Do dousing rods work

This Ketamine (also used to daze medically treated animals for easy treatment, and also as the famous "Ruffie-Shot") effect is very reminiscent of the famous Caribbean "Zombie Effect", induced by carefully dozed "Puffer-Fish" toxin.

Is the chemistry related in any way you can tell us here?

Hi Yuval,

• Is the chemistry related in any way you can tell us here?

I'm don't think Ketamine is related to the toxin in puffer fish but it wouldn't surprise me if it were related to some naturally occurring toxin. I will have a look and see if I can find out.

There are three main functions of a general anesthetic. First off is the pain moderator or blocking mechanism and is usually some form of narcotic. It prevents you from feeling the pain and going into shock.

The next part is the loss of consciousness that prevents you from being aware of what is going on around or to you. There are however some drugs that prevent the transfer of the memory of events from short to long term memory that have become fairly popular of late. This allows the patient to be conscious and capable of interacting but will forget about everything or having any recollection of what, when or where after a few minutes at most.

The final and most important part is the muscle relaxant component. This is definitely related to things like puffer fish toxin and curare. If you try and cut into somebody that is all tensed up you will end up causing massive damage to the tissue as it tears instead of being cut. By relaxing all the muscles it not only prevents this secondary injury or damage but makes it a whole lot easier for surgeons to get to where they need to.

The problem with general anesthetics is getting the balance right as the effective dose of each components varies from person to person. One of the worst problems is when they get the unconscious and pain killers wrong with the muscle relaxant right as it ends up with a patient that not only remembers what is happening but feels the pain and can't do anything to inform the surgeons because they are paralyzed. It's fairly rare but it certainly does happen and is something that worries anesthetists greatly.

Just one thing... Can they work on reducing the damn hangover. It's horrible!!!

Swear by it. Saw it with my own eyes. Most remarkable.

How many times did you see it fail? It's a bit like that old joke about keeping tigers away...

"Well, do you see any tigers?"

"No."

"See, it works."

Swear by it... Human levitation. Saw a guy levitate a woman on stage with my own eyes. Most remarkable.

Was it in Amsterdam, in the late seventies?

Why witness others?

You can do it yourself, with your loved ones, in privacy.

Dr. Cecil Lefevre from University of Utah wrote a book on things that cause dowsing rods to turn. One experiment he asked his readers to try was to lay out a garden hose,turn the water on close to full and walk crosswise over the hose and observe the reaction of the rods. I tried it over and over and sure enough. He explained that it's a difference of potentials that causes the effect.

Randy

Been dousing since childhood, now 64. I use bent copper wires that pivot on the inside of my little fingers. It works every time. Would you like some hints to what makes it work? O.K. stop begging... each wire is an antenna that is powered by static charge and electromagnetic waves in the air just like radios are. These "antennas" are grounded through your body. Your body has ground potential with the earth below you. That potential is not constant but changes with guess what?... Things in the ground: water, pipe, etc.

John

Then how do you explain the original use of a willow twig. They were just as successful.

G o o d - L o r d A l m i g h t y . . . !

A "magnetometer", for $45.....???!!! Yur right . . . couldn't have been anything but a fancy "dousing rod".

We drag magnetometers behind our ships (occasionally, when survey data turns out to be incorrect) to locate subsea pipelines offshore ... because a magnetometer can sense changes in the regional / earth's magnetic field (they cost a few pennies more than $45, though). I am certain that somebody, somewhere, has found an analogous application of same to locating water over an area that is otherwise barren of same.

In the same context as an individual labeled "an idiot-savant" has the power to stupify and amaze us ... and a cat can predict 25 times-in-a-row when an individual is going to die (Recent news / New England Journal of Medicine) ... I am certain that SOME individuals can, indeed, sense "changes" (using dousing rods) to locate water with amazing accuracy.

My *own* accuracy would have you digging a new "Grand Canyon" (!) to find a dribble-or-two!

By the same token --- *THINK* about it! A "hydro-geologist" was hired...? He might just be a "showman" on-the-side, basking in the attention that he gets with the rods.

He probably possesses pretty thorough knowledge of the aquifer and ground water tables in your own, as well as surrounding counties...(*!*)... and thus knows where he can "point", with confidence!

uh hum, please see #14

your quote is rather funny, I guess it puts you into the third catagory, the ones that can't spell 2?

{catagory}sp > category

Guess not.

Unlike some people, out of courtesy, I *DO* read *ALL* posts in a thread, before replying***.

And I *DID* read #14 ~ which says: ("I think it has something to do with....")

And my reply stated a personal "real-world" account, followed by my own personal feelings / observations that I felt applied to the peculiarly-mystical subject.

I , personally, would be embarrased beyond belief, were I to be endowed with "guru" status in this forum, by simply scattering an absurd number of nonsensical postings for the sake of reaching that "magical number" whatever it may be.

*** "Contribute", and you're part of the process-of-progress. "Rant", and there are plenty of morons who will root-you-on, hoping to be dragged-along at your heals.

c_rummel3@yahoo.com There you will find a phone #. From which you might obtain some enlightenment. In the meanwhile take your meds and mind your mouth.

And by your own quote I see which mind you possess. Now please, move along.

But, I have a real problem with the metal rods.

Pap used and the Amish still do use a forked wooden stick or branch from a tree.

Pap would only use peach limbs, nothing else seemed to work.

And, we had the old German Well Driller up here who offered the same "No water, no Pay, and he would even estimate the flow in GPM.

estimate the flow in gpm?

Locating water thru a pair of rods is a diffierent thing, that I can take.

