Phil Parker On Wikipedia trying top get SMILE added

[Large Donner]

I think the Dawkins experiment is like asking people to detect stationary cars behind a wall with a speed camera.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

The the criticism of the statistics from that paper is here:

https://www.csicop.org/si/show/testing_dowsing_the_failure_of_the_munich_experiments.

That looks like the workings of a very constipated statistical mind. The best performance data look plausible to me.
The fact that some other analysis shows nothing much seems to me to be just as much cherry picking to prove an assumption as the original analysis might have been.

I think the problem may be that dowsing probably only works under particularly favourable conditions and unless someone with a scientific mind has set up the experiment with appropriate conditions you may get a very weak signal. I can imagine that it may only work if the water lies in a long strip for instance, as in a pipe. So the best result graphs look like some spot on hits amongst a number of random non-hits.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I think that raises more questions than it answers, such as what was a teenager doing with good quality china, let alone whacking it with metal objects when filled with hot burny stuff, where were the parents who should have explained why this was a bad idea (probably by whacking them with aforementioned metal object) but.........I'm losing the will to live

What you need is a nice cup of hot cocoa. With a spoon. In a nice china mug. It will bring you back to life nicely.

 

[anni66]

No, no drinking. My co-student Jerry Marsden (not of the Pacemakers) had heard that it did in fact work but that to get reliable results you needed 50cm copper rods with 10cm right angle bend bases that would rotate freely in sheaths held in the vertical fist. He bought some copper and fashioned the rods and we went round to the Radcliffe Infirmary after we had finished in clinic. I think Jerry had already been amazed to find it worked but he got me to try. I walked around with the rods swinging freely forwards in parallel. You have to get the angle just right so that they lie forward but will swing at the slightest sideways force. For about fifty yards nothing happened and then suddenly they both went sharp left. On inspection we found manholes with water filled pipes on either side of where I had walked. We did it half a dozen more times or so and it was totally reliable. Having proved the point the copper then got used for gardening purposes. You should try it. It is quite a party trick.

It does work. I' ve tracked field drains using dowsing.

 

[Barry53]

My new face was freaking me out. I feel like I have my identity back now.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Can you do this with a cuppa soup and a bit of white bread with butter. I'm not a ready made food fan but I do love to indulge in cuppa soups sometimes. I always find it amazing how a little bit of powder in a pouch can taste so good with a bit of hot water poured over it and as for dipping in the white bread n butter Ooo, I do love that.

Actually I don't care if it raises octaves or not just the thought of the cuppa soup is music enough to my ears.

No way, soup does not work. Black coffee and any sort of tea do not work, but cappuccino does - now there's a clue. But I only say this if you have made your cuppa soup nicely and stirred well. I suspect that if the water is not hot enough and you have not stirred well enough you might get a bit of an octave going up.

I can certainly drink to a good cuppa soup after a rainy day out.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

It does work. I' ve tracked field drains using dowsing.

Another replication!
But I wouldn't want Esther12 to feel obliged to believe it without controlled conditions. Maybe we need to apply for a grant. Copper is expensive these days.

 

[anni66]

That Richard Dawkins dowsing test is of ridiculously poor quality: Dawkins used tiny bottles of mineral water in boxes in an attempt to simulate an underground body of water or an underground stream. That is never going to be an adequate simulation.

If we assume that dowsing may work through some magnetic or electromagnetic effect (remember that water is diamagnetic as well as a conductor of electricity), then this tiny quantity of water in a plastic bottle is not going to have any appreciable magnetic or electromagnetic influence.

The water should be moving for it to habe an effect

 

[Sbag]

No way, soup does not work. Black coffee and any sort of tea do not work, but cappuccino does - now there's a clue. But I only say this if you have made your cuppa soup nicely and stirred well. I suspect that if the water is not hot enough and you have not stirred well enough you might get a bit of an octave going up.

I can certainly drink to a good cuppa soup after a rainy day out.

bubbles?

 

[anni66]

bubbles?

