Water Divining

[naomi24]

I’ve just been listening to ‘The Bottom Line’ on Radio 4 where the guests were the vice president of CH2M Hill, the CEO of Veolia Water, and the CEO of Anglian Water, who all said that water diviners are used within their respective industries. One said if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he would never have believed it works. Listen to the last few minutes of the programme from about 27.14.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b036w3b6

Your thoughts?

[jomifl]

Just to chuck in my 2 pennyworth, I was under the impression that it is not the sticks or rods that are suppose to detect things, they are simply a kind of mehanical amplifer to the subliminal responses of the operator. However my experience of divining is limited to looking for the route of the water main supply to a house I once owned. A builder assured me that he could find it by dowsing, he was so confident you would have bet money on it. After a bit of walking around with a twig he dug a hole and found it wasn't the right place. I went to the local hire shop and got one of those gadgets that uses an electonic principle. It actually worked and I was able to trace the route of the iron pipe buried 2 feet below the surface. Being an anecdote this proves very little except that confidence is not 100% reliable.

[naomi24]

I neither believe it nor disbelieve it. I simply don’t know – but this is interesting and could explain why it appears to work sometimes and not at other times.

http://www.ltu.se/cms_fs/1.5014!/dowsing.pdf

[jomifl]

There are many possible explanations as to how dowsing may work but until there is some evidence let alone proof that it does it would be a waste of time pursuing them since proving them depends on dowsing being proven first.. The human brain seems to have evolved to find patterns in the apparent chaos of nature, sometimes it finds patterns that don't exist. Personally I think dowsing belongs in the same category as ley lines, homeopathy, crystal therapy, spiritualism, alien abduction, etc.
I would be pleasntly surprised if it was shown to be a genuine phenomenom other than a bit of intuition based on environmental clues such as geography, geology and plant distribution..

[modeller]

//So what were the other 17 children, then? // No idea apart from the fact in any class many kids don't follow the rules anyway and wouldn't find a brick unless they fell over it.
Of the 8 who were successful they found the £6+ worth of coins, sometimes in long grass , sometimes just below the surface.

chrisgel //we keep our ear to the ground, using high-tech ear-trumpets to track it down. //
I recently detected a big leak in a neighbours garden without any devices at all. Maybe it was intuition ? Mind you the foot of water covering his lawn may have given me a clue.

At my club we were given a talk by a dowser with an impressive CV ,who also claimed he could detect adnormalities in people e.g who had had surgery . He was asked if he could find someone in the front row who had recently had a heart bypass ( me ), which as you may know, requires the ribs to be wired together again with titanium wire in the form of a lattice.
There was only 10 of us but after four attempts he still hadn't picked me out. It should have been easy as at that time I use to set off alarms in shops and was strip seached in Moscow airport when their alarm went off.

[Svejk]

I'd be surprised if I wasn't the biggest sceptic on this site. The first time I saw my mate doing it on site we nearly came to blows. I insisted he was manipulating the wires to make them cross but, of course, when he finally persuaded me to have a go I realized it was a genuine phenomena.
I've always presumed it was something to do with magnetic fields and disturbed ground. It does detect plastic water-pipes so its not metal detection. I don't know though.
I implore the nay-sayers on here to take a metal coat-hanger, cut it and shape it so you have 2 L shaped 'rods' 300/100. Form 2
loose fists and balance the rods in them.. Now walk, holding them out in front of you, about 300 apart and you, hopefully, will be amazed at the 'violent' crossing of the wires. Mark the spot and approach from different angles and you will find they cross at exactly the same spot again and again.
It'll take you a lot less time to do than my writing this. And will expand your closed minds, which can only be a good thing. ;)

[modeller]

I've just remembered when my daughters were little 7 and 12 I put 3 or 4 pieces of silver paper under two big carpets and when they came home from school. They each had a go at finding the paper under one of the carpets and found them at first go. I didn't mention the second carpet and they went out to play.
The next day I removed the paper from the carpets and ,this the surprising thing, when they came home they were playing 'divining' on the second carpet in the conservatory and found the exact spots where the papers 'had been'. As a sceptic I'm not convinced but neither do I have any explanation.
I'll try something more scientifically on my grand children but they are a bit young so it might not be possible.

[modeller]

To add to sejk , if the L shaped wires are put inside empty biros or any hollow tubes so the wires are free to move, they are then not affected by how tight you are gripping them.

[jomifl]

When my brother and I were teenagers we were into all sorts of 'paranormal' things, dowsing, telepathy, telekinesis, etc. I guess we must have been born without the 'gift' (gullibility?) because none of it worked for us. The point being that we did have open minds, open to reason.

[jim360]

I'm getting bored of people believing in these things telling anyone else that they have a "closed mind". Well, have you ever considered the possibility that your mind is closed? Closed to the possibility that you might be mistaken? Closed to the fact that every time this has been scrutinised, the ability disappears? Closed to the fact that scientists might actually want to see if this works or not, rather than determined to show that it doesn't?

I challenge your, svejk, to get in touch with James Randi, agree a test of your abilities with him, and report back here £1 million to the good. It would hardly be a waste of your time to do so, because your abilities are apparently 100% successful, and your inevitable prize would more than cover travel expenses etc. Go on, prove me wrong. If you manage it in a controlled test, then I'll eat my words. But until then please stop going on about how my mind is closed. It really isn't.

[naomi24]

//It doesn't work. Anyone who says otherwise is, frankly, wrong.//

Are you sure about that 'open mind' of yours, Jim?

