The Queen of the Homeopaths

This video has been going around the skeptical blogosphere in the past few weeks. However, it wasn't until yesterday that I worked up the fortitude to watch it the whole way through. The speaker, Dr. Werner seems to have heard about a lot of pop physics but doesn't have a clue about the actual science.

I don't know where to begin.

Dr. Werner is not just a homeopath, she's a behavioral optometrist as well. I had never heard of behavioral optometry before I watched this video. To quote answers.com, "Rather than simply prescribe lenses to compensate for eyesight weaknesses, behavioral optometrists attempt to train the patient to see better across a range of different circumstances." Wow! At least it's more plausible than homeopathy, but I'd like to see how they can reshape my eye through behavior alone so that I can see clearly without the use of glasses. And that is one of the more sane things that behavioral optometrists do. Like plenty of other pseudoscientific forms of medicine, behavioral optometrists believe that the majority of illness can be cured by using their techniques on a single region of the body. For chiropractors, it's the spine; for reflexologists, it's the feet; and for behavioral optometrists, along with iridologists, it's the eye.

Now for some science. Dr. Werner begins by talking about Einstein's relation of energy to mass: E = mc². The one thing I have to give her credit for is that when she first states this equation, it is correct. But from there things go down hill very quickly:

The whole universal mass can be consolidated down into the size of bowling ball. That's all there is in the whole world—in the Universe. So how much mass are you? [response from audience] That's right, an infinitesimal amount. So if you took that formula, E = mc², you can almost cross out mass, so the formula ends up being energy equals the speed of light.

Yes, you could get all of the matter in the observable universe down into a size smaller than a bowling ball. Of course, you could not get the rest of the matter in the Universe, which is safely expanding away from you faster than the speed of light. The matter unlucky enough to be within your reach, would get piled onto a big lump somewhere in space. Before too long, that lump would become dense enough to form a black hole, collapsing the matter into a size much smaller than a bowling ball. Dump in everything else you can find and all the mass will remain concentrated in an region smaller than the head of a pin. (Any angels reckless enough to dance on this, would be immediately destroyed and incorporated with the rest of the matter.)

So, does this mean that I have an infinitesimal amount of mass? No! It doesn't matter if my volume is on the order of a cubic meter of a cubic attometer, I will still have the same mass. The only change would be my density. But what would happen if follow along with her and let the mass go to zero? The equation clearly shows that E = mc² = 0c² = 0. The energy vanishes when the mass does. Only when the mass goes to unity (m = 1) will the energy equal the speed of light squared (not the speed of light as Dr. Werner claims).

Actually, even if the mass was set to unity, the energy would not be the speed of light squared because that is not an energy. It is a speed squared, something entirely different from what energy is. Units are very important, we measure energy in terms of Joules, not speeds squared. A Joule, the SI unit for energy, is equal to kg m²s^-2 while the speed of light squared is in m²s^-2. The energy would be one kilogram times the speed of light squared when the mass is set to unity—including the kilogram is essential. Looking at the equation in terms of units shows why what Dr. Werner is doing is ridiculous. The equation relates mass to energy, the speed of light is a constant and only appears as a conversion factor. If we use natural units where c = 1, then we get: E = m—energy equals mass. The only reason why the speed of light is there is because a Joule, the SI unit of energy, is not equal to a kilogram, the SI unit of mass. This actually stems from the fact that a meter does not measure the equivalent amount of a second. If they did, then you would be in natural units and Einstein's equation would just reduce to an identity between energy and mass. When we use human-scale units like SI, we need to include the constant c into equations to convert between units. The equation has nothing to do with light.

There is plenty else wrong here. For one, Stephen Hawkings isn't a real person (cf. The Crackpot Index). Stephen Hawking on the other hand is a general relativist not a string theorist. Hawking recently stepped down from the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge, which now belongs to Michael Green, one of the actual founders of String Theory. The rest of the physics in Dr. Werner's talk does not improve. One of the things that you quickly learn is that the pseudoscientists are able to spew out nonsense much more quickly than we can debunk it, so I'll leave it at that.