I have been a great theoretician, in my opinion only I started hypothsizing when I was a PG ay Du science department.

I continued it while i was a research scholar at IITK (as an experimental biophysical chemist); and did not stop even when I was not really a part of any science community of any university or college (that was when i was active at Hypography science forum) and I am ready with my latest theory. None of my theories have been ever tested experimentally, partly because i always lacked institutional support for the laboratory facilities required. But I am happy theorizing and telling people about them. So, today I decided that I shall post them on Vimarsh. Who knows that my post may inspire someone who stubles upon in, and finds it worth testing From which theory should i start, i think i will start from my latest. I have been busy for last few days in contributing to the Homeopathy article on wikipedia. Although I must confess that I am personally a great believer of this system of treatment, more so after I entered into a debate with dear tarun here on this forum. I starting gathering information in its support (like the research conducted by Dr. Reilly an M.D. that was published in the reputed medical journal Lancet). So a few days ago when i stumbled on the article about Homeopathy in wikipedia, and felt that it was a bit biased against it, i added the reference of Dr. Reilly/s papers and did a bit of editing too! I was rebufffed by the other wikipedians a few times, and it was then that i carefully went through several documents including the webpage of NiCCAM about homeopathy. I now realize what is the basic point why so many scientists refuse to believe in it, Let me quote a paragraph from wiikipedia: Quote: Common homeopathic preparations are diluted beyond the point where there is any likelihood that molecules from the original solution are present in the final product; the claim that these treatments still have any pharmacological effect is thus scientifically implausible and violates fundamental principles of science, including the law of mass action... ....A popular homeopathic treatment for the flu is a 200C dilution of duck liver, marketed under the name Oscillococcinum. Comparing these levels of dilution to Avogadro's number, one liter of a 12C homeopathic remedy created from diluting 1 liter of 1 molar solution contains on average only about 0.602 molecules of the original substance per liter of the 12C remedy. Similarly, the chance of a single molecule of the original substance remaining in a liter of 15C remedy dose is about one in 1.7 million, and about one in 1.7 trillion trillion trillion (10^36) for a 30C solution..... The effectiveness of homeopathy has been a point of contention since its inception, and researchers have subjected the system to close scrutiny. One of the earliest studies concerning homeopathy was sponsored by the British government during World War II in which volunteers tested the effectiveness of homeopathic remedies against diluted mustard gas burns.[122] More recent controlled clinical trials on homeopathy are not particularly convincing. For example NICCAM says: Niccam wrote: In sum, systematic reviews have not found homeopathy to be a definitively proven treatment for any medical condition. Two groups of authors listed in Appendix II found some positive evidence in the groups of studies they examined, and they did not find this evidence to be explainable completely as placebo effects (a third group found 1 out of 16 trials to have some added effect

relative to placebo). Each author or group of authors criticized the quality of evidence in the studies. Examples of problems they noted include weaknesses in design and/or reporting, choice of measuring techniques, small numbers of participants, and difficulties in replicating results. A common theme in the reviews of homeopathy trials is that because of these problems and others, it is difficult or impossible to draw firm conclusions about whether homeopathy is effective for any single clinical condition

In short, while there has been some positive evidence in its support, critics rely on the Law of mass action and the Avagadros hypothesis to debunk all claims in it favor. Let me then elucidate my hypothesis. Homeopathy proponent often talk about memory of water while debunking the objections about abysmal concentration of a chemical in a homeopathic remedy, but they can hardly ever elucidate about this hypothesis. My theory is indeed an attempt to find evidence about this proverbial 'memory'. We all know about the unique properties of water, due to the hydrogen bonding. Furthermore any thing in liquid state, is quite different from a substance in gaseous state. Thus while the molecules of a solute in a dilute gaseous solution may very well be randomly distributed and the conclusions drawn about the possibility of finding a molecule in ultra dilute solutions may very well be true, the same may not hold true about very dilute solutions of large molecules in a water based solution. The solute molecule is very likely to be entrapped in a cage of water molecules which are strongly bonded to one another. So when one dilutes such a solution, there is a good likelihood that the cage structure left by a particular solute molecule may at least remain partly intact. These holes may very well be much like the proverbial holes in semiconductors. Once one decides that the above hypothesis could be true, the roads to evidence can be easily found. It is not totally impossible by the tools of molecular physics to find, whether theoretically or experimentally, that such holes in the liquid water are possible, which may be retained even when the solution is diluted beyond a limit when the possibility of finding even a single molecule in the solution is abysmally small. This in turn will lead to new knowledge about the structure of liquid water, would be a revolution in chemistry that we know today, as a sceptical scientist who tried to explore homeopathy objectively said in a recent article published in the New Scientist Magazine: Quote: "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry. Source: http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-notmake-sense.html My this theory has indeed by the following news story published on July 5 2010 in Suday Times. I quote here the story: A Nobel laureate who discovered the link between HIV and AIDS has suggested there could be a firm scientific foundation for homeopathy. French virologist Luc Montagnier stunned his colleagues at a prestigious international conference

when he presented a new method for detecting viral infections that bore close parallels to the basic tenets of homeopathy. Although fellow Nobel prize winners -- who view homeopathy as quackery -- were left openly shaking their heads, Montagnier's comments were rapidly embraced by homeopaths eager for greater credibility. Montagnier told the conference last week that solutions containing the DNA of pathogenic bacteria and viruses, including HIV, "could emit low frequency radio waves" that induced surrounding water molecules to become arranged into "nanostructures". These water molecules, he said, could also emit radio waves. He suggested water could retain such properties even after the original solutions were massively diluted, to the point where the original DNA had effectively vanished. In this way, he suggested, water could retain the "memory" of substances with which it had been in contact -- and doctors could use the emissions to detect disease. To a lay person this may sound tenuous. For a scientist it is highly provocative in its similarity to the principles said to underpin homeopathy. Homeopathic medicines work on the principle that a toxic substance taken in minute amounts will cure the same symptoms that it would cause if it were taken in large amounts. Scientists completely reject this, claiming there is no evidence to show that water can retain or transmit information and that homeopathic treatments have never been proven in full clinical trials. Montagnier's claims come at a particularly sensitive time, with the British Medical Association last week calling for the National Health Service to stop spending pound stg. 4 million ($7.2m) a year on homeopathy. The growing concern of doctors is linked to homeopathy's rising popularity. Users of homeopathy include the Queen and David Beckham. Montagnier was awarded the Nobel prize in 2008 for research carried out in the 1980s that confirmed the link between HIV and AIDS. The breakthrough opened the way to new treatments that have extended the lives of millions of people. Last week, he was speaking at the Lindau Nobel laureate meeting in Germany where 60 Nobel prize winners had gathered, along with 700 other scientists, to discuss the latest breakthroughs in medicine, chemistry and physics. Cristal Sumner, of the British Homeopathic Association, said Montagnier's work gave homeopathy "a true scientific ethos". It indeed supports the ideas that I stated in a science fiction story that was published in the Science Reporter magazine about a decade ago and is available in the web through the following link: http://www.scribd.com/doc/17705/NCommunication-a-science-fiction My yet another theory is as follows: That leads us to my penultimate theory, the Theory of Life. It emerged during a long discussion on the Hypography science forums. Let me quote a section of that discussion: Quote: hallenrm:If we agree that life is a concept just like energy, where does it lead to? Energy is a concept that relates to the potential for causing a change, any change.

