| I have no background in biomedical engineering, and I'll take your (and others') word that it could clearly never work. However, I have had a related experience that stops me, even in these cases, from immediately shouting "the king has no clothes": Some 25 years ago I was giving a talk at some point, that mentioned spread spectrum communication to a small crowd of physicists and engineers, none of whom was familiar with the concept. When I drew an energy/frequency graph in which the signal level was below the ambient noise level, I got laughing/mocking/disbelieving response, and I had to actually show (a simplified) version of the math to proceed. None of those people were stupid. In fact, I believe most if not all of them are way smarter than me; but they've all adopted the "s/n ratio must be large enough at every distinct frequency " as an axiom, which is simply wrong. Since then, when I see extraordinary claims, I just wait for the extraordinary proof. > It's like going to the beach, drawing a 5 gallon pail of seawater, looking into it, and then declaring that the beach is shark-free today and it's safe to swim. If shark shed sharkticles that can easily be detected, and the water mixing speed is sufficient, then -- yes, you might be able to make that claim from a 5 gallon pail of seawater. But before I believe you can do that, I would want to see the theory and a working demonstration. It's astonishing that wasn't demanded of Theranos by any of the investors. |