So, dowsing for water works, except when it doesn’t.
Well, water lines, no idea how to try for depth or quantity though, unless they’re decent(18"+) mains, when coming from opposite directions you’ll pick it up 2’ apart or so.
And imho, 95% of the time it works 100% of the time.
I tried it, so I can knock it. It doesn’t work. Do you have magical powers that I don’t have?
TheFox, how come you haven’t won the million dollar prize? The challenge was offered for 50 years. Did you miss the application deadline?
I’ve also tried it, so I’ll knock it as well. It’s the ideomotor effect and works no better than chance when there are no helpful clues or opportunity for confirmation bias.
Now if this wasn’t just a bad guess that would be a remarkable discovery and I’d encourage you to pursue it. In reality the effect doesn’t exist, it’s just the movement of your hands, and the guess doesn’t even make sense on the most basic of levels.
There is a trip to Stockholm, a nice golden gong and international fame and fortune on offer for you if you can merely do what you claim to do under fairly mundane laboratory conditions. What you claim really is that groundbreaking (pun intended).
I suspect that you are fooling yourself and that you have never tried, nor even given any thought, to how you might test your ability in a properly blinded fashion.
Are you open to the possibility that you do not have this power and that your success are down to purely rational and well known phenomena?
In other words, are you interested in knowing whether you truly have this ability?
Of course you realize that we have to burn you now.
Did a bit of a test last night, went out in front of the house and found the water main, then brought my girlfriend outside, who had no idea what was going on, and told her to walk with the wires pointed thataway and stop when they turned on each other. They did so in line with the water main.
I never said I had some ability, all I’m saying is that metal wires find underground water movements, whether its static electric fields, magnetic pulls, or subconscious muscle twitching, I have no idea.
Where were you when she did this?
What you’ve discovered is that the human mind is capable of many things.
Can you find water lines via dowsing? Of course you can, lots of people can.
What we’re asking is: what is the explanation for the ability of people to find things by dowsing?
If it’s static electricity caused by water moving through pipes, how is it that lots of dowsers don’t use your method of rods, but use the forked stick method? Or the pendulum method?
Static electricity is not the explanation for this phenomenon, and if it were it would be much easier to have an electrical meter that could detect the electrical field directly. Except there is no such field created by moving water in pipes that causes the rods to deflect.
What happens is that your hands move very slightly, and that causes a very large movement in the rod. Now, why is it that your hands move very slightly? Is it some supernatural power? Let’s find out!
I am not a well driller or plumber, but I know the immediate area where I live pretty well, geology-wise. I can make a prediction that any well drilled nearby will break through bedrock at about 300 ft down. I can also predict that a single 6" well will provide enough water for a typical household. Don’t know what that is in gpm.
I base this on every well I know that has been drilled for the last 50 years (it’s in a state database). Never saw a dry hole yet. Do you think I would impress people more if I waved a forked stick, and claimed my prediction was based on magnetic quantum hokum?
90% accuracy? Pish-posh! I can do better than that without a stick!
And others are saying they don’t. A single single-blind test with your girlfriend in a poorly chosen location is not evidence enough to overturn the many, many tests that show that metal wires do not find underground water movements.
That isn’t a meaningful test. Neither you nor her should know anything about the presence or location of water.
Well, the first two options have absolutely no evidence to back them up and the third is a well-known and understood phenomenon. Which do you think is most likely behind it? How could you design a test to explore it further?
Of course if it is unconscious muscle movement (it most likely is) coupled with knowledge or knowledge leakage from someone with experience of water locations then your statement above
is making a massive, unwarranted assumption. What is actually happening is that water is found whilst a person is holding metal wires. A very important distinction to make. You still have all your work ahead of you to show that the wires or the person are finding water by paranormal means.
It’s great that you’re doing tests! That’s how we learn things and have cell phones instead of smallpox.
The next step is to make sure they’re good tests. If you’re interested, a bunch of us here could help explain why that test doesn’t tell us a lot, and help you design some good tests – you (and we) might learn something!
I stayed on the porch.
I have no clue how or if people find objects, lost tokens, buried treasure, or nothing via dowsing. I only have experience and observations with wire sticks and water lines. It’s the only method I’ve seen first hand, which is why I said in my first comment that if you’ve never done or seen it, try it out and see what happens.
I know that fluid through lines creates static electricity, the info I could find regarding this pertained to hydrocarbons though, not water. Metal water lines can gain a magnetic field through electrical current in the grounding systems nearby.
We have. And we’ve seen quality tests showing it is all confirmation bias and environmental clues.
Irrelevant. Even if the rods did cross reliably over metal lines, there is no way these incredibly weak electric and magnetic fields were involved, for various reasons to do with basic physics.
Then how do you explain long-distance and map dowsing? Is this effect independent of distance, unlike every other force we know about?
Sorry (not really!) to resurrect this, but article today on the BBC website that’s sort of relevant.
That article doesn’t surprise me, and there are probably thousands of places and people who “use” rods while locating water; I wouldn’t expect the practice to really ever go away. Much like horoscopes, most people have figured out they’re not true but there is a certain nostalgia attached and lots of people still glance at them, or read their fortunes from the cookies. Some people will simply like to use these kinds of props to confirm their intuitions about where the water line is.
I suspect it’s even an embedded belief that science destroys magic. As long as you keep that evil Science away, the magic keeps working. Not that objective evidence-based examination of the phenomena uncovers that they’re unfounded. Not at all. :dubious: