Okay, the dowsing question

Great Debates
101

Damn hamsters ate my first attempt at a reply.

No offense taken. If some yahoo that can’t spell told me a tale like this on a message board, I’d like as not be calling bullshit myself.

Yes, I was there and saw the whole thing play out. The company break room had a floor to cieling window that faced the scene, The smokers congregated just outside that window, and this was our entertainment for the couple of weeks that it lasted. If we’d known at the outset was going to last so long I’m sure someone would have started a betting pool. I saw the guy walking around with his dowsing rods because one of the smokers thought it was so funny he told me I needed to have a look.

This was only one of the stories related to J____ (the guy who did the dowsing). These stories were told and retold to new employees, customers, etc. for years after J____ and the owners had thier falling out. So yes, like ULs, they got “polished” over time. I’ve done my best not to embellish.

As entertaining as the whole CF was, we had to feel sorry for the contractor, who was losing his ass. He was stressed, and embarrassed, and anyone with near normal social skills was giving him a lot of space. Not J____ (the dowser guy) though. So most of the details of the story were relayed to me via J____.

The flag in quesion was one of those wires with a 2" square of plastic on it. The contractor had used the hose like a compass and layed out an arc for the backhoe operator to dig along +/- a few feet. These flags ended up on the dirt pile, and J___ appropriated one of them.

I have a pretty good idea why they took so long to check out that spot:

Since J____'s find was beyond that arc, NOBODY thought it could be right, including J____. He just kept insisting that there was “something” at his spot.

And there was J___'s credibility factor:

-As I mentioned, this guy was into ANY crackpot pseudo-science you could name. Homeopathy? check. Cold Fusion? check. Yoga? (not just the stretching, but Chakras and all that) check.

-Personal hygene issues. Not so much infrequent bathing, he used [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide]DMSO[/link] like many women use body lotion, so his breath always had a STRONG stench…smoked oysters with garlic sauce I called it. Instead of doing laundry, he just bought a clothes at the goodwill store, and trashed them when they got ripe …he wasn’t too picky about the fit.

-How to discribe his personality? Manic. As in bipolar without the depressive part. I’ve never met another person even close to this guy’s level of high energy nuttiness.

-The guy’s value was that he came up with like 100 ideas a week for solving problems and or new products. 95% of these were crap, but hey, 5 good ideas a week still has value. To find those ideas you had to listen to all the crap. Because of all the crap, the guy had close to zero credibility. He was a self contained brainstorming session that seemed to operate 24/7. Even some of his bad Ideas got the direction of my thinking changed, leading to a solution.

What I am NOT to clear on is why they finally DID check out J____'s spot. Desperation perhaps?

This incident is remarkable to me because nobody knew where that thing was. The people that thought they knew about where it might be were wrong, but managed to convince the dowser he was wrong.

If any dopers were involved in setting up the early intel fabs (3 and 5?) in Albuquerque, you probably met this guy and will remember him.

102

Seriously, yes, if you can detect dirt in a random sample of milk jugs, some of which have sand or water, without any prior knowledge of which ones they are, go for it.

Dirt in the ground, maybe not so much.

And how many magicians were on the staff to advise you of the ways humans, especially scientists, can be fooled? You can’t do a test without 'em.

103

My uncle once hired a dowser to locate a septic tank (which he did). My father, greatly irratated by this, challenged the old gent a more controlled situation which he promptly failed. He claimed my fathers experiment didn’t allow the “force” to be properly conducted through his body. So my father then handed him some fine wire and asked him if the force would bend them. He said of course. But in practice of course they didn’t bend.

If dowsing could provide enough force to move your hand, it should be able to bend thin wire, IMHO.

104

Just to make this a bit clearer…

There are two ways to detect something.

The first method has three parts–the item you are looking for, something being emanated from the thing you are looking for, and a sensor that can detect such emanations. For instance, say that you are looking for a place where heat is being given off from a surface. So the place is the location where heat is being given off, “heat” is being emanated, and your hand is the detector as it has a method to detect heat.

The second method also parts. There is the item you are looking for, a device that gives off emanations of some sort in the direction you are looking, and a sensor that can tell you when these emanations are bounced back, to what level, and from which direction. So for instance, if we were looking for tree in the middle of a field, we could throw a ball directly forward, and when the ball bounces back and hits us our sense of touch tells us that we just got hit by the ball and we know there’s a tree in the direction we threw the ball.

Now, there is a thing called a “magnetic field.” Proof that this exists and can be emanated and detected at very fine levels is easily shown by the fact that your radio, cellphone, etc. all work.

A magnet is an object which gives off a magnetic field. Anytime you have flowing electricity, you again will get a magnetic field. The earth itself has a low-level magnetic field surrounding it, which is what traditional compasses use (these days they use the GPS and such.) Rubber will largely block a magnetic field, as will various other non-conductive materials. Conductive materials though will pick up the magnetic field and convert it into electricity–this is known as inductance.

Metal detectors work based on inductance. If you emanate a bunch of electricity at the ground, anything under there that is conductive (i.e. metal) is going to become charged with energy and give off its own magnetic field. The detector then has a sensor which can pick this up.

If you were looking for a power line though, you could turn off the emanator, and just use the sensor since a power line already gives off a magnetic field without inductance.

So now, when it comes to looking for a non-electrified pipe underground and your only detection device is a couple of metal rods, we’ve got a very simple problem. Even assuming our detection device could work to detect emanations, what is being emanated? The pipe is not electrified, nor is our detection rods.

At best you could say that seeing as the earth itself is slightly electrified (which it is) that the metal pipe is going to conduct this better than the surrounding soil and thus give off a higher magnetic field than the rest of the dirt around it. But, for everything we know of both electricity, the earth, and the human body, this would be too slight for us to detect. Specifically, the amount of change in the magnetic field at the surface ground would be so slightly different that you would get a larger difference from the ground being slightly moist than from there being a metal pipe buried four feet below. Essentially, given the random nature of both the earth’s magnetic field, and the composition of the soil at any point the change caused by a metal pipe would be overshadowed so far by other random things as to make it impossible to even notice.

For instance, if you have some graph paper. If you randomly choose a number between one and one thousand and write it into each square. Now you pick a single column and add one to each number in that column (rewriting it all on another piece of paper with the new results), how easy do you think someone else could tell which column it was that had the +1 on it? Doing some math and heuristics, it’s theoretically slightly possible I suppose (if you know ahead of time that you’re looking for a column.) But now say that the person you hand the paper to can only see the numbers written into a single row–for instance, like they were just walking in a straight line with a detector over a field. So the person is only going to have one box of your column in their sample. Mathematically, it is entirely impossible for them to single out that one box from a single row.

So now if you say that a dowser walked over an area a few thousand feet in area, covering every foot, before the rods changed position, then that would be somewhat believable. However, if you just walk in a straight line, and the rods point to a particular spot the first time you’ve ever crossed a spot, then you just don’t have enough information to be able to come to any conclusion if we’re talking magnetic fields. And if we aren’t talking magnetic fields, then whatever you are detecting is either something that humans don’t know about yet, or you haven’t detected anything at all.

There are, though, some ways that someone could find something reliably. For instance, deduction. If I see a two manholes, I can fairly well guess that there’s something underground connecting them together in a straight line. If I’ve been working on a job working on sewer lines for fourty years, and I need to find a pipe–all I have to do is go on my fourty years experience to deduce where the line most likely is. The question is whether the person realizes that they are doing such deduction.

And of course the kicker is, if the person thinks that what they have been using all along is a method to detect magnetic force and they fail to find the pipe all they have to do is look around and if they spot a power line, blame it on the power line. Of course there might have been a power line just as close every time he successfully found a pipe–but he’ll only notice and blame the power line the times he fails. And if he doesn’t see a power line, he can just blame it “not being exact all the time.”