[chrisgel]

If 100% of the people on the planet believed it were true that wouldn't make it so. With the utmost respect to all those who claim to be able to do this or have witnessed it. Hearsay evidence just does not cut it.
To be accepted as fact you would have to demonstrate, under controlled conditions, that it worked and was repeatable.

[Svejk]

I suspect the exalted James Randl might be a fraud of some kind. There's a lot of them about.
Why all the Jaw-Jaw and no War-War. It took me 5 minutes to fashion a coat-hanger, as described, this morning.
As you've just left Uni it might take you 15mins & you might be pleasantly amazed.
What have you got to lose?
After all, even Einstein clung to erroneous beliefs till his dying day.

[naomi24]

Chris, we know that - but is that really the sign of an 'open' mind? Most people are not liars, and most are not deluded, and with so much anecdotal evidence, which we know doesn’t count, rather than saying it doesn’t happen at all wouldn’t it be far more open minded to say ‘we can find no hard evidence and until we do we can only say we don’t know’?

[jim360]

Hehe, Naomi.

It's possible, is it not, that I had an open mind about this beforehand, then considered the evidence and rejected it. That's still open-minded, yes?

Perhaps some other time, svejk. I have for a start less money to give, and I'm less of an experimentalist anyway. But if I could devise a test that you would be happy to agree with, that could be easily conducted, then maybe I would test you over an extended period. It's not going to happen for a while, though. The same "that you would be happy to agree with" applies to James Randi, so he can be as much of a fraud as he likes -- you only conduct the experiment if you are happy with the conditions.

[chrisgel]

Naomi - Yes I think I have already allowed the possibility that it might be true.
As for an open mind, I believe that I have more of an open mind than most but that's not for me to say.
Being open minded is not the same as being willing to believe anything. Most of the people who have spoken about successful experiences have done so in an almost belligerent manner, as if to defy anyone to argue with them. This I believe is more of an indication of a closed mind than saying "Up to now there is no evidence"

[jim360]

What do you mean, by the way, that"we don't know", in this case and others? Does that mean that there is a roughly even chance of the phenomenon being true or not? Or some other split between the relative likelihoods of the two positions?

It always seems to me that "we don't know" is a bit of a misleading statement. I suppose for almost any scientific statement you can think of, we don't really know. But there is nearly always far more to it than that. In this case, "we don't know" but also "we have no reason to believe that the experiments so far are on the wrong track".

There is always some degree of uncertainty, anyway, but "we don't know" seems to make it far bigger than it often actually is. Anyway, I'd like to ask what you mean be saying it in this case.

[naomi24]

Jim, //It's possible, is it not, that I had an open mind about this beforehand, then considered the evidence and rejected it. That's still open-minded, yes?//

No, it isn’t. You’ve rejected it on current evidence. You haven’t considered the possibility that further evidence may emerge. If you don’t know, the only thing you can genuinely say is you don’t know. That's open-minded.

Chris, //Being open minded is not the same as being willing to believe anything.//

Absolutely right – and I do say ‘up to now there is no evidence’, but I don’t discount the possibility that new evidence may emerge in the future.

[jim360]

Still wanting to know what it means to you to say "don't know", though. How much uncertainty is there?

Also, why is this scientific conclusion so much more questionable than all the others that you are presumably happy to accept as genuine? Such as, say, the ones that led to this conversation even being possible.

[chrisgel]

Naomi - Of course new evidence might emerge for all sorts of things, Ghosts, telekinesis, fortune telling etc. etc.
Until that time, the only rational thing we can say is that there is no "Scientific" evidence that supports the claim and "Anecdotal" evidence just isn't enough to take on a belief.
In short "We don't know"

[LazyGun]

We can do a lot more than simply say " I don't know". We can assign a level of probability to a phenomenon, based upon empirical fact, plausible hypothesis, and observable and reliably reproducible event.

We can conclude that gravity is as described. Therefore the ability of someone to "levitate" ie defy gravity by means of an as yet undetermined force, is extremely improbable. In fact, the chances that it could happen are so infinitesimally small that we can assign a value to that proposition, which is so close to zero as to be zero, for all intents and purposes.

Thats not an example of a closed mind - thats a scientific, objective and dispassionate analysis of the evidence, which leads us to a conclusion. Reject that premise and you reject the whole basis of rational thinking.

This same method and same mechanism is used to assign a probability to gods existence, and much the same conclusion is arrived at- the probability that a personal god, omnipotent, omniscient, responsive to prayer etctetc - the type of god described by the major abrahamic religions - is so infinitesimally small as to be, to all intents and purposes zero.

Not a closed mind - an examination of the evidence and a rational conclusion.

We may yet find some as yet unsuspected interaction between electromagnetism and wires, or bits of stick, or quartz. Naomi offered a link to a Swedish guy who speculated about such things. But thats all it was- speculation. I would like to see him follow up on that, do some experimentation - show us how the piezo-electric effect might in fact be the answer for dowsing. That would be good, and exciting, and interesting. But he wrote the paper some while ago now, and has not published any data to support his speculation, so whats the reasonable conclusion to be drawn?

Yes, we are basing such conclusions on science as we know it today. So yes, it is possible that some new science will come along, or some new force might reveal itself that can explain all of these previously mystical or paranormal issues - but we no longer have big "here be dragons" gaps in our understanding of the world and the cosmos that would allow for such paradigm shifts, in my opinion. So again, a small possibility - higher than, say, the likelihood of a personal god, but not by very much more.