But estimating the flow..? amazing!!. How does he do it? Are you convinced by all means?

Flow rate, well, there I believe it was just experience from many years of Dowsing and a bit of Showmanship or a "Dog & Pony Show", as we are all prone to do in sharing are hard earned practical knowledge with the "masses".

Shrekengost, the driller would find you the water, and no rotary drill for him, as it would change the underground water.

He used only an ancient hammer drill and took weeks, not days to drill a 100'+ well. He "respected the water. Are these things paranormal or as I believe, we are still learning, thank God.

Had to fix some typos here.

Haha!..

I wonder though how much they paid that "hydro-geologist" using a "45$ magnetometer"?

OK, how about a quick vote. Three simple questions...

1. Were you ever successful with a Ouija board?
2. Did you move the planchette or did it seem to move by itself?
3. If you were successful with the Ouija board, do you believe that you moved it in some subconscious manner or were their spirits, demons, devils at work?

If you answer "no" to number one, don't waste your time with the other two questions.

I went down to a hotspring one day, to have a swim. while I was there, a hydro geologist arrived and started taken the temperature of the water. I asked him what he was up to, and he started explaining.

the conversation turned to field detection, or more to the point hydro thermal field detection. he explained the process and the science of discovering the boundaries of a geothermal field that lays beneath the earth. He explained how they were able to determine that I was swimming in an outlet of the largest ever geothermal field ever discovered throughout the world. that was in 2001.... don't know if the Mokai Geothermal field is still the largest field ever discovered.

anyway, he explained that they stick two rods into the ground and send an electrical arc signal from one pole to the other. if there is water present underground, the conductivity of the water changes the shape of the arc from one pole to the other.

they are also able to test for depths and outer limits by moving the rods and changing the strengths of the signal sent through the ground.

as for dousing, its actual more scientific than that... and I don't see why people aren't capable of detecting frequency changes that naturally occur from the presence of water beneath the ground. I can detect ELF and even EMF changes without any devices (a place called Galatea has a higher EMF field than I've ever felt before -which may be explained by the dumping of tonnes of Colbalt on the soil to make up for the deficiency that cause the lanscape to be arid -now it flourishes brilliantly, and the farmers that held on through the period where most of the farmers walked off because nothing would grow have a property worth millions). so I think there's cause for reason beneath the quackery.

"I can detect ELF and even EMF changes without any devices"

Please tell us what you experience when you observe these changes. Is it a physical thing you feel, an emotional change, or what?

My grandfather taught me how to "work the rods" as a kid. While I was working my way through college installing landscaping, I used it frequently to locate empty 3 & 4" PVC or ABS pipes under sidewalks and driveways. (The builders put them in during construction for us to route our irrigation pipes through.) Never got a false positive or a false negative in four summers. Can't explain it, but I believe it!

I suppose it could be similar to how scientists argued over and studied birds and wondered how they could find their way in fog and cloud to home over thousands of miles etc...

I think its now been generally accepted that the birds are able to sense the Earth's magnetic field, but I'm nor sure it has been proved yet?

So maybe this detection of a changing ambient manetic field could be part of our lives and cause imperceptable movements of the muscles to cause the rods to cross etc...?

John.

Anybody with a loose bolt in their head can sense the magnetic rays and the messages from the mother ship.

lol, haha. I get the feeling you're exceptional at it! does that mean you have 2 loose bolts?

We be vermin... All our bolts are loose!

I think all my bolts are tight, and I can still receive the messages from the mother ship.

You seem to be suggesting that dowsing, witching, or wishing of water wells does not work as advertised. How Dare You??! What the heck are you, some kind of rational thinker??!! I am a practiced dowser, and it has worked for me every single time. (Although I have to admit, I don't use willow twigs -- I hear voices.) It even worked when I lived in Pennsylvania, and I had to drill not one, but TWO wells. In that case, I needed a good well to provide the ordinary household needs and supply a ground source heat pump at 10 GPM. The other well had to receive the flow from the heat pump ... which, in general, means that it must flow as much as the heat pump puts out.

So here's how I did it. I walked away from the foundation about far enough to give a drilling truck some space to work, figured out if the piping would work out well, and then drove a stake. Then I went a little further (far enough that the two wells would not short-circuit, I figured) and drove another stake. Then I told the driller to drill the two wells where the stakes were. AMAZINGLY, we hit water with both wells. I had a sense we would. I can't tell you just what it felt like, and I didn't use rods or twigs, or a dried up toad, or a bible. (What did I say above? Oh yeah... I heard voices.)

Of course I did have one, tiny, and probably unrelated piece of information available to me. That piece of information is that it is virtually impossible to drill a well anywhere in the eastern half of the US without hitting water. The driller I used said they had never used a dowser, and that he couldn't imagine why anyone would. In his twenty some years of drilling he had never... not once... failed to hit water.

As far as I know, witching works as described in this article.

See, aquifers tend to be rather extensive!

The two topics here are dousing for water and underground utility location. We can really screw ourselves up if we attempt to relate all we understand about what we think we know about one to the other. What fun.

I'm with C-Rummel3. Seen it work, made it work, believe it (most of the time).

Well, we all have had fun today and I bow to you superior insight from "LA".

Learned a lot while working in "PCB' from the good ole boys in "Wewa"

Well sir you do get around. Not many people in the world have ever been to Wewahitchka. I doubt it was printed circuit boards you were learning about from the good old boys. Y'all keep having fun while I make the sad ride.

