GeologyRocks

I was under the impression dowsing (senu stricto) was using wood or metal rods for the search of water...

I think I can explain this - magnetic fields! If you bury a load of electrical and (metallic) water pipes, you will get magnetic field. Holding some metal rods in your hands loosely will cause the rods to move in those fields. We can test this hypothesis: go over the same line with a magnetometer and see what the profile looks like. It's be interesting....

So what exactly were the buried cables? You mention telecoms - I can;t see a huge field being generated by that cable...

Next question: what kind of CAT scan: Ground Penetrating Radar?

Here's a guess: A human body is about 70% water, and water can conduct electricity. Could this help magnify or conduct the feild?

Services were definatley electricity, water and telecoms (fibre optics), possible a gas main as well - it was a particularly choice site!!

Magnetic fields sounds good, I guess even a solid metal (water) pipe could have a field induced in it by nearby electric cables. The more I think about it the more I seem to remember the rods deflecting in the same direction to point along the line of the service instead of crossing, again consistent with a magnetic field.

I don't see how it could pick up fibre optics but my memory is a little hazy on that one so maybe it didn't.

And I'm still surprised that it was more accurate than a couple of grands worth of a CAT scanner. The CAT scanner was a typical hand held one - the sort which gives presence and direction (through rotation of scanner) but not depth. GPR was too pricey for the job and takes longer to set up and provide an answer.

Before this I considered 'proper' dowsing - the crossing rods when divining for water just a hoax. But this incidient has brought it back in for a retrial and the jury's still out!

have you seen or heard of him doing it again? one time just isn't enough for me. But if he could do it on a consistant basis, maybe my mind would change.

In agreement. Unfortunately most dowsing successes are no greater than chance and are generally unrepeatable.

CAT scans work by detecting the weak magnetic fields generated by cables. I've used them quite a bit in the past in Cornwall to help locate cables in caravan sites when they want to put in drains, etc.

However, I don't think dowsing is any better than educated guesswork much of the time. Also, referring to the repeated reactions in the same place, I believe that's largely due to suggestion. One person gets a response so other people will experience the same phenomenon even if there's nothing there. Then there's the finding of water - you can dig just about anywhere and find it. the experienced eye can see the landscape and estimate at what depth the water table lies. You don't need a bent coathanger to do that.

Gus

Precisely, if you tell people to find water in a certain area they wil find it eventually, this though has nothiung to do with the skill of dowsing and is generally no more than a 'self fulfilling prophecy'. There is a lecturer at a place I used to work that always used to take his students out dowsing. He would always take them to the same place and have them walk over the same piece of ground and observe the effects, and low and behold they would all experience movement on the rods. This was taken as proof of dowsing, however as pointed out to him on more than one occassion, if you take students to just one site and then give them some rods they are bound to experience some phenomena through auto-suggestion. What would have been more interesting would have been if he had given them rods and told them to go to 10 different unprompted sites and observe the results. Funnily enough he never tried that!

Good ideas.

I accept that the lack of repeatability makes the one occurance a bit suspect. We did try to repeat it by having three different people do the 'dowsing' but then you can't rule out auto suggestion.

If I work with that technician again on a GI I may ask if he can do it again with his 'magical' dowsing rods. However, I'll make sure we check with a CAT scanner as well just to make sure!!

And remember - just because we can't understand how something moves doesn't mean we should discount natural causes. Plate tectonics struggled for years as a theory because no-one could come up with a way to move plates despite all the evidence that they did move. Maybe the same with Brownian Motion...but my memory is a bit hazier there!

Good point. I can't remember who said it but it always resonates for me but 'an absence of evidence isn't always evidence of an absence' or something like that!! True, it is always wise to keep an open mind with these things but I do like a good old bit of empirical evidence to back these things up. Just call me a bluff old traditionalist!!!!

You bluff old traditionalist!
As a pointer to everyone else, Baylor tells us "that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" most weeks! So it really does resonate inside him. When we are doing mock tests, sometimes you can hear the harmonics in the tables! Ask James, he will tell you that its true. Although he may not out of spite!

I can tell you about Baylors helper monkey and other stuff but do not remember harmonics in the tables.