In the same vein Life can be a concept that relates to the potential for creation, of any form! This definition takes care of all confusion. Cells have life because they have the potential for dividing into more cells or organizing themselves into organisms, all new forms. Biological organisms, have life because they have the potential for reproducing, both naturally and artificially! Now, one may ask, what is the potential of creation in atoms and molecules? Remember, it is the atoms and molecules that organize to form biological organisms. But on a much broader point of view, atoms and molecules constitute all chemical substances <http>, that lead to the creation of all artifacts, devices and machines! At this point Skuzie joined the discussion, he said: Life to me is an abstract encapsulated repository of information that is able to sense and interact with the environment in an unpredictable way. In our case we are a collection of cells that each have sorted information, on top of that we have our brain that stores even more information, together this information interacts with the environment, example by absorbing energy (food). We are unpredictable of what we do in this environment (unlike a fire), the question of whether a virus is alive is a question of is a virus predictable every time, at least to me it is. Life needs not be able to reproduce or be able to evolve, we are stuck in one point of view of what is life by looking at life here on earth, but there may be more exotic life out there. If someday a true AI machine with its own conscious that will be able to make its own choices is created, wouldnt you call that life? But HydrogenBond stuck to his guns: All aspects of biological life can be traced to hydrogen proton potentials and gradients. For example, reduced materials are the food of life. The proton begins tightly bound to carbon and nitrogen and upon release into water gain mobility. From this proton gradient potential we get energy. Within a cell, the ion pumps, especially the sodium/potassium pumps, use the lions share of a cell's energy. One of the main uses is to create an interior membrane zone of low hydrogen potential and a zone of high exterior membrane hydrogen potential. The inner potential sets up a hydrogen potential gradient with the DNA. Within this gradient the dynamics of cellular life are expressed, with flow going in both directions to attempt lower the perpetual potential (its constantly renewed). The outside potential interacts with the environment, while migration between the inside and outside of the membrane potential allows the cell to exist beyond its own boundries, into the environment. When we form multicellular animals like humans, the hydrogen proton gradient potentials is established within the entire organism. For example, between nervous tissue and the blood supply, between the brain and the body. This perpetually renewed gradient potentials is what give us life. Age will alter the potential gradient. Life is just one phenomena recycled over and over almost in holographic form, where the smallest works just like the biggests phenomena. Even the interaction of groups of people are due to gradient potentials within the brains. Organizations become a way to express the collective neural potential gradients. Suvival of the fittest in animals implies the strongest neural potential need combined with the maximum potential gradient between brain and body.

And so did hallenrm The concept of life at present is exclusive, that is, something is either alive or not. The concept of life, expounded by me, is different, it can be quantitative just like the concept of energy. A thing may have more life than another, just like a running train has more energy than a stone in a garden. Atoms of different elements have different amount of life, depending upon their capacity to form different molecules. Thus, atoms of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen would have much more life than atoms of say inert gases. The amount of life in an atom could be calculated from the diversity of (molecular)structures it can form. Similarly a bacterial cell, would have more life than a virus, but much less life than any multicellular organism. Amongst the multicellular organisms a human being would have the maximum life; and amongst human beings creative and socially successful people can be said to have more life than dumb ones. Wouldn't it be new paradigm in science? But Ronthepon finds it confusing How can something have more life than something else? I believe that life is more of a property present in two values: 0 or 1 Something is either alive or it is not. The degrees of lifeness as you mentioned may be markers of vitality, or activity. There is also a concept in language called liveliness. I think that it refers to activity. encouraged by the response hallenrm continued: Well! I am introducing a new concept to override the present one!! I feel that you are overriding the concept of life with that of liveliness. I'm not sure if that will be useful for science. So far I have seen usefulness of the concept only in the form of Live or Dead, and never come across the need for levels of liveliness in science. Skuzie added: However, I do not assert of the fact that the concept of liveliness is a waste. It merely is not vital to science. I like hallenrm's idea of quantifying life, but ronthepon has a good concern that is has little practical uses in the realm of science. When dealing with biology we must know whether the organism is alive or not alive, it is a boolean value, no gray areas. But at the same time when a person dies does he really die at once? many of the cells in a persons body will continue to function until they starve from the lack of energy provided. Now your cells are 'alive' and you are 'alive' in the present biological terms. The terms alive/living/life I believe are not concrete terms such as 'gravity', but are more like the term 'lake', how big does a stream have to be in order to be a lake? I think that quantification would make sense at some level in science and would make things more clear when using the current living terms. Perhaps liveliness is the correct