Greetings,

Infrared cameras sense heat, using the sun to heat the earth and looking right after sunset the thermal difference across an apparently uniform soil for instance and have been used to image where a steam line/oil pipe/water line travels underground, where civil war soldiers graves are, water pipes with flowing liquid embedded in concrete or under the concrete depending upon thickness, there must be a temperature or emissivity (ability to radiate heat) difference.

I sell/use multiple technologies to search for problems, infrared, ultraviolet, ultrasound, radio waves, and these technologies are sometimes narrowly filtered to look only for specific things. Using multiple technologies to "reinforce the conclusion" or it seems as cost goes up get closer to pin-pointing the object of interest and providing a live picture with the problem pin-pointed.

Lightening rods protect a cone/umbrella shaped area, when a well is drilled and water pumped in excess of the seepage capacity an umbrella shaped area above the well point begins to dry up, using these as examples.

Having read all of the ideas, I agree with radio/magnetic waves being concentrated/less concentrated (umbrella shaped area) above the object of interest which cause the dousing rods to turn. I disagree with one statement about the person being "grounded", the person is typically wearing rubber soled shoes isolating them from ground/earth and this acts to increase the area/sensitivity of the antenna (dousing rods).

If the person must be grounded by wearing wet leather soled/or no shoes for the dousing rods to work then a magnetic effect would be suggested.

If there must be a lightening storm and the person must be dragging a grounding rod behind them with a chain then insanity would be suggested.

Dan www.specialcamera.com

Years ago, I was working at a municipal power plant in the Midwest. While installing new UG lines, one of the plant people walked out with a Y-shaped tree branch and proceeded to "douse" the area. He handed me the branch and said to walk across the property. I, skeptic that I am, was astonished at how vigorously the tree branch pulled down at one spot. Any existing UG lines were at least 40 years old and the property had been regraded and gravelled multiple times. So, I'm at a loss to explain the phenomenom.

P.S. The spots at which the tree branch did its best by any of the plant personnel were pretty much unrelated to the actual locations of the UG utilities.

I liked the P.S. add on!

Is it because we are sympathetic?

Is it like faith, be it your God, your Theory, your Science, or Yourself.

All I know is it works, along with some other forms of "Witchcraft". or "Pseudo Science"

No one, up to now, has ever claimed that "Dousing Rods" might or might not work. For a forum supposedly comprised of fairly well informed sentient beings, I am shocked, simply shocked (as Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) said in Casablanca), that the ancient art of DOWSING has been degraded to "Dousing". I have doused a fire with water, and doused my kids with buckets of water. Dousing, saith the Wicki, is the practice of making something or someone wet by throwing a lot of liquid over them, e.g., by pouring water, generally cold, all over the place or person. Now DOWSING is different. Quoting from the Skeptics web site, "Dowsing is the action of a person--called the dowser--using a rod, stick or other device--called a dowsing rod, dowsing stick, doodlebug (when used to locate oil) or divining rod--to locate such things as underground water, hidden metal, buried treasure, oil, lost persons or golf balls, etc. Since dowsing is not based upon any known scientific or empirical laws or forces of nature, it should be considered a type of divination and an example of magical thinking. The dowser tries to locate objects by occult means." Au Contraire, I personally knew an old old lady in Kerhonkson NY who was the local DOWSER, and just about every water well driller in the area used her free services (Well almost free - provide her a lunch and transportation and maybe a gratuity). She picked the spot for my father in law's well, and the drillers hit good sweet water at about 200 feet. The well drillers said she never missed (what never? well, hardly ever (Porgy & Bess)).

I think you will find that the numbers for it working and against it working equal the number of don't knows!!

I have been spelling dowsing as such in all my posts as have others...

Please remember to read the posts and also know the meaning of the words you use...

'Occult' is merely a word used to express something as being unknown and inexplicable to present day understanding, nothing more or less.

John.

Electroman - I never meant to disparage anyone such as you, who had (and has) the ability and the alacrity to spell DOWSING correctly. But you are in a very very very small select subset of this group. One does not need to formulate a Weibull Distribution of the occurrence of "Dousing" within this thread of 56 (or more) posts, to discover a shocking, simply shocking, failure rate. Now I am the first to admit that my spelling is also atrocious, but, thanks to my years of embarrassing misspellings, I have learned to check such matters, especially when writing standards, or technical papers, or textbooks, or handbooks, or especially letters to the NY Times. Editors are very picky. And they should be. As Ogden Nash may have said, "In a land of fools there are no rules." And we who design machines that can kill (Rockets, Aircraft, Medical Instrumentation, Toasters, Toys, etc.) must be very careful about such rules, lest a multi million dollar rocket blows up because of a syntax error in a DO Loop (one lousy comma, years ago), or because one segment of a design group uses MKS units and another uses SAE units (not very long ago). (Speaking of units, which weighs more, an ounce of gold or an ounce of lead? Which weighs more, a pound of gold or a pound of lead? Which weighs more, a gram of gold or a gram of lead? All three answers are different, because of troy weight, avoirdupois weight, and the good old gram. The answers are gold ounce, lead pound, and neither.) Now, getting back to the DOWSING spelling situation, the particular misspelling occurring, i.e., "DOUSING" - this is not a misspelled word, it is a correctly spelled totally different word, which will not be caught by a computerized spell checker. Hence this is a particularly noxious occurrence, which is becoming increasingly common as more and more people depend on computers to correct their errors. As the computers appear to think more, we appear to think less. This will be our downfall. Computers design computers now. Luckily, they screw up too, especially when line widths go to the nanometer or mille micron range and stray and shunt capacitive factors grow large. But these and other effects of scale are being incorporated into newer design rules and application programs, so I am glad my obsolete design skills are fast becoming redundant, leaving me with just enough talent to fix the current generation of the MCU, ECU, EEPROM, GEM controlled direct injected modular design V-10 6.8 liter internal combustion engine that tows my 7,000 pound boat rig. The next generation of electronically controlled engines I am nearly certain will be essentially unrepairable. Replacement will be the fix. In fact, that is effectively the case right now for most engine or transmission or heater or a host of other control modules that are turning our cars into large moveable computer cases. Soon, the electronics will cost more than the mechanical components. Soon, the entire internal combustion engine set (Otto, Diesel, Sterling, Wankel, etc.) may disappear, leaving a fully electrically propelled and controlled vehicle. Just like the 1912 Detroit electrics produced by the Anderson Electric Car Company. C'est la vie. And watch your spelling. And please excuse my tendency to become inebriated by the exuberance of my own verbosity, as Gladstone said of Disraeli. (Or was it vice versa? Nope, Gladstone said it.)

