No, it isn’t, and frankly I doubt you’ve read much or if you have you’ve biased towards woo writings rather than sceptical or scientific writings. If you had you would know that the standard way of testing dowsers involves an “open” and a closed test. In the “open” test the dowser is told which hidden pipe has the flowing water, precisely to check if their powers are working in the given setup. They basically invariably report that their powers are working at that point. Yet in the closed test when they don’t know which pipe has the flowing water, they fail.
Ergo it isn’t magnetism, or smell, or anything of that nature. If it was, their powers would work or not work in a test whether they knew where the water was flowing or not.
Their powers work in tests only when they know where the water is. And in the field their powers “work” because it doesn’t matter what they do, there’s water pretty much everywhere underground anyway.
It’s not practical, might well give results that favoured dowsers (due to lack of ability to control) and wouldn’t prove anything to a degree that would convince anyone.
Firstly, and I just can’t say this enough, there’s water almost everywhere underground. So the percentage wouldn’t be low it would be probably 100%.
Secondly, if you chose an area with highly varied surface topography that might well give you better variability in the degree to which underground water could be found at various sites across your test area. But it would also give clues to experienced dowsers as to where the underground water was and would probably result in them doing quite well in the test.
Thirdly, if you chose a perfectly flat featureless plain, so that dowsers got no clues, it is highly unlikely there would be much variability in underground water across the site. More likely there would be (or not be) a single relatively uniform aquifer across the whole site.
Fourthly you could do a lot of pre-drilling across a lot of sites to find a miracle location where there were no surface features to give clues to dowsers but high variability in underground water (at a cost of probably many tens of millions of dollars) but if you pre-drill it is almost a certainty that dowsers who fail will say it was because your pre-drilling affected the vibrations/magnetism/chi/ley lines blah de blah de blah.
I don’t think controlled testing of dowsing under real world conditions is practical.
In the process of busting out my old concrete driveway, the contractor broke one of the grey water pipes that supplies the sprinkler system in my yard. We searched and searched, and couldn’t find the shut-off valve. Called the HOA, and their maintenance guy came out. He couldn’t find it either. He called one of the local County water guys, who came out shortly afterward. He pointed out markings on the curb which indicated where the piping came in from the larger supply piping, and using this as a guide, he started probing the ground to find the valve box. No dice. He then pulls out a couple of dowsing rods and starts walking around the yard, where the rods would periodically cross.
I looked at my concrete guy, and we both rolled our eyes. But, we had no luck finding the valve, so I figured I’d leave well enough alone.
He never did find the valve. Took a second guy with actual instruments to find it, in a spot the first guy had walked over many times with his dowsing rods.
I think the first thing I ever posted to the SDMB was about my experience with dowsing. I got beat up over it. So here I go again. I tried it at my dad’s house holding 2 short pieces of hollow pipe vertically, with L-shaped rods in them, so the rods could turn freely. He had me walk his property to see if I could find the water lines. The rods pointed forward horizontally and they were parallel. I slowly walked around and at one point the rods crossed, and that was indeed where the water line was. What surprised me was how strongly the rods pulled when I reached that point, it was a weird sensation. Whether the explanation is dowsing works or it was my own subconscious, it was an impressive force.
So I know I will get refuted, but it is fun to try even if you don’t believe in it.
Yes, gravity can be an impressive force. It even makes the world go 'round.
Your rods were tilted very slightly in one direction and gravity did the rest. Because of the length of the rods, any hand movement was exaggerated. The rods were actually telling you which way your hand was tilted; you were holding a tilt meter.
You can do the same thing by mounting rods on a support that can tilt in any direction. A small tilt causes a large movement. No human contact is needed; you could tilt the mechanism by a rope or a magnet.
Conversely, mount rods on a rigid support and move a jug of water near them and they will not move at all unless there is an air current.
You show me where you want hand-held rods to point and I’ll make them do so with so slight a hand movement that you can’t detect it. It’s simple weight and balance and nothing more.
The thing is, once you understand the ideomotor effect and how your dowsing rods are constructed, it’s really not that impressive. It’s easily demonstrate and repeatable.
The only question becomes what caused you to make the rods signal at that point, and the most likely answer is that you were responding to queues from your dad. You were a Clever Hans.
Around, minus the “a”, substituting an apostrophe to indicate the missing letter, becomes 'round, and the Earth does go around the Sun. It was also a clever :dubious: use of the word “round” to refer to the (approximately) spherical shape of our Earthly globe, which is held together by gravity.
It all comes round to gravity, i.e., the Earth sucks.
