Phil Parker On Wikipedia trying top get SMILE added

[IreneF]

Wait. Does dowsing work with any body of water or just with water in a metal pipe? If the dowser is actually getting a response to the metal in the pipe, then the process would be like using a stud finder before you hammer something into your wall.

The traditional dowsers I've read about use a forked stick to find an aquifer.

 

[Hip]

If Countrygirl and I are right the movement of the rods has nothing to do with the dowser. The rods have a life of their own. That may not suit authors who would like to speculate on sixth senses and so on. The compass needle on my boat does not need me to tell it to point north.

Isn't the usual explanation that involuntary tiny muscular movements cause the dowsing rods to move inwards? That would also explain how those Y-shaped wooden dowsing sticks move during a dowsing detection.

But the interesting thing is that none of them had any objections before the trial, they were all satisfied with the setup and 100% confident it would work.

But I think that is a bit unfair, and rather dishonest (or at best lazy) on the part of Dawkins, because your average dowser may not necessarily have any understanding of the laws of physics, and thus would not be in a position to judge whether the experimental setup was adequate or not. But Dawkins as a scientist has no excuse, and he should have realized how poorly his experiment simulated an underground stream.

You find this quite often with skeptical scientists performing debunking experiments: because they don't themselves believe that the phenomenon they are studying is real, they don't really make any effort try to find any effect. They may be more interested in saying: "you see, I told you it was all a lot of nonsense".

To be fair, you really need to try your damnedest to find the effect you are looking for. And then if after a serious, prolonged and committed effort at finding it, you still find nothing, by all means publish the negative result. But Dawkins's attempt was more a Mickey Mouse study rather than good science. I know he just did that study for a TV show, so it's supposed to be entertainment rather than serious science, but nevertheless I found it shoddy (I remember seeing it on TV some years ago, and I thought it was shoddy then).

Okay well these are the Dowsing studies so far, if it does work it's obviously damn hard to measure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing#Studies

The Tom Williamson book throws in lots of theories: one of them is that dowsers may only be sensitive to magnetic field gradients of around 100 nanoteslas per meter, but that stronger gradients are not registered by the magnetic sense. So a large iron rod in the ground may not be detected, because it produces to too high a magnetic field gradient. Whether that is true or not I don't know, but it shows the sort of complexities that might be involved in trying to detect a dowsing sense.

 

[Wonko]

Wait. Does dowsing work with any body of water or just with water in a metal pipe? If the dowser is actually getting a response to the metal in the pipe, then the process would be like using a stud finder before you hammer something into your wall.

The traditional dowsers I've read about use a forked stick to find an aquifer.

Aquifer "might" be possible, very , very unlikely, think static electricity, point effect, and a slight potential difference caused in the earth by waters conductivity. thing is I can't see the range of such an effect being more than millimeters and as soon as you moved onto the ground over the water the hypothetical effect would disappear as you'd instantly reach the same potential.

So....hokum.

edit.....think the same sort of idea as a damp detector used on walls, but powered by the static generated by you moving so able to act at a longer distance - I think, maybe, probably not, my head hurts, mummy......

 

[Barry53]

Aquifer "might" be possible, very , very unlikely, think static electricity, point effect, and a slight potential difference caused in the earth by waters conductivity. thing is I can't see the range of such an effect being more than millimeters and as soon as you moved onto the ground over the water the hypothetical effect would disappear as you'd instantly reach the same potential.

So....hokum.

Unless static electrical effects are provoking localised currents in the ground itself nearby, and therefore magnetic fields.

 

[Wonko]

Unless static electrical effects are provoking localised currents in the ground itself nearby, and therefore magnetic fields.

You'd need loads, even by static standards, probably close to that needed to generate lightning - certainly possible but can't see it happening routinely, everywhere there water underground.

edit....but that's just gut feel, as I've said, my brain's gone, so I have no numerical support for any assertions right now, or probably this year

edit 2 - and wood, as used by traditional dowsers, isn't known for its responsiveness to magnetic fields - not known by me anyway.