For God sake, man!!! Learn to write in paragraphs! The single paragraph style leaves many a good posting unread!!!

Although I agree with you on a disturbingly large number of things, I don't agree re the mechanic's post. It's best read aloud to give it the real sound of a rant. Rants should never be paragraphicized! If he were to write it in paragraphs, then he'd have to first figure out where one ends and the next one begins. Then he'd have to think about transitions to give the appearance that the whole thing is connected in some rational way. But the rationality would detract from the flavor of the thing. People buy Ferraris because they are 1/10 as reliable as a Toyota but cost 10 times as much. Putting this post in paragraphs would be like making a Toyota out of a Ferrari.

Soooooooooo many words...

hurts my head... must nap

Hi mechanic of new york. Welcome to CR4.

There are many english as second language folks here. Also many fat fingered typists such as myself/

I personally have a capitalization of nouns and noun derivatives issue since I took German.

If you are going to be a strict constructionist on spelling, you will soon be CR4's newest GURU just by correcting such errors

Point well taqken any who...

milo

My first experience was at the age of 13 yrs.A large sink hole appeared.An old man using forked willow told the rancher it was caused by under ground stream'How deep & how many gpms. I have witnessed what we called witching water many times.I operated a backhow for a living in my 20s. We used a man named Olie Justice For locating lines, digging new wells & finding broken pipes. It always worked for some people others couldn't do it.I know a man in montana who witches wells and keeps a record. He has a record of 85% success.I have always lived in arid area.I always said if I could figure how it worked I could be rich.I've seen it with rods or willow.Willow will twist into on a good well Which makes it more convincing.Still today there are drillers who drill only after having it witched in.I'm 65 so I love to use words like witched in instead of dousing.Its more in the old days.You've brought back some memories, Thanks Wamblee

And we all know that Laetrile, and coffee enemas, and colloidal silver, and having your aura cleansed are all cures for cancer! At least that's what all the survivors say!!!

The non-survivors.... Hmm! Don't hear to much from them. Wonder why?

Why are we all here - because we are not all there!

I grew up in an arid part of the world. a lot of farms in our area could not even find enough water for drinking purposes.

There are a lot of solid dikes and sills distributed in an haphazard way. On our farm there was a strong fountain. with more water than can be attributed to the catchment area. It could therefore only have been an aquifer formed by a deep fold which surfaced there at an angle of ±60 deg from the horizontal. The source of the water may have been the mountain range ±150 km away.

The effect of this was that you could drill anywhere in the top part of the farm and get water at 3 - 6 meter. The bottom part was below the dike with almost no water.

The area was (and may still be) plagued by water showing "specialist" using a range of things (metal, wood , glass, panties, and any thing under the sun)

My dad usually told told the people that they could try. and then actually took them on a guided tour over a water rich area (but it could not be noticed from the surface) in the general direction of the fountain. Most of them never even suspected water and sum may have marked "weak holes". When they suddenly see al the water in front of them the knew that they were out-conned and left in a hurry.

I could not even have the wires or sticks working there.

Or did I overcompensate because I did not want it to work?

metal, wood , glass, panties, and any thing under the sun

! ROFL. I think you may have just about caused me to make water. Not telling where from though !

Yes- we had a woman visit there whose panties fell down when water was detected. I was young and were not allowed to attend the xxx rated scientific experiment. (the news of her methods spread over the grapevine) . She apparently made a lot of sales. (The holes she indicated was all suited for big pumps.)

Our so called 'Essex girls' use ankle-warmers. Having been born in Essex, I can say that this is a scurrilous generalization.

How do they detect water with ankle-warmers?

It's more a reaction to Wine. Even glimpsing a car with fluffy dice dangling across the windscreen can produce this effect.

Ah, Now I am more confused and interested!!!

How did they use the panties??

The joke is ..

Q. Why do Essex girls wear panties?

A. To keep their ankles warm...

(I don't actually aprove of the joke as my Daughter is technically an Essex Girl having been born in Harlow)

....So is one of my sisters. Any place could be used really. Harlow only just qualifies as Essex though.

You do keep banging on about Harlow, so....

Jean Harlow (Hollywood's sexy actress) kept calling Margot Asquith by her first name, or kept trying to: she pronounced it Margot. Finally Margot set her right. `No, no, Jean. The t is silent as in Harlow.

It fell down as a sign of water. Not they but she.

My two cents:

1. Selective memory. If 100 people dig a hole and one finds water, the 99 don't talk about it. All "proofs" that I've heard are anecdotal. As far as I know, no controlled test has shown results that are statistically significant to support dowsing.

