I am NOT a nice woman

A couple of weeks ago, the following was posted on the Pharyngula blog. It features a homeopathic “doctor” named Charlene Warner giving a talk about light therapy. The level of stupid indulged in was painful.

">

I posted the following email to her after my eyes stopped bleeding from the dumb:

Dr. Werner:

You don't know me, but I saw a video of you giving a talk about homeopathy and light therapy. In it, you made a number of factual errors that I assume were well-meaning and unintended and so I thought that perhaps, I would write you privately to point them out.

1> You cannot remove mass from Einstein's special relativity. The amount of mass in the Universe is entirely irrelevant for the implications of this equations. The reason, for instance, that you can move a one-ton car 300+ miles on just 50 lbs of gasoline is because the burning of that small amount of mass releases a huge amount of energy.

2> Stephen Hawking did not create string theory. In point of fact, he has been largely hostile to string theory (for fairly good reasons). The Steven you are thinking of is Weinberg.

3> String theory, if it is true (and there are very good reasons to doubt that it is) has none of the implications that you state it does. The 'vibrations' of strings are, if they exist, a probabilistic quantum mechanical affect and should not be taken to mean something actually vibrating. Rather it is a fluctuation of energy within a defined range of probable states.

4> Even if string theory is true, it would have absolutely no implications that we would directly experience since a single string would still be smaller than the smallest particle and in the same way that you are not affected by individual Z-bosons, for instance, you would not be affected by any single string.

5> String theory is a mathematical description that seeks to explain certain interesting features of the Universe at the sub-atomic scale and in particularly intense gravitational fields. Neither circumstance is something you will ever experience.

6> While it is true, in a very limited and technical sense, we are mostly energy it is true only because E=mc2 actually does hold with mass intact. E=c2 is actually a non-sensical statement on its face sense if E=c2 then the value of E would be E-squared but that is NOT the value of E. This gets necessarily mathematical so bear with me:

If A=B then B = A. If A is squared then B is squared if the preceding is true. Therefore, if A=2 then B must also be equal 2. If A is 2 then A-squared is 4. This means that if A=B then B is ALSO equal to two and four respectively. This is a necessary and inescapable conclusion for the math. So your statement that E=c2 is non-sensical because that would mean that E is equal to the speed of light squared *directly* but that is manifestly not the case.

7> Your statement that 'nothing is really mass' is incorrect. The reason you are not floating away right now (and you aren't) is because the mass of the Earth warps space-time around it and creates gravity. The reason why everything in the solar system orbits the Sun is because the Sun is hugely massive and warps space-time around it. If what you said was true then gravity would not work since Einstein showed that gravity is the warping of space-time by mass.

I think that's pretty much it. Btw. I am not a physicist by training. Rather, I'm a graduate student in biomedical informatics but I read a great deal in physics (well, when I'm not in school) which is why the mistakes in your talk caught my eye.

Have a great day. I hope that you will take this email in the spirit in which it is given. As you are a medical doctor, I'm certain that the last thing you want to do is provide erroneous information to the public.

Like I said, I’m not a nice woman!