“An experienced dowser, who has often picked up a fair bit of practical geological knowledge, particularly if he has worked in the same geographical area for many years, often develops a good instinct for judging where water might be just by looking at the terrain. When he walks around doing his number with the stick his mind unconsciously transmits this knowledge to his arm muscles, with predictable results.”
To me this means dowsing does work, not in the sense that the stick is sensing water, but that the dowser is tapping into some kind of buried human survival skill. Sure the stick is a crutch, if you will, kind of like the way Dumbo needed his magic feather to fly.
I live in an area that has a lot of mesas, some have water some don’t. The use of dowsers of common; people don’t even think twice about it.
Just cause you can’t prove it don’t mean it ain’t so.
Again, Mr. Mook, it’s not just that we can’t prove it. Dowsers make specific claims of what they can do. It’s not a big leap, or any obscure “science” stuff, to ask them to show us. Many have tried, all have failed.
This may have been a good example of subjective-validation. Just how close was “very very close”? Could the pattern you “detected” have fit another map about as well?
Do you know that the underground stream was flowing that year and/or season? Maps can get old and be inaccurate. Only drilling can tell.
Sorry, no repeatable test has ever been devised that connects magnetism, electricity and dowsing. Flowing water does not create an electrical field that can be detected by simple lab equipment the way a current in a wire can.
I wonder what else your teacher (and I use that term advisedly) showed you. It may have been a fun experiment, but it sure wasn’t science.
A common way of holding a Y-shaped branch is with the palms up, and the center of the Y pointing up (sometimes horizontal). Your hands will be holding the device somewhere on the curves of the two “arms.”
Now squeeze your hands around the stick. Voila! You have just created an unstable device, and with only a tiny pressure change or slight hand angle change, it will spring down or up, seeming by magic. Try it. Grip it harder and it springs faster. Nothing is pulling on the stick, it is only lever action.
This is simple physics, folks. Give me a forked twig and I can make it suddenly point down, up or in a random direction any place I want to by a slight pressure change in my grip. Grip it tightly, attempt to hold it steady, and a slight movement of your body will send the stick flying. Underground water is not needed.
A pendulum shares some of the characteristics with unstable systems. Attempt to hold a pendulum steady, and your unconscious muscular actions may start it swinging or rotating. There is nothing mysterious about this phenomena, but if you ascribe the movement to the presence of water, gold or oil, you are making the leap into unprovable territory.
So you see the cat, the wires move. Is there the slightest possibility that your observation of the cat caused you to assume the wires would act in a certain way?
And how do you determine the difference between a sleeping cat and flowing water? I can do that WITHOUT dowsing, thank yew.
RitterSport – I’ll pass on the bridge, but the land interests me: we’re having a water shortage here in Perth, & I hear some of the Florida land is a tad on the damp side…
kanicbird – The times I have tried dowsing the only thing in what passes for my mind is looking to see I don’t trip over anything (my shoelaces for example). Humor aside, I really don’t think of anything in particular, and as far as the land goes it truly is important to me that I remain vertical while walking… You have no idea how embarrassing it is to pretend that I really had to closely scrutinise a very small insect before it was eaten by the nasty big insect and the rubbish in my mouth is because I forgot to brush my teeth and the tree-stump had nothing to do with my trajectory!
Musicat – I have no idea of how others hold their sticks, though some very weird contortions have been described to me. As I said in my first post, the way I hold my wire is such that relaxation will point it heavenward. The small increases in pressure or angle change you talk so glibly about are at the cost of considerable effort. I chose this method because it seemed to be the way proper dowsers would hold their sticks – the “right” way. Nobody showed me.
No, I haven’t mentioned Randi – I haven’t yet been to his site.
I do find the comment on Cecil’s probable beliefs about the nature of the solar system 1000 years ago a bit disturbing. Do I understand kanicbird to mean that Cecil would have debunked Galileo et al? Oh, silly me, of course not! Galileo lived much less than 1000 years ago, it would have to be Eratosthenes and Ptolemy. OTH, wouldn’t Cecil have known automatically that the Earth is an oblate pyramid?
Oh yes: you don’t get nuth’n for free. Perpetual motion really is a big mith (sorry, couldn’t resist!) as are mind-reading, telekinesis and dowsing with maps.
Kidding aside, however, Randi and others are offering over US$1,000,000 to anyone who can prove any paranormal abilities. Now, I don’t know how much pro-dowsers get paid, but I would think that much money would appeal to them. Just the size of the reward would make me doubt the existence of paranormal abilities – why not go and collect if you really have the abilities.
Sure, maybe dowsing involves some physical forces that we don’t understand yet. Then, you could really take Randi for a ride – take his $1 million, even though you don’t have paranormal abilities. Wouldn’t he feel like a sucker.
There are several people in this thread who claim to have actually done some dowsing themselves. Go and get your money! I won’t even ask for a finder’s fee (maybe Meatros wants one for originally posting the link on dowsing that points to Randi’s award.
Randi has put his money where his mouth is, go and get his money if you really think you can do it.
Regarding a medieval Cecil arguing against a round Earth, putting aside the fact that a Cecil of any age would know everything anyway, there was no real scientific method back then that would be able to properly test the claim of a flat Earth. If you properly tested it, using generally accepted scientific principles, you could come to no other conclusion than a round Earth.
<< I just know that it worked for me when I tried it >>
There’s an element of self-delusion in this, and I don’t mean that in an insulting way. The same phenomenon happens with many coincidences. A worried mother feeds a sick child some homemade stew and the child gets better, and the mother is convinced that her stew has curative powers. A gambler spits three times and hits a jackpot, and is convinced that there’s a cause-effect. Coincidences happen, they happen a lot – after all, there are millions and millions of events every day of our lives, it would be astounding if there weren’t coincidences. Then, when the coincidence happens, we delude ourself into think cause/effect… when it’s really just coincidence.