2. As Vermin said, aquifers tend to be large. It may not be improbable to find water anywhere within an area.

3. Professional dowsers may consciously or subconsciously detect signs such as soil color or vegetation, or perhaps humidity.

I started the original disscussion and I wasn't sure if it was dowsing or dousing thanks for the clarification.

I'm thrilled it turned out to be such an interesting topic.

I think I agree that there is high likelihood of finding water anywhere in the northeast and the "Hydro-geologist" struck me as a colossal bullshit artist.

I have an open mind though and there have been some rational explanations that may explain things.I even hold hope that someday science will support this and other strange occurrences.

I'm sure many unexplained phenomenons have been first labelled quackery and then found to have Merritt ,chiropractic for example.For me I'll leave the book open and reserve judgement as I do with religion and wait and see .

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Don't mention the 'R' word !

Blimey, I've just logged on and been inundated with emails telling me about the posts on here...

Can I take it that not much engineering work is being done today then?!!

In my original post somewhere I mentioned that the water board guys are equipped with dowsing rods and instructed in there use... For a huge company to equip all its inspectors with this 'tool', I would assume that they do have some faith in its ability to work wouldn't you?

As for the 'R' word, let's not go down that route eh??!!

John.

This may be a good place to clarify my position a bit... I have no problem with the fact that some electric, magnetic, etc. force might be detected by humans. I don't find that impossible in the least.

On the other hand, in scientific studies where scientists have buried objects, made their best attempt to leave behind no telltale evidence, and have done this in an area that was unfamiliar to the dowser, the dowsers always fail. Their record is far worse than 50-50. This being the case, I think there's a whole lot of wishing going on. And on familiar ground, we're damn good guessers.

I would have no objection to believing in dowsing as a real, physical phenomenon if it worked in trials. And I'm not against it based on religion or something like that!

Is a ring on a thread used by a doctor to determine the sex of an unborn child dousing?

Smeging hell guys, we are supposed to be engineers and scientists not bloody long haired, happy weed smoking, back to nature, nah nah brained, myth believing loonies that think something is true just because some off the planet weirdo said it is.

First off it is the job of the person claiming that dousing works to show how and why it works rather than the skeptics to prove otherwise. Also as vermin said earlier the minute you start introducing any sort of scientifically based test to check the validity of dousing it fails miserably.

Amongst a host of others the James Randi Educational Foundation offers a prize of US$1,000,000,⁰⁰ to anybody that can demonstrate any supernatural, paranormal event whatsoever. Now guess what, nobody has ever been able to demonstrate that there is any paranormal anything whatsoever.

If dousing actually works then I would suggest that you go and earn yourself a million dollars. It will be the easiest million dollars you ever earned.

Until then, forget it, it doesn't work and it is not up to me to prove it doesn't, it us up to anybody making the claim that it does work to not only show that it works but how and why it works.

Pretty Curt and Grumpy today, eh.

..He's not pretty !

(pencil in all the other seven Dwarfs gags too)

Maybe, but he's absolutely correct! (although I have no idea what that first adjective means)

Smeging hell indeed.

As a member of the pragmatic tribe of engineering, "It is what it is," I stand by my post #10.

I did it, on separate circumstances, and I offerred my "hypothesis" on why it worked.

I may be close; I may not. But if we had to wait for the full high church scientifically published peer reviewed orthodox explanation, well, we probably never would have had fire.

Vulcanized rubber, teflon, etc. etc.

Stating that there are areas that are on and off limits for technical inquiry seems to me to be a great way to let somebody else take the lead.

It is in the gaps that true scientific progress is made; in the discrepancies between our evidence, and our current understanding.

Where they swung, there was buried pipes.

We'll know more tomorrow than we do today; That doesn't mean to not do something to day because there may be a better means tomorrow.

Someone posted Laetrile and other "supposed frauds" earlier.

Somewhere, I'm certain, is a survivor of cancer who is sure that it was the Laetrile that healed him or her. Whether we call it placebio effect, happy coincidence, stray cosmic ray, or interaction of the bronze age sky god, this person is still alive.

Our task is to try to understand and use statistics to help us understand, that yes, they survived, but its not the way to bet...

In london in 1854 everybody knew that Cholera was transmitted by smell to only the most morally fallen ...

Open minds consider all facts and create progress.

milo

Yes yes. The absence of scientific evidence does not disqualify or disprove the event.

Sorry Masu, but I have to disagree with you... As I said in a previous post:

Up until recently we knew that birds, such as homing pidgeons could find their way home with ease over many hundreds of miles and we used that fact to send messages for centuries...

We hadn't a clue how they did it but it was accepted, it was only in recent times that scientists have discovered that the birds may have some form of detection based on the earth's magnetic field etc...

But as far as I'm aware, we still don't know... That doesn't mean that for centuries we've been using paranormal means to send messages does it?

Besides which I'm bald and not a long haired hippie.... **although I was one back in the 60s**

John.

John,

I like the comparison with homing pigeons. There was a TV program a while back that showed how one particular pigeon had figure out that it could navigate by looking at the roads. I'm not taking the p*** here - this bird had been shown to do so, though how anybody noticed this I don't know. Anyway, as you say, the way in which they navigate is not at all well understood.