term? but I think when judging the complexity of living identities (not necessarily biological as we know them) we have to look at the amount of information the living identity encapsulates, whether information is stored as genetic nucleotides, neuron connections, or boolean bits stored on a hard drive, in the end it is all this abstract information that makes the living identity 'living'. Ronthepon seems satisfied, he said: If you look at the problem in that way, when a person dies, many of his body fuctions cease. But a lot of cells may remain alive for a number of moments. In those moments, we attempt to administer the so-called life saving operations. How do you define a the deadness of a man? That is much more loose than defining the deadness of a cell. There, I agree that livliness is needed. If a method is agreed upon, by the esteemed bodies of science, to calculate the index of life (Life Index for Everything), Which itself would be a herculean task for scientists, imagine the number of thesis that can be produced in various departments of science, calculating this index for various things. I remember, scientific journal are proliferated with such papers, viz statistical mechanical calculations, measurements of specific heat, or free energy of a reaction etc. etc. This index will open a new door for reporting explorations for extraterrestrial life. The reports of these explorations could be: The LIFE on Mars is calculated to be 100, while that on Venus is 150. The index could be logarithmic, for atoms it could be a single digit, for molecules double digit and for (the so called living biological organism, 4-9 digits. However, the index would not remain constant throughout the lifespan of its body. It would increase as its size grows, and plummet down in case of its death!. Based on my posts at http://hypography.com/forums/articles/7595-what-constitutes-life.html Then there is a theory that struck me when i was about to submit my Ph.D. thesis. Let me begin with the background. While a student of chemistry at DU, iwas fascinated with irreversible thermodynamics. In fact, i did try to get a scholarship in Belgium to work with the famous Ilya Prigogine, since it was not possible, i even sent a letter to Prof. R.P. Rastogi, the only Indian at that time known to be working in this field. To cut, the story short, I finally got admission in the Chemistry Department of IIT Kanpur to work with Prof. Pinaki Gupta Bhaya. He was a young lecturer at that time, very keen to interact with young students. He used to spend many evening talking to students in the canteens of their Halls of residence and also invite them for dinner, fish with rice at his residence (he was still a bachelor), so when i talked to him about my fascination, he agreed to guide me on that subject.

But that was not to be so, he was himself fascinated with using diamagnetic ions like Europium to probe the binding sites of calcium in proteins using NMR. I would have pursued his problem, but the problem was that IITK had no state of art FTNMR equipment at that time, so the only option left to me was to go to CDRI located in Lucknow to do experimentation, furthermore since I was his first Ph.D. student, he was yet to establish lab facilities required to isolate biomolecules. So, in fact i spent a couple of years establishing our laboratory almost from scratch. So after I had spent almost four years as a research student, i could hardly find any topic that would interest us both and for which experimental facilities were available locally. It was at this juncture that somehow i decided to study interaction of calcium ions with vesicles of cardiolipin. Cardiolipin is a phospholipid found mainly in mitochondria of cells, and is isolated mainly from rat liver or bovine heart. I began with rat liver! Since we did not not have an animal house facility available, i often used to visit CDRI to collect albino rats from there, which I learnt to dissect in our lab to get their liver out and then try to isolate cardiolipin. (and when ever i did not find it very convenient to visit CDRI i would trap some rats in our lab itself to get rat liver Later i shifted to bovine heart, for which i had to visit the local butchry in he evening (so as to get the heart fresh after slaughter, pack it in ice, bring it to my lab, start the isolation almost immediately, so as to finish the first few steps before midnight on the same day. Anyway it was during the seventh year of my stay at IITK, that I had to really hasten my experiments. By then I had developed a novel method of isolation of cardiolipin from bovine heart, a new method for estimation of phospholipids in aqueous dispersions and a new method for preparation of large volume of phospholipid vesicles dispersion (by injection of an alcoholic solution into an aqueous buffer. I also repaired a dysfunctional Toshniwal spectrophotometer lying idle in the lab (for which I had to learn some thing about FET op amps etc) My plan was to do a kinetic study of he development of development of turbidity of these solutions after injection of various concentrations of Calcium solution. I also had a light scattering photometer available (it was left by Prof. D. Balasubramanian after he left for CCMB) The idea was to measure dissymetry of the various vesicle solutions as a measure of their average size of vesicles present in them. It was at this stage almost after spending more than six and a half years that I had this fantastic observation. Cardiolipin is quite an unsaturated phospholipid, it therefore undergoes autooxidation rather quickly. If there is any delay or exposure to air in between, it is more likely to get oxidized. I observed that when a Calcium solution is added to a cardiolipin vesicle dispersion was more exposed to air, it showed much more slower development of turbidity then otherwise. Now, my theory, As I have already said, cardiolipin is found mainly in mitochondia, the site of oxidative phosphorylation in a cell. The process that is instrumental for the energetics of the cell. This process is known to be catalyzed by calcium ions and also involves oxygen. The current theory about the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation is strongly centered around enzymes, phospholipid membranes have at most a peripheral role. I theorized that the cardiolipin membranre of the mitochondria underwent a phase transition under the influence of Ca ions which led to the oxidative phosphorylation proccess. So if could put forward my theory with sound experimental data, it would have been revolutionary in our current understanding of cell energetics. Who knows, if i had succeeded I might have been nominated for the Nobel prize even. But that was not to be so, because I was at the verge of completing seven years limit set by iitk for its graduate students; adequate facilities for such a project were not available so the only option was post doctoral research. But, USA was under a spell of economic recession, therefore not many labs, including NIH from where I had received some encouraging responses could offer me a PDF position.

