here are some suggestions I have for things the homeopathic community could do in order to advance the state of knowledge and begin settling the argument rather than simply repeating it. These are things which could build on current knowledge rather than demanding that current knowledge is discarded and a completely different set of hypotheses adopted.

Obviously I do not think homeopaths can do this. But I also don't think these are necessarily the only tests. I'll be happy to hear from any homeopaths or scientists who can propose better and more valid tests for these core concepts of homeopathy.

Incidentally, water memory is not in there for a reason: I think it's a sideshow. If there is a mechanism by which hyperdilute solutions can work then it might be water memory or it might be something else, answering that question is an irrelevance until these thee issues are resolved to the satisfaction of the scientific community. It is only then that homeopathy is likely to be taken seriously.