I'm with the non-believers here, but I was interested in your comments about the Water Boards. The only info I could find was near the bottom of this link. As you'll see it's a negative one. I'd love to see some proof of Dowsing, especially as it features in an Engineering Classic (De Re Metallica ,16C)

It's fun to think that maybe somebody out there does have a technique that works. Perhaps they are ignored amid the multitude of quack nu-age practitioners of stuff like 'crystal healing'. masu makes a good point about the onus of proof. Whilst I'm not a believer, it would not totally surprise me if some thing similar to dowsing with rods was found to have some basis in fact at some point in the future. I doubt that an individual person has some sort of mystical power, but maybe metal rods react to magnetic anomaly or something. I can't imagine how wooden sticks etc would react to anything underground ( the 16th C probably had more charlatans than today). If you have any more info on the Water Boards I'd be interested, but so far I get the impression that it's just a whimsical practice if they keep them in the van. Sorry for the negativity.. I'll try find some positive later.

Kris, I'm not saying it does or doesn't work, it may do?...

All I'm saying is please let's keep an open mind until someone can prove or disprove it...

There probably are a lot of charlatons around which might make it difficult to sort out and study the good from the bad... but as its been going on for so long it surely must be time to investigate it? and not just dismiss it as a hippie load of rubbish?

I like to keep an open mind about all things, it can lead you down odd paths to a dead end but it can also ,sometimes, lead to an interesting outcome.

John.

Totally agree with you John. Right now I'm puzzled about the nice picture in my post which I can't see now . I'll try again;

There's a certain something about the posture(s) in each picture.

Bird navigation

and fish navigation

I'd submit that the two, pigeon navigation and dowsing are very different.

1. Through the scientific process, many theories have been proposed and tested re pigeon navigation. Very early on, people advanced the theory that the earth's magnetic field came into play and experiments were done to test that hypothesis. Things went back and forth for a while, but now there is consensus that pigeons can use the earth's magnetic field, further supported by the fact that when the field is disturbed by solar flairs, their ability to navigate goes downhill. So we have come to understand a lot about pigeon navigation by applying the scientific process, not by throwing it out.

2. Conversely, we know nothing more about dowsing (in a scientific sense) than we did many centuries ago: we can't even come up with a plausible theory. There is no scientific consensus to support that is has any basis at all. Further, there have been studies done that indicate that it does not work at all. (See link in my post above)

So, in the pigeon case, scientific thought has converged on a plausible and now almost certain explanation. In the dowsing case, scientific thought not only has not converged on any rational explanation for its working as advertised, but has instead converged on its not working at all.

Loads of people believe that Ouija boards "work". That is not a scientific consensus. I agree with Vermin, that they are precisely in the same category. Dowsing has the advantage in generating believers though, because you can drill almost anywhere and hit water. So it you used a dowser, you'd think gosh he was right! A better test: have him find a place where you can drill and fail to hit water. It is the nature of water well drilling that once you set up the equipment, you just keep drilling until you hit water.

Dowsers say, in effect: See, I told you so! I told you you'd find your pencil in the last place you looked! Am I prescient, or what??!!

I told you you'd find your pencil in the last place you looked! Am I prescient, or what??!!

Ah Ken...

I don't fall for that old one...I keep looking after I've found it!

Being poor, I always travel by bus. If I'm travelling East, I nearly always see several buses going Westwards before my Eastbound bus arrives. I suspect a conspiracy.

Would an arm wrestling contest settle the matter scientifically?

Don't do it in a bar - the locked arms would fall into your pint.

I never dreamed when I answered this post (#1) we would end up discussing dousing rods & panties.

I cannot speak to dousing as a means to find groundwater or panties so my comments speak only to location of conduits. If the two topics are somehow related we may be at this for some time............which so far seems not to be such a bad thing. Enjoyable discourse.

If only as a group we could put both to the test. It would be better than the tv show that proposes to prove / disprove myths. You are all invited to my property to find conduits. You may also search for groundwater but it seems to emerge from the ground spontaneously where I live so that may not be so much of a challenge.

Thanks Traditional

OK, I'm thinking of a place somewhere North of Alabama. I'll give you thee guesses to get it right.

Ready?

At posting, I'll be beaming my thoughts to you for 30 seconds... Ready?

Now!

Thanks vermin.....maybe another time.

I knew you were going to say that!!!

How did you know? Was it just a "feeling" or did you have to do what I do when I want to hear the future, namely stick pencils (erasers inward) in each ear? I find that if they deflect upward, I am hearing future words. If they deflect downward, I am hearing past words. Hearing current words is difficult, unless I remove the pencils.

Good morning Pepper, Traditional, y'all (where's Del?),

GREAT thread!

I grew up in upstate New York and we had 2 wells on our property. Both had been found by dowsing. As for the 'ground water is everywhere' theory, which I agree with in part, let me just say this: one well was ca. 20-30 ft deep and produced..sulphury ground water (my dad used to drink it out of the hose saying "Drink some! it's GOOD fer ya!" - I could barely get one mouthful down...but he's 87 and going strong). The other well was ca. 80-100' deep and produced the most wonderfully awesome mountain spring/deep-well tasty water...well if any of you haven't had the luxury of drinking real clean deep-well water... So: 2 wells within about 25 meters of each other, quite obviously bored into two totally seperate sources.

The personal part of this story came when some neighbors were having a well dug (well, drilled, of course, this would be the 60's) - they called a diviner. Drillers in the country wouldn't drill without one. Results in worn-out bits and dry wells and a p'oed customer. My dad thought it was hocum but watched the stick dip (willow is the preferred wood), they drilled *there* and got fine water, and not too deep.

Now I live in Europe and I like Old Stuff. Every farm, castle, outpost, wherever there were people living HAD to have a well. I can tell you that NOBODY would put hand to shovel/pick-ax/hand-drill...to dig one of these 10-20-40...90 METER deep wells, often in solid rock, often in nasty hot places, without calling on a diviner. That be HARD work.