 

[Barry53]

You'd need loads, even by static standards, probably close to that needed to generate lightning - certainly possible but can't see it happening routinely, everywhere there water underground.

edit....but tthat just gut feel, as I've said, my brains gone, so I have no numerical support for any assertions right now, or probably this year

Probably, but that was why I said localised currents. Still large currents, but the ground is zilch resistance. But it's all conjecture on my part, as much for the fun of it as anything.

 

[Wonko]

Probably, but that was why I said localised currents. Still large currents, but the ground is zilch resistance. But it's all conjecture on my part, as much for the fun of it as anything.

I've even tried working it as a capacitance thing, with the air as the conduction gap, doesn't seem to work, without enough energy to fry the dowser anyway. There just isn't a circuit that works as far as I can see. The closest I can get is the damp detector analogue and that's rubbish, it might work if you were standing in a lake, but ...... lol

 

[Skycloud]

I have tried dowsing, it was an activity for a youth group I was supervising. I had nothing to do with organising the event and had not been to the location before. Almost all of us found 'something' crossing the field in a line, and were told it was the electricity cables running from the nearby school building to the floodlights for the games courts. We were also finding nails that had been hammered into the ground before we arrived. These couldn't be seen without parting the grass. I have no explanation, but we were all fascinated. We were using metal rods; none of us had any luck with the hazel twig.

edit to add of course there was an element of believing what we were told; None of us actually saw the electricity cable, foe example.

 

[Hip]

"James Randi in Australia" (1980)

James Randi visits Australia in 1980 and offers a $40,000 prize to the country's top dowsers in a tightly controlled trial of their abilities to detect in which of 10 underground in plastic pipes water is flowing. Randi involves the dowsers in the design of the trial to ensure that there will be no objections to the results. The trial seems quite rigorous, not to mention quite costly set up. A co-investigation features an attempt by the dowsers to identify in which of 10 closed boxes there lies a gold ingot (a test for brass was also done). Prior to the test, most of the dowsers asserted that they would be 100% accurate in their identifications.

Great video of James Randi. I love watching James Randi's debunking work. He such a sterling fellow in his efforts to uncover subtle deceptions.

He did a better job in setting up this dowsing experiment than Dawkins. Although I don't consider Randi's negative results to be the last word on whether dowsing is real or not, as I can see a flaw in Randi's experimental setup, which means it may not properly simulate an underground stream.

In an underground stream, it is likely that the soil for meters around the stream will be damp with the water, thus creating an area meters across which has altered electrical conductivity (since damp soil is a better conductor) as well as creating some diamagnetic effects from the water (which may minutely alter the local magnetic field). But in Randi's setup, the water was confined to a narrow plastic pipe, which would not dampen the soil around it. So this may not adequately simulate a real underground stream.



But I find Randi very enlightening to listen to. I like what he said at timecode 35:40 of the video, where he talks about the muscular ideomotor reaction (minute unconscious muscular motions). He says that when the subjects were told which of the 10 pipes carried the flowing water, they were able to produce definite dowsing rod responses as they walked over that water-filled pipe. But Randi says this is purely due to the unconscious ideomotor reaction, which minutely moves the muscles and thus moves the dowsing rod. Because they knew that the pipe contained water, they unconsciously responded by making these ideomotor reactions.

But when they were not told which pipe carried the water, they did not produce any dowsing rod responses over the water-filled pipe, other than responses that could be accounted for just by random chance.

So it was knowledge of which pipe contained water that allowed them to produce an ideomotor reaction that moved the rods.

So this is very interesting.

 

[Cheesus]

So where does that put the LP on my sceptometer? Guess.

Somewhere near Santa Claus?

 

[Hip]

Very interesting article about at study on dowsing indicating it may be a real effect:

Far harsher criticism of dowsing and dowsers comes from outside the mainstream scientific community. Two organizations, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), http://www.csicop.org/si, and the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), http://www.randi.org, are actually working to discourage the practice, which they both dismiss as paranormal nonsense. To make their point that dowsing is a sham each has staged demonstrations in which dowsers were asked to find buried pipes. Dowsers did no better than the laws of chance predict. JREF is so confident of its position it promises to pay $1.1 million to anyone who can "prove" dowsing works.
...

Now comes a massive set of data that suggests there may be some validity to dowsers' claims. The encouraging words are contained in a study financed by the German government and published in the Journal Of Scientific Exploration, http://www.jse.com/betz_toc.html, which is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published at Stanford University.
...