105

You’re thinking in 2 dimensions. Water flows with gravity (down). It accretes as it travels (look at any cave). Water also follows the path of least resistance so it follows whatever geo-path nature provides. In my side of the world the substrata is alluvial so you have both vertical and horizontal water flow. It causes real problems when chasing toxic waste.

That’s an interesting idea.

106

Trouble is, here we are all trying to work with speculative arguments about how it all might work, when at the moment, there isn’t any rigorously observed ‘it’ to be explained. If dowsing (or whatever you want to call it) really can be used to locate underground objects with a success rate greater than chance, someone needs to demonstrate it under strictly controlled conditions.
I’m pretty sure people must have tried this. Does anyone know of such a properly-controlled experiment that yielded significant success?

Discussing anecdotes (no matter how remarkable they seem) and hypotheses at this stage is quite possibly adding more credence to the topic than it deserves. Where’s the actual science?

107

Wikipedia has some stuff on what tests have been done. The humans did do better than a random chance, but not to an extent beyond what can be explained by simple luck in that instance.

108

I agree. The problem with a test of dowsing is that if it works you have to test what the dowser is actually reacting to. If it’s a source of water that has existed over time then the conditions have to be duplicated.

I don’t really have a belief that dowsing works but the possibility exists in nature for the detection of very minute changes in our environment. I also understand the problem science has understanding something before it’s fully understood. We know gravity exists but we can’t prove what causes it. I doubt there’s a lot of serious research into dowsing because it lacks a good starting point to pursue. We already have the equipment to map the subsurface. Maybe the need for more cost-effective devices will drive the research that is lacking in this area.

109

For dahfisheroo and others who have wondered what the JREF tests might be like, I dug out my copy of Flim-Flam! and here is a description of one of Randi’s tests on a group of dowsers in Italy (back when it was the “$10,000 Challenge” not the "$1 Million Challenge).

Basic setup is a a 10mx10m area of dirt with pipes buried under the surface and a tank of water to feed a randomly-chosen pipe for the dowsers to attempt to detect.

Following is a direct quote from p308-309 of Flim-Flam!, 1982.

  1. In a 10-by-10-meter area, pipes 3 centimeters in diameter have been buried at a depth of 50 centimeters.
  2. There are three different paths of three different lengths available, one to be chosen at random for each test.
  3. Three tests will be performed with each person, and the same path may be used more than once, since the choice is random.
  4. The chosen path may enter at any point on any side of the square and exit at any point on any side of the square.
  5. First, the dowser must scan the area for any natural water or other distractions (metal or other objects) and mark these “natural” places.
  6. Any secondary distractions will be outlined on the ground visibly.
  7. Second, the dowser must demonstrate, on an exposed water pipe, while the water is running, that the dowsing reaction is present.
  8. The dowser will determine the path of the flowing water in the pipe being used, and this path will be marked on the ground.
  9. The dowser will place from ten to one hundred pegs in the ground along the path he traces.
  10. To be counted, a peg must be placed within 10 centimeters of the center of the pipe being traced.
  11. Two thirds of the pegs put in the ground in each of the three tests for each dowser must be placed within the limits specified by condition 10 for that test to be considered a success.
  12. Placement of each peg will be transferred to a scale chart by the surveyor to the satisfaction of the dowser, who will sign this chart along with Mr. Randi, the lawyer, and other witnesses.
  13. No results will be announced until all tests are finished and the location of the pipes is revealed.
  14. After a dowser has performed, he will be isolated from those yet to be tested.
  15. Two out of three of the tests must be successful (as in condition 11) for the dowser to have passed the testing procedure.
  16. If a dowser passes the test (conditions 11 and 15), the check for $10,000, which has been deposited with the lawyer, will be awarded to him. If no dowser is successful, the check will be returned to Mr. Randi.
  17. If the test is failed, no further claim may be made against Mr. Randi.

The dowsers agreed to all these conditions, stated that the water flow was enough to test their abilities, etc. They were all 99-100% sure that they would pass before they took the test and all were 100% sure that they had in fact passed the test after they took it (but before results were announced).