To determine whether something is cause/effect or just coincidence, you need scientific evidence. The experiment needs to be reproducible, and a blind test needs to show that you can’t get the same results by randomness. In the absence of such proof, we’ve just got a very interesting set of coincidences, and nothing more.
Look, if a hundred people walked around with dousing sticks, and if sheer random luck said that you’d find water about 1/4 of the time, then after three trials, you’d have 2 or 3 people who were successful THREE TIMES IN A ROW! They’d be convinced that they were tapping some mysterious force, when it’s just random probabilities.
This was not blind at all, There are several hints and indicators as to where a water line will be near a hourse. You may not even realize that you are picking up on them.
Furthermore, are you certain you found the water line? Did you dig to confirm it? Or did you just assume to “jump” of the rod was confirmation enough.
It’s been known that the Earth is spherical for a lot longer than a thousand years. The ancient Greeks even carried out scientific tests to measure just how big it was, and got it right. There was never really a time when most people believed that the Earth was flat. What there was, was a time when most folks just plain didn’t worry about it at all. The people who did care about such things, though, all knew that it was round. I presume that had Cecil been alive back then, he would have been one of those people.
As for the Earth being the center of the Universe, that was actually a very reasonable conclusion to draw, given the evidence at the time. The subsequent discovery otherwise was one of the great triumphs of science. The great virtue of science is not that it’s never wrong, it’s that it never stays wrong. Scientists are willing to admit error, and change their views. Paranormists are not.
My main point is that Cecil seems to take current science as a absolute truth; when science advances and we are able, for example, actually conclusivly measure the vibrational energy imparted in a homeopathic solution so dilute that it may not even contain one molecule of the substance anymore, Cecil will be on that bandwagon too. But Cecil has not shown any ability to think beyond out current physical understandings of the universe.
Just because it can’t be currently proven doesn’t make it untrue.
In other words, while there is absolutely no evidence to support your idea, and lots of evidence against it, there’s still the possibilty that someday, someone will come up with some data that could be interpreted to support this illdefined collection of ideas that might someday be referred to as a theory.
Any average person who says dowsing works get’s immediately shot down by people wanting scientific proof. Well you’re not going to get any sort of scientific proof from me, I just thought I’d share an interesting experience.
There are too many completely skeptical people here who don’t seem willing to try anything for themselves. The world isn’t all black and white, it’s shades of grey. How freakin’ hard is it to go outside and try it? That’s all I ask.
But the point is that people have done the tests necessary to show if dousing works, and guess what? It doesn’t. How many times do you have to run the test before admitting that there’s nothing there?
It’s not being skeptical when every single time that anyone has tried to test for the existance of dousing, they come up with bupkis. No one is jumping down your throat, they are explaining to you where your memory and lack of experimental controls has allowed you to come to an understandable but incorrect conclusion.
I suspect that most people on this thread have tried it. I know I have. But it’s the equivilent of a parlor game, like a Ouiji board. Science has explained that one, too, and no one feels like going out and running full scale tests of it either.
I was never able to find water but I used to think that I could find old water lines and stuff. I guess i didn’t really do it. Saved a lot of digging but that was just a fluke. Saving digging by any means is good IMO.
Now, everyone one wants proof. Okay, what is proof? 100% accuracy? 95%? 60%? 40%? Hummmm
A for instance :::: Hypothetical ::::
Now, I say I can find old water lines buried 3-6 inches under ground? Okay? So if you go bury 100 lines 40 feet long in a field or across a dirt road and then bring me blindfolded and point me down the road, how many lines do I have to correctly find to win? What percentage would take it out of the realm of chance in you opinion? Or does it only count if you ask me to fine lines 12 inches under the ground also? Or water flowing at 60 feet down?
I make no claim about anything but ½" galvanized pipe aged 10 years and buried 3-6 inches under ground. Now with just that very specific condition, what would convince someone of the audience that I could do it?
Must I use your wire or stick? Can I use mine? If I did get 100% of the pipes in this very selected test, would you, if you were in charge, give me the million? 90%? 80%? What do YOU call proof?
If you want to look at it that way fine. As science has advanced it has found more and more questions, many more questions then answers. We have found that we are moving further away from truly understanding this reality then we thought we were years ago. New things are being discovered every day.
Cecil, in his columns, doesn’t allow for future discovery. As for dowsing, If it works I don’t think anyone who can do it can actually explain how it works, just that it works. Such a activity will attract frauds and people who truly believe they can do it too ( though they really don’t have the gift), this, to the delight of Cecil, maked the whole practice look like a sham.
There were many theories that couldn’t be proven scienifically untill the technology. Some of Einstien’s theories took years to prove. IIRC the atom was theorized long before it was actually seen.
Dowsing might be some interaction of matter, might be some subconscience reaction, but to what? - maybe to what the person wants to believe or maybe to some other sense that the person has.
I don’t know the conditions of the ‘test’ to prove or disprove dowsing. But if the land was distrubed it may not work the same.
How freakin’ hard is it to conduct proper blind tests with controls?
How freakin’ hard is it to contact James Randi and pocket a million bucks?
Every single time, every single time, dowsing has been tested, it has failed. I’m not saying dowsing doesn’t work, no-one here says that. We’re just saying that the evidence saying dowsing doesn’t work is immeasurably large, whereas the evidence saying otherwise is next to non-existent.
I’m not belittling your experience; I understand it’s very powerful and meaningful for you. Now you can show how open-minded you are, by trying a blind test (I’ll provide some links where Randi describes such tests, easy to conduct in the safety of your home), and, if your ability disappears under such circumstances, admit to yourself that you were wrong.