Based on my personal observation (along with what's following), I would be very interested to know what our colleagues from other continents & regions say about this subject, whether a divining tradition exists outside of Europe & n. America.

Last but not least, look up 'divining' on Wikipedia (excellent article), then search this book on amazon:

The Divining Hand:: The 500 year-old Mystery of Dowsing (Paperback)

by Christopher Bird (Author)

scroll down to the 1st customer review. I guess this is the guy

http://www.geodivining.com/

I work at a very high-tech physics laboratory, but I believe there are many things in daily life we still can't explain. They just work...

- RF_guy

Hey RF guy, good story. It's been an interesting thread regardless of what your perception is. I've always lived in places where you couldn't help but find water, only a matter of quality and yield related to elevation, confining strata etc. Never been exposed to divining for water. I suspect finding water in mountainous terrain to be more difficult but I certainly can't weigh in as a hydrogeologist.

What,

T h e s e ?

Even as back-scratchers, these, below,

would do a better job.

Water and oil finders cannot simply say: "Here, right here. I smell the sucker. Gimme fifty-thou for it, as agreed" They need some impressive paraphernalia to make a bizarre point.

Hey, if it's only about smell, you could train a pig to do a better job, and it would only cost you some hay.

Hi Folks,

I havn't had a lot of time of recent to give CR4 the normal level of attention I would like, but I see my comment had the desired effect. Rather than reply to the numerous responses one by one I will use a single post.

In post #87 dkwarner stated;

· Maybe, but he's absolutely correct! (although I have no idea what that first adjective means)

Smeg me, I gather you have never watched the BBC Sci-Fi comedy Red Dwarf.

In Response to qaqcpipeman's post #83 statement;

· Pretty Curt and Grumpy today, eh.

Very true. Actually what I get upset about is the ever increasing prevalence of totally ludicrous quantum leaps in logic that many seem to making. I think the best way to describe what I am waffling on about is to give a couple of examples.

1. A pregnant woman was having a normal check up during her pregnancy when the doctor was unable to detects the baby's heart beat. While he tried for quiet some time he could find nothing and feared that the baby had died. While this is unfortunate it is not unheard of and the normal course of action is to perform an abortion. However, this is a dramatic thing to do and prior to carrying it out they always check the diagnosis to make sure and during this check they detected the baby's heart beat.

The parents were obviously ecstatic and went on ranting and raving how their prayers were answered and it was truly a miraculous event.

Now it may have been a miracle but it is far more likely that the only problem was that the initial fetal hart monitor was faulty. However, the parents made a totally unjustified leap in logic sighting that it was truly a miracle from god.

1. I have lost count of the number of people that get up and say they have seen alien space craft. The come up with things like it wasn't a plane and I don't know what it was so it must have been an alien space craft.

Jumping from I don't know to it's an alien space craft is a totally unjustified leap in logic that just can't be taken seriously. However, time after time people offer it up of proof that aliens have visited earth even though there are a myriad of more plausible explanations.

I reality people are offering up their ignorance and lack of understanding as proof and the statement that dousing works because I have seen it work, is a similar totally unjustified, leap in logic. If you look at the scientific testing of dousing you will find that as soon as you introduce a double blind test it completely fails. Not only does it fail but there is absolutely no scientific basis for it to work.

I also agree with Blink, in post #95 where he stated;

• I'd submit that the two, pigeon navigation and dowsing are very different.

While it is always desirable to understand the physics, science, chemistry and mechanics behind an event or occurrence it is not critical. However, it is critical that it stands up under scientific scrutiny, which is something the pigeons ability to navigate dose very well, while dousing fails miserably under even the most cursory scientific scrutiny.

If you can demonstrate that dousing does in fact stand up to scientific scrutiny then I suggest you contact the James Randi Educational Foundation as quickly as possible because it's worth US$1,000,000.⁰⁰ but be warned, everybody and everything to date has failed miserably.

One of the best threads yet.

Believe this, I just got back from my Medical Checkup and my Doc and I started discussing unexplained phenomenon in both of our fields. He claims he has seen so many "impossible things", that he spends much time collecting data and case history info. And, so later maybe a post on an unexplained cure a lot of his patients use and claim works.

This is where science works: in the gaps between what our current theories say and what we can observe.

milo

About twenty years ago, my next door neighbor, an elderly Japanese man was complaining of chest pains. He went to three doctors and each said he was suffering angina and need bypass surgery.

A friend of his asked him to go see his doctor. Apparently he was known in the area as a brilliant diagnostician. After a few minutes of examination. The doctor asked him if he ever laid down after eating. My neighbor answered yes. It was his practice to take a nap after dinner. To this the doctor said, "You have acid reflux. Don't lie down at least for two hours after eating." and put my neighbor on a little known prescription drug called Zantac. Within a week, my neighbor was pain free.

The other doctors? They chalked it up to one of those medical miracles. He never had acid reflux (which they had never heard of), he had a spontaneous remission of clotted arteries.

This is not to say all doctors are quacks, but their hubris can often lead then astray.

A little bit of information you may find interesting about how successful a completely useless douser can be in Australia. Australia is by far the driest inhabited continent on Earth (I am excluding Antarctica because few people live there and those that do are only there temporarily). Water is an important commodity and much of the continent is classified as desert.

Now there is a thing called the Great Artesian Basin in Australia which is pretty much what its name suggest. Basically it covers around 25% continent overall but more importantly most of the deserts and contains around 65,000 km³ of water with various levels of salinity.