Researchers analyzed the successes and failures of dowsers in attempting to locate water at more than 2000 sites in arid regions of Sri Lanka, Zaire, Kenya, Namibia and Yemen over a 10-year period. To do this, researchers teamed geological experts with experienced dowsers and then set up a scientific study group to evaluate the results. Drill crews guided by dowsers didn't hit water every time, but their success rate was impressive. In Sri Lanka, for example, they drilled 691 holes and had an overall success rate of 96 percent.

"In hundreds of cases the dowsers were able to predict the depth of the water source and the yield of the well to within 10 percent or 20 percent," says Hans-Dieter Betz, a physicist at the University of Munich, who headed the research group.

"We carefully considered the statistics of these correlations, and they far exceeded lucky guesses," he says. What's more, virtually all of the sites in Sri Lanka were in regions where the odds of finding water by random drilling were extremely low. As for a USGS notion that dowsers get subtle clues from the landscape and geology, Betz points out that the underground sources were often more than 100 ft. deep and so narrow that misplacing the drill only a few feet would mean digging a dry hole.

As impressive as this success rate may seem, it doesn't do much to change the minds of skeptics. Their preference is to test dowsing under more controlled conditions. Back To The Lab

Anticipating this criticism, the German researchers matched their field work with laboratory experiments in which they had dowsers attempt to locate water-filled pipes inside a building. The tests were similar to those conducted by CSICOP and JREF, and similarly discouraging. Skeptics see the poor showing as evidence of failure. Betz sees the discrepancy as an important clue. He says that subtle electromagnetic gradients may result when natural fissures and water flows create changes in the electrical properties of rock and soil. Dowsers, he theorizes, somehow sense these gradients and unconsciously respond by wagging their forked sticks, pendulums or bent wires.

What's interesting is that in the first part of the study that was conducted the field, with natural underground water sources, the dowsers had a high success rate; but in the second part of the study conducted in the lab with simulated water sources (using plastic pipes), the dowsers performed no better than chance.

However, unlike the skeptics, the researchers see the discrepancy as an important clue to the nature of dowsing, and think that water in pipes may not produce the same magnetic or electromagnetic signals as water flowing naturally under the soil.

 

[Wonko]

It seems the Germans may have a weakness for stuff, first homeopathy and now this, they'll be believing in gravitational fields next.

Knowing where the water is must surely be cheating, the whole point is that they shouldn't and the sticky thing should tell them.

More research into the sticks is called for, how do they know where the water is, how are they communicating this information, and why are they bothering?

I'm sure giving the sticks several sessions of CBT can sort all this out.

 

[Forbin]

In an underground stream, it is likely that the soil for meters around the stream will be damp with the water, thus creating an area meters across which has altered electrical conductivity (since damp soil is a better conductor) as well as creating some diamagnetic effects from the water (which may minutely alter the local magnetic field). But in Randi's setup, the water was confined to a narrow plastic pipe, which would not dampen the soil around it. So this may not adequately simulate a real underground stream.

None of the dowsers, though, raised an objection to the water running through what looks to be a 4" plastic pipe.

And, as the documentary showed, there are aquifers under what looks like about 3/4 of Australia. They argue that it would have been more challenging for dowsers to point out the areas where there is no underground water.

 

[Hip]

None of the dowsers, though, raised an objection to the water running through what looks to be a 4" plastic pipe.

As mentioned earlier, dowsers are not necessarily going to have the right scientific background to judge whether a 4 inch plastic pipe will sufficiently simulate a natural underground stream or not, in terms of the magnetic or electromagnetic effects natural stream may create.

Even for a scientist, it would be hard to know whether a plastic pipe is an adequate underground stream simulation or not, given that we don't know what type of signals dowsers may be picking up from these natural underground water sources.


So it is not correct to say that "well, the dowsers did not raise an objections to us using water flowing through a plastic pipe to simulate a stream; they agreed on that. And we proved that they were not able to detect the water in the pipe; so that proves dowsing does not work". That is a logical non-sequitur.

These studies should be about science, not about trying to catch the dowsers out by making them agree to something, and then showing that under the agreed conditions, dowsing does not work.

