There’s three things wrong with that one short piece. Specifically:
He is wrong to claim there is water under 94% of theEarth. Actually, underground water is hard to find. If you just select a spot at random and drill, you are very likely to come up dry.
This means that the test that he designed is pretty stupid. If he actually conducted such a test, he would lose.
He has never actually challednged any dowser to “find a dry spot” and if he did, they would all accept.
It’s a story he’s told over and over for thirty years, and it’s a total fabrication.
And here’s the clincher. I am willing to take the test as he has described it. If he’s telling the truth, then that would be a legitimate display of paranormal powers. Of course, Randi refused to actually conduct the test. Why did he refuse? Because he’s lying.
Here’s the thing. Every time there is a discussion of dowsing, some troublemaker cites Randi’s story. Most of them know it’s a lie. They are not fighting ignorance, they are threadshitting.
That’s one example of Randi’s lies among hundreds. You can take it or leave it, as you wish. Please do not discuss him any further.
It certainly is not hard to find. Cecil seems to think that in the dryer parts of the US hit-and-miss will get water around 75% in much of the rest of the country it is pretty much guaranteed.
Then why hasn’t anyone proposed this as one of the ways to try an win that million Randi use to have up for offer?
I’ve always thought that the ultimate proof that telekinesis does not exist (at least in animals) can be found by observing my dog.
When there is food on a low table near her, she knows that she is not to touch it. However, any food that falls on the floor is legally hers (precedent, Rover vs. The Smiths)
I have seen her staring at the food intently, absolutely WILLING it to fall on the floor. STARING a the food - trying as hard as she can to get it off the table. If there was ANY telekinetic ability physically possible in the universe, dogs would have developed it to it’s ultimate power.
Uh huh. So your “cite” is “uh, 'cause.” That doesn’t cut it. We’d need (a) the details of your application, (b) proof it was submitted and received, and (c) the exact reason(s) given for its rejection. And all of that as something more than your say-so, like, say a chain of emails or a scan of a letter.
Yeah, well, at the time I put up a website detailing my application. I got a load of hate from the Randi supporters.
Now, please don’t continue the hijack. Stop talking about Randi. Also, don’t talk about dowsing. Instead, let’s discuss ways to test telekinesis.
Please let this go. Lookup basically any other thread Peter Morris is in for his standard Randirant.
To the OP: There are close to 3000 earthquakes a year in many places in the US, most of which are too small to be felt. Plus, such things as truck vibration can be measured by sensitive equipment miles away. It’s just not possible to get the level of isolation you’s require: your test would always be detecting movement on the nanometer scales.
More to the point: if you could discover that the item wasn’t moving when the alleged telekinetic power wasn’t being applied, and was moving when the alleged telekinetic power was being applied (with a suitably blinded setup to prevent the interpretation of the nano-scale measurements from being biased in favor of (or against) such a correlation), then that would be significant. But otherwise, just discovering the latter branch tells you nothing, without the control provided by the former branch.
What the OP is proposing is saying (my translation):
“While we can rule out telekinesis on objects we can measure, it isn’t as easy to rule out telekinesis if we try to measure things below the noise limit of our instruments.”
That’s true, but not very interesting. All measuring instruments have a lower limit of accuracy. The reason we put limits on them is that everything below that is essentially random data.
Sure, you can’t rule it out, but there’s no reason to think anything is going on either. If you enjoy this sort of thing, try tuning your TV to a channel without an operational transmitter within range. If you watch long enough, you might see an image. Briefly.
Right, that’s why something like telekinesis can never be proved to not exist. It will never be proved to exist, but a non infinite amount of failures to prove it’s existence don’t technically prove it doesn’t.
As far as the problem of unavoidable seismic disturbances, conduct the experiments in space. Using the right materials and testing equipment, with identical and identically measured control objects present in the space capsule, I think a very expensive scenario could be constructed capable of proving telekinesis is real.
I find it interesting that you drop a load of unsupported bollocks on a thread and then ask *everyone else *to stop hijacking. But apparently you don’t have a leg to stand on, so there’s no point in continuing to ask you for evidence you can’t provide. [/hijack]
That’s always the problem with unsupported claims. You can’t ever 100% disprove anything–you can just make statements about what we’ve observed up to this point. So the question then becomes: how much to we have to observe in order to be reasonably cerrtain, to the extent we can say that we “know,” that some thing or phenomenon doesn’t exist?
People who believe in these sorts of nonfalsifiable things put no upper limits on the number of times they can fail to be demonstrated. And that’s why it’s impossible to ever have a logical discussion about them.