Posted By: CWattersWhy haven't dowsers figured it out how it works?

Lack of evidence and mechanism?

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: Joiner</cite>I've seen it work with water. An old blacksmith mate (and I mean OLD, he was 77 when he retired and 94 when he died) used to do it for people who wanted to know if they had water on their land. Late 70s and still a lot of properties around that weren't connected to the mains. Old properties that had been left to dereliction, it was the start of the trend towards moving "to the countryside"; old wells had either been filled in or simply collapsed. The cottage we lived in back then (but before we moved to Shropshire in 1976) had had its well capped and covered over with topsoil. He said it worked best when he was relaxed after a few pints, so the sessions were usually late afternoon ones!</blockquote>

I've seen it work too. I can't explain how the bloke did it, but he was spot on, even predicting the depth that we'd hit water at the various points he located. When the drill rig arrived and sunk the borehole the water was exactly where the dowser predicted, even down to the flow rate.

The closest I can come to a theory is that dowsers are using a subconscious interpretation of senses to determine where water is, much as some desert dwelling animals have.

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: fostertom</cite>[Some stuff snipped here for brevity]
This is an unexplored (in the west) interface between human Intentionality, and the broad universe. As such, it seems incredibly important, but systematically ruled out-of-court by Science (though not to scientists' freewheeling forerunners the Natural Philosophers). As such, it plays by rules unknown to the present-day Scientific mind-set. Present-day Science is wilfully missing a big trick here.</blockquote>

Science is primarily a business of postulating theories to explain observed phenomena and then testing them by experiment to prove or disprove them. Quite often it is easier to disprove than to prove, so there are a whole raft of observed phenomena, including dowsing, for which a definitive causative mechanism cannot be determined (yet).

It is human nature to always want to link cause and effect. This leads to the widespread belief that "magnetism", "crystal forces" or some such made-up, and unproven, mechanism is the reason behind some of these observed phenomena. Personally I'm of the view that we just lack the knowledge at the moment to understand things like this and am quite happy for them to remain in the big pile of "known unknowns" for the time being. I do baulk at all the crap and mysticism that gets spouted as the "reason" for things like dowsing working, particularly as there's no demonstrable evidence base to support it.

As I've stated before, Arthur C Clarke's three laws still stand up well:

1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

You know, life's a lot easier when you stop looking for answers to questions that didn't need asking in the first place.

Sometimes translated as: "Lie back and think of England."

I've interviewed many would-be scientists over the years. Until I was told (by some narrow minded HR people) to stop, one of the techniques I used was to show candidates an aerial photo of Salisbury Cathedral and ask them to tell me everything they could from the information in the photo.

95% of candidates would get as far as "it's an aerial photo, probably a church" and go no further. Very occasionally I'd get one who'd go for it, determining that the photo was probably taken in the 70's or 80's (from the colours and models of the cars parked around) that it was spring or early summer (trees coming into leaf, shadows still longish) that it was taken mid-morning (angle of the shadows relative to the East/West alignment of the cathedral) etc etc. I had one candidate who spent fully five minutes listing things he could find from that single photo.

The point of this tale is to illustrate that curiosity about our environment is, as far as I'm concerned, a key attribute for any scientist in any field. People who don't constantly question why things are the way they are, or don't have an insatiable desire to discover how things work, shouldn't be working in science.

Unfortunately, we have an education system that somehow seems to want to suppress curiosity. It has to be said that it's also a character trait that tends to cause irritation with those who'd rather just accept things for what they are..............

Tee hee