Yet an idea that has struck my mind in recent past. It is about Bacteria and its influence on our various kind of health The genesis of the idea lies on the following well known facts: wikipedia wrote: The Bacteria [bktr] (singular: bacterium)[] are a large group of unicellular microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a wide range of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals. Bacteria are ubiquitous in every habitat on Earth, growing in soil, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste,[2] water, and deep in the Earth's crust, as well as in organic matter and the live bodies of plants and animals. There are typically 40 million bacterial cells in a gram of soil and a million bacterial cells in a millilitre of fresh water; in all, there are approximately five nonillion (51030) bacteria on Earth,[3] forming much of the world's biomass.[4] Bacteria are vital in recycling nutrients, with many important steps in nutrient cycles depending on these organisms, such as the fixation of nitrogen from the atmosphere and putrefaction. However, most bacteria have not been characterized, and only about half of the phyla of bacteria have species that can be cultured in the laboratory.[5] The study of bacteria is known as bacteriology, a branch of microbiology. There are approximately ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells in the human body, with large numbers of bacteria on the skin and in the digestive tract.[6] The vast majority of the bacteria in the body are rendered harmless by the protective effects of the immune system, and a few are beneficial. However, a few species of bacteria are pathogenic and cause infectious diseases, including cholera, syphilis, anthrax, leprosy and bubonic plague. The most common fatal bacterial diseases are respiratory infections, with tuberculosis alone killing about 2 million people a year, So, it is established that there are innumberable kinds of bacteria around us, which can invade our body. Now, what can be the effect of the various kinds of bacteria that are present in our body at a given time. All these bacteria cannot be existing very harmoniously, there must be conflicts among them, for individual survival, just as there are conflicts between people belongong to various economical strata, religions and political ideologies. So, it is the different compositions of bacterial populations within or without us, that in principle effect not only our physiological health of our body, but also our mental health, which in turn should be deterimental for our econimic health and so on. If such is the case, what determines the composition if bacteria population in a given persons body, if we accept that these populations are not totally identical. One of the factors that come to my mind, is the personal hygine habits, that are passed down the generations, besides the kind of residence a person is brought up in. It thus explains why it is only the people belonging to the upper strata of society are most often "beautiful" and handsome. Although it perhaps fails to explain that people from all strata of society fall sick to almost the same diseases. But that would require statistics that concentrate on the economic status of a person through his/her life time versus the type of diseases s/he has been a victim of. So, it opens up a wide arena of scientific research, in an atmosphere where it is commonly believed that the scientific knowledge is more or less completre and there is not much a young science student can aspire to discover to earn name and fame

BTW here is the link to an article by my good old friend Bill Allin that set the train of my thoughts in motion in this direction: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9980631/Fascinating-Stuff-You-Didnt-Know-About-Bacteria I have since advanced the idea enunicated in the previous post to explain our behavior in terms of the biomass residing in our guts, a preliminary account of this theory has been published at scribd.com. The link is: http://www.scribd.com/doc/31595160/Why-do-we-behave-the-way-we-do