It's total hokum, and here's how you prove it.
Get a friend to bury ten pipes in a piece of ground, and then run water through one of them, without telling you which one. Then try to use your magick dowsing techniques to find out which one it is.
You can't think of a good cause (Cancer Research ? RSPCA ? RSPCC?) that could use a million bucks ?
Yes you have heard of him. He was mentioned the last time a silly dowsing thread came up a few months ago.
In order to provide an explanation of how dowsing works, it is necessary to study dowsing working.
Since dowsing does not work, and it has never been shown to work, it isn't possible to provide an explanation for it.
you can't think of a use for $1m ?
Why do people win the lottery then ?
Do you think that people who win the lottery, win it because unknown forces in the Universe conspired to make it so ?
The reason why we accept that concrete sets without a scientific explanation is because it can be demonstrated.
Since dowsing cannot be demonstrated, there can be no kind of explanation, scientific or otherwise. It doesn't work.
But it doesn't work. That's the point.
Dowsing for anything with rods I can just about accept - dowsing for anything by hanging a thread over a map - well that's just plain nuts.
Mary - do you have faeries at the bottom of your garden?
Because he wants to prove a point, I expect.
I expect he will also make sure that there is no chance of him ever paying out the money, most likely by imposing his own subjective assessment of what constitutes "proof".
The message from "Geronimo W. Christ Esq" contains these words:
But make sure that the person who chose and connected the pipes isn't present at the test - that should be supervised by a disinterested and uninformed third party. It's that step at which many such tests fail.
The message from "Geronimo W. Christ Esq" contains these words:
Can I interest anyone in a thread on fuel magnets?
The message from "Geronimo W. Christ Esq" contains these words:
That's only luck if you're the winner. To everyone else it's just the same old randomness, just like the week before.
I may have posted this before, but there's bound to be an entry in this list that fits the bill...
The message from Tony Polson contains these words:
I think more likely he'll apply what the scientific community accept as a fair test. It's quite a well defined concept and not hard to do.
In my (admittedly limited) experience of dowsing, it would have been impossible for me to tell whether pipes were empty or full of water.
I found electricity and telephone cables but could not differentiate between them and water pipes, full or empty. All I knew was that I had found *something", which we later dug up. In each case the location was exactly as indicated by the dowsing rods crossing.
I must admit that this thread has re-awakened my interest in dowsing. I think I might take it up as a hobby.
;-)
If you're talking about Randi, what constitutes proof is agreed between the claimant and the James Randi Foundation ahead of time.
Everyone who is referred to Randi goes through the same motions (you're doing it right now) of either claiming the money does exist, that even if it did exist he wouldn't pay it out, or that such things aren't provable in "scientific" tests (which really means they aren't provable at all).
Call the man's bluff, then.
[In a way, this is true. Randi essentially agrees to pay out the money if anyone can demonstrate "supernatural" powers, or anything that violates the known laws of physics or our understanding of the world. If dowsing were possible, it would turn our entire understanding of the world completely upside down and you could throw all physics textbooks written in the past 500 years in the bin. There is no immediate likelihood that it will happen though. Not a single person has been able to actually prove any of the incredible phenomena they claim.. ]
Thread-on fuel magnets don't work any better than clip-on fuel magnets, and are more difficult to fit.
Owain
What's that got to do with it ?
Mary said she doesn't believe in luck. Luck is basically the name we give whenever random events conspire to deliver a favourable outcome.
A lot of dowsing (like in Tony Polson's case) is down to luck. The rest of it is down to certainty. Once you accept that it *is* possible to win the lottery, even if that possibility is remote, then surely it is a reasonable step to believe that is possible for random events to deliver what appears to be a natural outcome.
It's pretty straightforward to take a guess in an average house where service cables might be located. Are you sure that you didn't merely make a lucky guess ?
The crossing of "dowsing rods" is a well-understood phenomenon.
Mary, I saw this article and thought of you:
Err, this isn't really the case. It has been shown that human brains are sensitive to magnetic fields. It may be entirely possible that dowsing using rods or hazel twigs is possible if the brain is sufficiently sensitive to detect magnetic anomalies caused by the presence of buried objects.
OTOH, dowsing using maps and pendulums is obvious nonsense.
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