If you look at the development of any technology, whether its electric power, the electric lightbuld, radio transmissions, the transistor, or whatever, the development is a process of trial and error. The first attempts usually don't work, and engineers and scientists spend years tweaking their setups until they find the exact formula or circumstances in which their product or apparatus reliably works.

That's the way I think you need to treat something like dowsing: you need to keep tweaking the setup until you can get it to work reliably every time (assuming it is a real phenomenon). Then when it is working reliably, you can call in the skeptics to scrutinize. But if you just make one attempt to demonstrate dowsing in the lab, and that first attempt fails, it is way to premature to say that dowsing does not work and does not exist.

 

[IreneF]

Testing dowsing in a natural landscape makes a lot more sense than testing plastic pipes set 1m apart. One way to test it would be to have several individual dowsers individually walk the same piece of land and see if they agree where the water is.

 

[HowToEscape?]

In most places there's a water table, dig down and you get wet, unless it's a clay or solid rock layer and of course you're there going to get no water. Finding water some ways down in the ground is not exactly a surprise.
Imho, the evidence for dowsing is created by the application of idle brain cycles to the desire to believe in magic.

 

[IreneF]

In most places there's a water table, dig down and you get wet, unless it's a clay or solid rock layer and of course you're there going to get no water. Finding water some ways down in the ground is not exactly a surprise.
Imho, the evidence for dowsing is created by the application of idle brain cycles to the desire to believe in magic.

I realize it would be hard to test for the existence of water without a lot of expense, but dowsers should be able to agree whether the signal is spread out or not. The twitches should be consistent for each dowser.

 

[Snow Leopard]

I'm still unsure if we're being serious or not.

JE is either taking the piss, performing a social experiment, or accidentally demonstrating for us a classic example of confirmation bias and why anecdotal evidence is insufficient to produce generalisable knowledge.

Claims of electromagnetic fields begs the question - show the data or GTFO.

 

[Hip]

Claims of electromagnetic fields begs the question - show the data or GTFO.

Theoretical conjectures and discussion often proceed empirical evidence. You can discuss hypotheses of mechanism without having to provide empirical data. In fact, developing theories and hypotheses is often the impetus that spurs the experimenters to go out and gather empirical evidence.

Discussing physical theories of dowsing is not to be mistaken for arguing that dowsing exists or arguing that dowsing is proven. It's just trying to put any discussion on dowsing into a scientific framework.


But anyway, data does exist: in the Williamson book (published 1993) I mentioned above, it talks about a University of Lund study conducted on the island of Gotland, which recorded the positions where dowsing rod responses occurred. When the researchers later measured the magnetic field near one cluster of responses, the found a magnetic tough 25 nanoteslas deep.

In another German study in Munich, researchers placed a buried magnet in the ground, which created a magnetic field hill of around 5,000 nanoteslas in height. Interestingly, the dowsing rod responses did not occur at the peak of the magnetic hill, but one or two meters on either side, which supports the idea that dowsers respond to small changes in magnetic field strength, but not large changes like this 5,000 nanotesla peak (one or two meters from the magnetic peak, you get small changes in magnetic field strength, when you are just entering the foot of the magnetic hill).

The Germans also tested an electrically-created a 500 nanotesla magnetic field. In this case, there was no correlation between the locations of the dowsing responses and the magnetic field; however, the researchers used a pulsing magnetic field for some reason, rather than a static one, which may have affected the results.

And studies at Utah State University also showed a correlation between dowsing rod responses and artificially created magnetic field peaks and toughs (in this case created by burying an iron rod in the ground).

 

[HowToEscape?]

@Hip

If you really want to believe in something, you'll have no problem finding evidence for it.

If dowsing works via the proposed mechanism, then you'd be able to use the Dowser for something useful such as fixing your car, or finding whether downed powerlines are live.

Heck they could paddle along in floodwaters and find any shock hazards. In the recent Texas hurricane, a teenager got killed rescuing their cousin's cat; unbeknownst to him there was a power line in the water which energized a hidden post of some kind, possibly a mailbox. Where was a dowser to detect that hazard at the distance where it's in in the micro tesla range?

So far, zero dowsers have volunteered for these essential roles.