They all showed the ability to get a “dowsing reaction” when presented with known water flow (see #7).

They all came up with totally different answers to whether there was any existing underground water flowing (see #5).

One of the dowsers got a few flags along one route in one test (In Randi’s words it was “…a very small score” and “…quite far from winning”) and that was it - everything and everyone was pretty far off the mark.

I’m not directly familiar with other scientific tests of dowsing but this looks like a pretty decent one to me, and it’s pretty well documented. It showed that the dowsers could detect water flowing if they knew exactly where it was but when the path was hidden they failed, and they all came up with totally different answers from one another even when trying to find the exact same flow path.

110

it is probably worth noting that the above described test will not have been deigned solely by Mr Randi - the challenge permits (even expects) the applicant to design what he or she considers to be a fair test, so if your claim relates to detecting buried live cables, or buried jars of seville marmalade instead of buried pipes, I’m sure that will be possible.

A million dollars is a lot of money; if I believed I could perform the kind of things being claimed in this thread, I’d have applied like a shot. So, honestly, why not give it a go - as well as becoming tolerably rich, you might get marked down in history as the person who opened up a whole new area of scientific research.

111

Who said it was a test?

Certainly I can think of ways to fake this incident:

The guy cold have gone out and spent 10’s of thousands of dollars and bought a duplicate uber expensive item so he could sneak back at night and bury it for the construction guys to find. Knowing that this guy shopped at thrift stores, I’m thinking thats not likely.

He could have dug around at night, found it, and planted it in his spot. Possible, but the guys with the heavy equipment were moving a lot more dirt than one skinny smelly guy digging in the dark with a shovel would, so the odds are against that too.

The search cost the contractor a bundle. No way was he or his crew in on a hoax. If the ground had been loose where they found it, I think they would have noticed.

The guy had no profit motive, and the only thing he gained was seeing us scratch our heads and say “damn!”. I knew the guy fairly well, I really doubt that. I don’t recall him ever mentioning the incident after it happened. Though he beleaved in all this crackpot stuff, he really didn’t try to win any converts.

If I had to guess, I’d say he had some unconcious intuition as to where it was. The guys had just missed thier receiving hole, and it was found almost in line with that and the initial hole on the far side of the driveway. Just a bit farther than anyone thought possible.

112

Wrong.

As has been pointed out above, by a dedicated obsessive Randi fanatic, Randi doesn’t care how it works. I only need prove that it works, and “it’s not paranormal” isn’t a good reason for not applying.

113

What part of “Application” didn’t you understand?

http://www.proverandiwrong.net/Application.aspx
That is the formal application that I sent, giving Randi exactly what he requires:

  1. A 2 paragraph description of what I can do
  2. definition of success and failure
  3. description of protocol for testing the claim.

I’m happy that you believe that. If you think it’s so hard to find a dry spot, then someone displaying an ability to find dry spots must be eligible for the prize. Go tell Randi that you are sure I won’t be able to find a dry spot, and encourage him to conduct the test that he devised.

I don’t care what you believe, I’m fed up trying to fight your ignorance. I’ll just take advantage of it to make myself a million dollars. Frankly, every idiot that believes Randi and tells him so just brings me closer to wealth.

Ah, well, perhaps those rock boulders are more common than you and Randi think they are, mayhap? Do you think that’s possible, perchance?

114

Correction: SOME humans did better than chance. Some probably did worse. That article says:

(Note that the “authors” and the “scientists” came to the opposite conclusion.) Omitted is how many of the 43 showed WORSE than chance. In any randomly chosen group, it is statisticly expected to find some better, some worse than chance. This does not mean that the better group necessarily has any abilities whatsoever, nor that the worse group is experiencing “negative” energy. It is exacly what is expected by the laws of probability.

Now if the 6 high-scorers could repeat those high scores in other tests with other randomly-selected individuals, we might have something worth looking into.