So, even if you are the most incompetent douser that has absolutely no skill whatsoever you have at least a 25% chance of hitting water if you drill down far enough and if you are in any of the arid regions the probability increases dramatically.

http://www.dowsers.org

Hmmm...

Yummy, and then some ...

having trouble with the second [yummy] link. What was I supposed to see?

Exactly!

(...my point in the first place, having a formal association doesn't make something legit... - for those still asleep)

uhhh? ok smart science guy. apparently a bit of axe grinding going on.

For the record I will clearly state my position on dowsing. I feel it works. I feel this way, for the following reasons:

#1 I have seen it work at the hands of a trusted family friend ( a man who also has been known to extract A_u where others said it was not to be found)

#2 It is in historical records to ancient times.

#3 it is commonly practiced today.

Now I qualify that position with the following statement: Nanny na na na na boo boo!

It amazes me; that as a matter of point re: a dowsing topic some goof ball inserts a link to the Catholic Church re: exorcism. For a bunch who insist on not using the "R" word it is always on hand for the beating about.

Further, I don't know if dowsing involves invoking Odin or drinking ant pi$* to work or if it has something to do with the elven magic they use to make those tasty little cookies. I do know it is evidenced through millenia and I have more evidence to support it occurs than not. Whether it is dumb luck or not I don't know. When Robert located our line we had been looking a long damn time. That looking came to an abrubt halt after he got there. Is it hokey? Yes. Is it fringe? yes? Is it disproven? no!

I pose this question to you. Aren't theories in science commonly used although they cannot be proven/disproven? Are any of same accepted, having been used to build on greater principles? Thus allowing some of the greatest principles in use to be precariously placed. A simple yes or no will suffice. No, no please. That will be all.

And enough with the Catholics. Those guys are weird.

ps. please do not confuse me for a 'christian scientist' or such.

If dousing is so reliable and has been working for thousands of years why have none of the so called professional dousers bothered to claim any of the prizes offered for the proof that something like dousing works?

I would have though showing the likes of the James Randi Educational Foundation would be a simple task and the easiest US1,000,000.⁰⁰ they ever earned. There are also a host of other societies around the world that offer prizes of varying amounts that total around US$1,500,000.⁰⁰. That's a lot of money and all you need to do is an afternoon of work doing something that all these dousers claim is something that comes naturally.

So, why hasn't anybody done it, or bothered to claim the US$2,500,000.⁰⁰ that is up for grabs? There is only one answer that I can see and that is;

I'm sorry, I just can't take anybody seriously that would prefer to earn $50.00 an hour from people that blindly believe the claims of these so called professional dousers. Especially, when for the same effort, they could earn a million dollars and get scientific verification that their claim are true and factual.

It just doesn't add up.

• I pose this question to you. Aren't theories in science commonly used although they cannot be proven/disproven? Are any of same accepted, having been used to build on greater principles? Thus allowing some of the greatest principles in use to be precariously placed. A simple yes or no will suffice. No, no please. That will be all.

A scientific theory is a hell of a lot more than a claim that this or that happens or works. First off a theory is based or results that can be demonstrated repeatedly under controlled conditions. Next up you need to gather volumes of evidence and then analyze these results using a host of mathematical technique in an attempt to explain the results you have demonstrated and been able to replicate under controlled conditions. It's a whole lot more than saying it works because I saw it work.

Now, whenever dousing is subjected to this process it falls over at the first hurdle, so in no way can you ever make a claim that it analogous to a scientific theory.

Your almighty scienceness,

I take it you did not open the link.

A scientific theory is an integrated conceptual framework for reasoning about a class of phenomena, which is able to coordinate existing facts and laws and sometimes provide predictions of new ones.

"...A scientific theory is an integrated conceptual framework for reasoning about a class of phenomena, which is able to coordinate existing facts and laws and sometimes provide predictions of new ones..."

And:

"...Aren't theories in science commonly used although they cannot be proven/disproven? ..."

So?

In what reality is it that science commonly use theories that cannot be proven or dis proven?

According to Popper, "a proposition which cannot be proven of dis proven, shouldn't even be considered in the first place"

Just to avoid further futile argument, here in advance a few quotes concerning my ref to Popper:

"...Karl Popper maintains that the laws of science are not, in principle, verifiable but only falsifiable because they are formulated in strictly universal statements which refer to an unlimited number of instances. Several taxonomists have apparently concluded that the knowledge of systematic zoology is expressed in these strictly universal statements. It is argued in this paper that the knowledge claims of systematic zoology are formulated in what Popper has called numerically universal statements which are equivalent to conjunctions of a finite number of singular statements and that they are, therefore, in principle, both verifiable and falsifiable..." - Read more, here

"...As a scientist, Popper created the concept of falsifiability. Under the concept of falsifiability, a theory cannot be considered a scientific theory if it does not contain within it the conditions under which it can be proven false. An example of a theory that is falsifiable is a theory that all squirrels are gray. Observing a few gray squirrels proves nothing, but if one could observe a squirrel that is not gray, he would be able to prove the theory false, so it is falsifiable..." - Read more, here

"...As Popper has it, if a statement cannot possibly be proven false, then it can't be considered a scientific statement: it might be a perfectly legitimate example of some other kind of statement (metaphysical, philosophical, poetic, etc.), but it is not scientific because, for Popper, the distinguishing feature of science is that it proceeds by making assertions that can be falsified, testing them, and preserving, modifying, or discarding its beliefs based on those tests..." - Read more, here

Guys, these are the basics of scientific criteria and methodology.

- How on earth did we have to resort to quoting them?

Sorry, that was me, I didn't realise I wasn't logged-in.