Density

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

bubbles?

AHAAAAA! And what do bubbles do to the speed of sound in water?

 

[Barry53]

That is exactly it. They take on a life of their own.

The fact you hold them in loose sheaths, backs up the notion you are not manipulating them yourself unconsciously.

50cm copper rods with 10cm right angle bend bases that would rotate freely in sheaths held in the vertical fist

 

[Barry53]

I have to ask @Jonathan Edwards , why were you tapping the bottom of a mug of freshly made cocoa in the first place, let alone making notes about it's musical properties? Further I need to know how the cup was supported and why this didn't dampen the oscillations, increasing frequency would suggest additional energy input rather than any dampening, although it could also suggest a resonant frequency issue, in which case be careful

But hot cocoa has plenty of energy in it. No idea how the mechanism works, but the energy is there for it. An interesting thought: I reckon the temperature of the cocoa likely ends up slightly lower after 20s if tapped on the bottom of the mug, than if not, because it sounds (sorry, just realised weak pun) like there is a bit of that energy going somewhere else?

 

[Large Donner]

Another replication!
But I wouldn't want Esther12 to feel obliged to believe it without controlled conditions. Maybe we need to apply for a grant. Copper is expensive these days.

Can we do it with lead I know a bloke who pinches it off roofs.

 

[Wonko]

AHAAAAA! And what do bubbles do to the speed of sound in water?

dunno, skimmed a paper on it in the last 10 minutes, lots of equations, lots of words, no idea what they were saying/meaning - on the face of it's obvious - the speed of sound should be lower, because of the resistance caused by the bubbles being a different density (even 'if' sound travels faster through the bubbles it would still interfere with the wave traveling through the liquid when it emerged from "bubble space" which would slow the overall speed). At least I think, with no valid reason, that it is so

 

[Large Donner]

AHAAAAA! And what do bubbles do to the speed of sound in water?

They tickle your bum a bit when you fart in the bath?

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Yup

Sound travels through water 4.3 times faster than through air. Even if a tiny proportion of the water is air bubbles (attached to cocoa grains and stabilised by the proteins in milk that make it froth) the speed of sound can be reduced dramatically. The rise of up to two octaves (more often one and a bit) suggests almost 4 times. The pitch frequency will be proportional to the speed of sound so when you stir in some bubbles it goes down and as they rise over twenty seconds, it rises with them. As explained to me by Professor Sir Geoffrey Taylor in his College rooms in 1969 (he was then about 88 I think). We had gone round for tea, hoping tea would work, but it didn't. Sir Geoffrey worked out what the answer must be anyway. The answer was also published in Scientific American a few weeks later if I remember rightly.

 

[anni66]

AHAAAAA! And what do bubbles do to the speed of sound in water?

Bubbles need to be homogenously distributed in a liquid to affect the speed of sound ( hence wavelength i think). By squeezing the air in the bubbles, the density dosn' t change much but the bulk modulus does ( a lot more) affecting the speed of sound and wavelength.

 

[Barry53]

I realise that I'm not making much of a case, but I've never really thought about dowsing before. It could be that I'm being misguidedly skeptical out of prejudice, but I think I'm becoming more sceptical as others post in favour of it, rather than less. Using it to find water leaks, or a coin in a field... it sounds implausible.

I could readily believe that mucky water (which electric currents can therefore flow through) moving through pipes and therefore creating lots of static electricity, could generate magnetic fields that move around a bit, possibly within the mucky water itself. Put copper in those electric fields (though lack of a completed electrical circuit baffles me I confess), and they could experience a force on them, which is the essence of how electric motors work. I can feel an experiment coming on - my son usually has various bits of scrap metal.

 

[anni66]

Bubbles need to be homogenously distributed in a liquid to affect the speed of sound ( hence wavelength i think). By squeezing the air in the bubbles, the density dosn' t change much but the bulk modulus does ( a lot more) affecting the speed of sound and wavelength.

Did a module on biomass at uni which included algae. Bubbles are a big thing in the algae world