You are certainly using it as an example of a test, albeit not a formal one. If you don’t have confidence in it, why mention it at all? I could invent and tell you stories, too, but what would that prove?

I suspect you many not be aware of how “magic” (which I’ve heard defined as “the simulation of the paranormal by normal means”) works in the hands of one who is trained in how people are misled. It is typical that non-magicians think that some tricks are done with chemicals, special devices, etc., when the explanation is often much simplier – misdirection, use of assumed events, etc. If you want to learn more about this, I suggest you study books on magic. Find out the various ways the mind reading tricks are done, and you may be surprised at how easy it is to fool people.

I cannot examine your particular example from such a distance. One reason is non-magician observers often leave out important observations that are crucial to understanding the trick. Nevertheless, if you are ever confronted with a seemingly paranormal event, you would not be investigating it properly if you don’t obtain the services of someone whose profession is fooling people, people like you and me.

115

I call bullshit. Take the JREF challenge or shut up! :slight_smile:

116

I can see the application text on your web site but just posting it on a web site won’t fulfill the application requirements. What I want to know is, have you properly notarized it, sent it to the proper address, and do you have a receipt to prove it? If so, have you received any communication about your claim? If so, what is the message in the communication? Has your application been accepted, making you a “Claimant,” has it been rejected or is it still under consideration?

IANA formally-trained Geologist, however I have considerable knowledge of the geology in my area. Since well drillers are hired to provide water for a house or business, they aren’t likely to stop if they drill into solid rock. They keep going, break thru the bedrock, which typically is between 2 ft and 300 ft, and get water. Lots of it.

(The state law requires a cased well down to 170 ft, so we can’t legally use water more shallow than that even though is is readily available. At 170 ft, they often have run into bedrock.)

The only way you could drill a dry hole here is if you deliberately stopped in the middle of the rock. Even then, if you pull the drill out before casing the well, it fills with water from above. It would take quite an extra effort to make a dry hole. There’s water, water everywhere, and many drops to drink. It’s hard to avoid the damn stuff. So in my neighborhood at least, Randi is right when he says it’s hard to drill a dry hole.

Good luck.

117

Thanks for the reference to that extensive test. But such an elaborate test is necessary only if the dowser claims the water must be flowing. If they claim to be able to detect different immobile substances, a more common claim, a much simplier test is possible. Here’s one in Australia. Plastic jugs are filled with water or sand and the challenge is to tell the difference from their rods alone.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4694530584288972114&q=mighty+mitta

118

YES YES YES, how many times? It’s all there on my website. Notarized application sent, for gods sake.

What sort of receipt?

I’ve kept a scan of the notarized form, and can prove it

all there on my website. In plain sight. Randi has acknowledged receipt.

If you believe that, fine, I won’t argue. It helps me. Do please write to Randi, tell him you believe him and that you think my claim is impossible. Urge him to actually conduct the test that he proposed.

119

Musicat I don’t bother with Peter any more but for the sake of avoiding cluttering up this thread with a futile debate about whether he’s sent in his application: yes he has, on the JREF board there is a post by someone from JREF saying it’s been received and rejected. And yes, me digging up a link to that post would involve me spending too much time on such a silly subject for me to bother, so don’t ask :wink:

120

No. Your claim is he is wrong on one (dubious) occasion. Randi says he is often wrong, and won’t pay anyone to point that out.

While your claim may not be paranormal, it makes no sense, either. You’re just spinning your wheels and spewing frustration in all directions like a rabid St. Bernard dog shaking off the rain. If you really want to get Randi, why not make a claim of something that can be tested? Is that all you’ve got, a weak beef with someone you hate? Knocking a chip off of someone’s shoulder won’t win much admiration for your stance, let alone give you a chance at the tempting temple of titillating moolah.

Got a claim about dowsing? Anything paranormal? Anything which qualifies for testing? If not, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Thanks. I’m aware of that thread on JREF. I just wanted to hear it direct from the horse’s, uh…mouth.