Dowsing

[Steve Firth]

He's dead, if he ever existed. So correct, he can't exist, he may have existed.

You appear to spend so much time dealing with fantasy that you have problems dealing with reality. HTH.

[Derek ^]

Then I'm curious why you were looking for them at that particular location, Tony.

After a working lifetime on building sites one must get a pretty good intuition as to where services are likely to run.

One of my friends did work experience building the (still only part used) roundabout on the end of the M606 in Bradford. His first task set by the site foreman was to "Get down there and give me a rough estimate in gallons per minute of sewage coming out of that broken pipe"

DG

[Tony Polson]

You're barking. But we already knew that.

Welcome to my kill file. You will enjoy the company of several like-minded people. Go ahead and bark!

;-)

[Tony Polson]

So you "found it odd", did you?

Here we go again ...

... another "expert" joins the rest of the idiots in my kill file.

;-)

[Tony Polson]

I was very sceptical and was reluctantly coaxed into giving it a try by a colleague.

After a few minutes' training, within a few minutes I located several buried services. We set a JCB to dig for them and they were located

*precisely* where the rods indicated. As a sceptic, I was astonished.

There must be many hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the construction industry who routinely use dowsing to locate buried services. The skill required is minimal. They do it without fuss. To them, dowsing is just a simple, practical and effective tool.

The people who make the fuss about dowsing always appear to be those who would not do it, could not do it, or (mostly) those who have not even tried. They always have absolute, total "faith" that it doesn't work, based on their strongly negative preconceived ideas and - the one essential component - zero experience.

;-)

[Mary Fisher]

Yes, they're not prepared to chance winning a fortune becaue they'd have to admit that they were wrong :-)

Mary

[Tony Polson]

I wasn't. I systematically covered the entire site.

The site was privately owned and there were no records of the existence, let alone the locations of the majority of the services. The few records available were grossly inaccurate - I found a water pipe about 30 metres away from where the as-built drawings stated it had been installed. Dowsing found its route within an accuracy of half a metre or so.

I'm still sceptical. There are many false claims made for dowsing, particularly when it comes to locating underground water supplies, none more so than the current controversy in Jersey. The claims being made there are patent nonsense. But dowsing seems to work for locating buried services that are fairly close to the surface, such as gas, electricity, water and telephone.

I have never trusted dowsing on its own; I have always used it to decide where to dig trial holes (with great care) in order to positively locate the services. Given the risk of death or serious injury when live cables, gas and water mains are severed, it would be extremely foolish to place blind trust in dowsing alone.

But it is definitely of positive help in deciding where to dig trial holes, which is why so many people routinely use it, without fuss, and without making any extravagant claims for the technique.

[Tony Polson]

From my limited experience of dowsing, I don't think having water in one of the pipes would make a significant difference. Dowsing does not seem to differentiate between buried services. The crossing of the rods occurs in a similar way regardless of whether the buried service is a water pipe, a drain, an empty cable duct, an electricity cable or a telephone cable.

In my experience, dowsing provides only a location, and several such locations help you to find a route. But you have to dig trial holes to find out what the buried service is.

If you find a manhole, a valve pit or suchlike, you can use dowsing to trace the route(s) of the service(s) from that location.

[Tony Polson]

If I was that lucky, I would have won the lottery many times by now.

;-)

[tinnews]

.... and as I described, when they investigate further, it turns out not to work.

[tinnews]

Don't start *that* thread as well! :-)

[PeTe33]

I can think of every possible way in which someone prepared to put up such a sum in order to disprove something in which he does not believe, will be able to nullify any legitimate demonstration under any test conditions.

Now, if he were to say he would provide the test conditions that met his approval, he would have lost his money a thousand times over!

[The Natural Philosopher]

All science is based on the summation of anecdotes.

'Look the sun has come up this morning' 'It comes up every morning' 'You only have anecdotal evidence for that'

[The Natural Philosopher]

Too easy...

[mogga]

The water board use dowsing rods to confirm the location of their pipes.

[Huge]

Read the web site, bozo. You agree the test conditions ahead of time.

All they ask is that you can do what you claim.

[Steve Firth]

Heck, guess what, you're wrong.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Tell me any science that is not based on individual observations, by individuials, all of which could be classed as anecdotal.

[Douglas de Lacey]

You gave us some anecdotal evidence. Care to add references to specific experiments?

Douglas de Lacey

[Douglas de Lacey]

You cannot know that! What is your model of "scientific evidence"? (Mine's popperian, if that helps).

If you mean me, I assure you that I do. I could also add that I have never tried dowsing, and am entirely agnostic about it. Hence my desire from some evidence. But since (my impression is) your side comes up only with flat denial, I'm beginning to wonder. After all, one could easily think of models which could work.

Who is making such claims? All I did was to ask for some evidence (which seems to be what you too demand).

Now if you could document that, it would indeed be evidence of a sort. But not the kind I'd like to focus on, because it depends on no model of its efficacy, and therefore is not (as it stands) testable. Have any dowsers offered models of how it works? Have any opponents studied the apparently verifiable claims of success? I don't know, but no-one in this thread or its predecessors appears ready to enlighten us.

Douglas de Lacey